How to track your brand’s presence in AI search
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Marketing Hub Marketing automation software Free and premium plans Service Hub Customer service software Free and premium plans Content Hub Content marketing software Free and premium plans Revenue Hub CPQ, billing, and payments software Free and premium plans Agent Hub Your central home for building and managing AI agents across the platform Learn more AEO (Beta) Answer engine optimization tools that track and improve your brand's visibility in AI results Learn more Home Marketing How to track your brand’s presence in AI search How to track your brand’s presence in AI search Written by: HubSpot Staff HUBSPOT AEO TOOL See exactly where your brand shows up in answer engines and take action to close AI visibility gaps. As any marketer or SEO knows, there’s a special satisfaction in seeing your hard work pay off in the form of snagging a top result on the SERPs. But in the age of answer engine optimization (AEO), search results don’t tell the full story. To gauge success, you need to learn how to track your brand’s presence in AI search — which introduces a new set of metrics, including mentions, citations, and share of voice. This guide will introduce you to AI search visibility, plus the tools and metrics to track your presence in AI search. AI search visibility measures how often answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity mention or cite your brand in their answers. While traditional SEO focuses on where a page ranks on a results page, AI search moves the unit of measurement from a ranked list of blue links to a single synthesized answer, and your brand either makes it into that answer or it doesn’t. That shift changes what you track. In traditional search, a number-one ranking is the goal. In AI search, ranking first no longer guarantees you appear: A Semrush analysis of 200,000 Google AI Overviews found the top organic result was used as a citation only 34% of the time on mobile and 46% on desktop. See exactly where your brand shows up in answer engines and take action to close AI visibility gaps. The workflow changes, too. Instead of tracking keyword positions, you monitor a fixed set of prompts and log how each engine responds over time. None of this negates SEO. Strong rankings, crawlable pages, and topical authority still feed the models that generate these answers, so your existing foundations stay relevant. AI search adds a layer on top rather than replacing the one underneath. Curious where you stand in AI search? AEO Grader scores how answer engines represent your brand today, giving you a free baseline before you commit to ongoing tracking. You can run this tracking workflow manually with a spreadsheet or automate it with a dedicated tool. Either way, the four steps are the same. Start by adding your domain and any subdomains you publish on. Instead of keywords, AEO focuses on prompts. Build your initial prompt set. While you can track branded prompts to see how you compare to competitors, focus heavily on unbranded, solution-seeking prompts, as these do the heavy lifting for your visibility score. Pro tip: You don’t have to start from scratch or guess what to track. AEO in Marketing Hub uses your CRM data to automatically suggest prompts informed by your real business context. Run every prompt through each engine separately, because answers differ across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Use logged-out or temporary sessions so personalization doesn’t skew what you see. For each response, record whether your brand is named, which pages get cited, and which competitors appear. HubSpot AEO automates this step across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini so you don’t re-prompt by hand. Choose a short list of KPIs to watch over time (the next section breaks down which metrics matter most). A spreadsheet can work for a small initial audit, especially if you’re checking a limited set of prompts once a month. But manual tracking becomes difficult quickly because AI answers vary by engine, session, model update, and retrieval source. For ongoing monitoring, use a dedicated AEO tool that can rerun prompts consistently, track citations, compare competitors, and show visibility trends over time. For each prompt, note every competitor the engine names, then calculate your share of voice against them. Repeating this monthly surfaces which rivals own which question clusters, telling you where to focus content first. HubSpot AEO reports competitor presence on your tracked prompts automatically, so you can spot these gaps without manual tallying. Once tracking is live, these seven metrics show whether you appear, whether that visibility drives revenue, and whether engines describe you correctly. A mention is your brand named in an answer without a link. A citation is a source the engine references; when that source is your own page, it’s an owned citation. Your brand can also be cited through pages you don’t own. The visits that arrive when someone clicks a cited link. Many engines pass no referrer, so these sessions often land in direct and undercount AI. HubSpot tags clicks from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini as a distinct AI Referrals source automatically.
Source: HubSpot
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