In tech circles, we sure do love our TLAs. I'm referring to “Three-Letter Acronyms," BTW.

If you’ve been following our recent coverage of GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), these relative newcomers have been sucking up all the oxygen in the AI atmosphere.

But unlike SEO (a “classic” TLA), which has largely existed in the marketing trenches, GEO and AEO have permeated the C-suite as leaders wrestle with the precipitous decline in search traffic – which, for some sites, has dropped by as much as 90% over the last two years.

You might drop an OMG right here.

The primary culprit? Google’s AIO (AI Overviews), those handy summaries that give you an answer without browsing blue links and scouring sites. According to research from Bain, 80% of consumers rely on these “zero-click” results at least 40% of the time. And that number is growing.

Then there’s the consumer shift towards ChatGPT and Perplexity, external forces that are sidestepping the browser and providing direct answers. They’ve been black boxes for brands, forcing them to rethink their strategies and explore new ways to surface awareness within these ecosystems.

This is where AEO has evolved as a panacea, introducing a pane of glass for understanding visibility and reinforcing discoverability. For modern marketers, building awareness and showing up in these new channels is the new mandate, and tools are emerging to help meet this call.

HubSpot recently announced a spate of new and updated products to help support marketers in their quest to dominate the AI-driven landscape. This includes HubSpot AEO and Breeze Assistant, which promise a critical advantage in this strange new AI landscape.

HubSpot has certainly been doubling down on AEO, viewing it as a critical tool in the content marketer’s toolbox – one that reflects how AI-driven leads are converting far better than traditional search. Along with its own targeted innovation, the company acquired XFunnel last October, a comprehensive platform designed to help businesses monitor, experiment with, and strengthen their presence across LLMs through AEO.

HubSpot Chief Product and Technology Officer Duncan Lennox. Source: LinkedIn

Tools are a big part of it. But so, too, is the presence of context.

According to Duncan Lennox, HubSpot’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, most products on the market have access to data. But what’s missing is context – and the more AI knows about your customers and business, the more it can move the needle on the metrics that matter.

"Context is much more complex,” he said. “If data is what happened, context is why. It's deep knowledge of your customers, your market, and how your team works. That knowledge grows with every interaction, delivered with precision at the moment it's needed. Without it, AI gives you generic output. With it, you get real outcomes. And that's what we're building at HubSpot."

As part of its Spring 2026 Spotlight, HubSpot is leveraging its context advantage to help customers build that critical awareness and discoverability – and grow revenue in an increasingly challenging and fragmented market. Yes, it's competing in an evolving field of products, including legacy platforms that are expanding their features to enable GEO and AEO. But this is HubSpot, and it has more than a few aces up its sleeve.

Here’s a closer look at these products and updates.

HubSpot AEO

We all know that organic traffic is withering. Every brand is feeling it. Based on its proprietary data, even HubSpot can validate that traffic for its own customers is down 27% YOY. It’s a sobering reality.

At the same time, industry data from Search Engine Land indicates that AI referral traffic has generally tripled. In other words, traffic from LLMs is converting at a higher rate than traditional channels – and this shift is creating a new opportunity.

This is where HubSpot AEO comes in, helping marketers to understand, track, and optimize how their business surfaces in answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. All the places that consumers are turning for answers in the AI era.

According to HubSpot, its embedded AEO is the first and only solution to use a customer’s own data to suggest prompts that real customers are likely to use in LLMs. With its Prompt Tracking & Recommendations, users can manage the questions that matter most to their business and receive AI-powered suggestions backed by actual customer data. This is where that vital layer of context comes in, taking the guesswork out of optimizing for the right solutions.

HubSpot AEO also provides a Brand Visibility Dashboard, offering users a clear read on how their brand is performing across the different AI engines. This is buoyed by Multi-Engine Support that tracks visibility across the leading answer engines.

A really slick feature is the Citation Analysis & Recommendations, which delivers much-needed insight around the domains and source types that matter when it comes to showing up. There’s also a Competitor Analysis feature that isolates a brand’s Share of Voice relative to its competitors. Powerful additions to the marketer’s toolbox.

HubSpot’s AEO tool is available with its Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise plans, or as a dedicated solution for $50/month with no plan required. Both offerings include competitor benchmarking, citation analysis, and prioritized recommendations.

Breeze Assistant for Loop Marketing

Breeze Assistant is already a staple of the HubSpot ecosystem, enabling users to tap the full potential of their business across the collection of HubSpot's AI tools, which are seamlessly integrated throughout the entire customer platform.

Breeze provides what marketers need – and expect – from a world-class customer platform. It’s an easy-to-use AI companion that uses your CRM data and connects to your business ecosystem to help with things like meeting prep, content creation, and strategic analysis. And because it knows your company context, it can be more effective and productive.

Source: HubSpot website

Now, Breeze has been fully trained on Loop Marketing, HubSpot’s playbook for how to market using AI. It endeavors to address the challenges of declining traffic and email engagement, as well as the cognitive load and complexity of multiplying channels.

In a nutshell, Loop Marketing brings together all the moving parts of marketing to create a system that fuels growth. Illustrated diagrammatically as an infinity symbol – implying the constant kinetic flow – it crystallizes the human/AI collaboration to express their messages, tailor them to the right audiences, amplify across channels, and evolve in real time.

A red infinity symbol with white stars

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Source: HubSpot website

With this added training, Breeze Assistant can now help marketers define ideal customer profiles (ICPs), build brand guides, and create campaign briefs. Once again, context plays a huge role, with Breeze guidance being grounded in actual customer context – not generic marketing advice. According to HubSpot, a team that’s new to Loop can go from zero framework knowledge to launching a campaign in a matter of days.

Breeze Assistant is also sporting some additional upgrades, including Role Awareness that can tailor Loop recommendations to help marketers with campaigns or support sales with deal guidance. There’s also enriched Brand Alignment, ensuring that content created with Breeze Assistant automatically matches your brand settings. It can even access HubSpot Academy content.

With improved page context, Breeze Assistant is also able to understand what page you’re on in HubSpot and provide more relevant and meaningful answers. And with access to website analytics, campaign data, and customer records, it can drive more accurate and reliable results.

Agent power

When it comes to sales, deals often die because of cognitive overload. The admin work of researching accounts, finding the right contacts, sending emails, and updating CRM records is a time killer.

The Breeze Prospecting Agent has been a godsend for reps, allowing them to enroll prospects once and automate the rest of the functions. AI steps in and continuously monitors for buying signals, and even creates personalized sales outreach. HubSpot has announced an updated Prospecting Agent, as well as its new Smart Deal Progression – a combo that aims to solve these challenges so reps spend their time on what actually wins deals.

Prospecting Agent

With the latest updates, Prospect Agent is now equipped to handle the full prospecting flow, drawing from your full CRM history and intent signals at each stage. This includes identifying in-market accounts based on real buying signals, sourcing complete buying committees, and drafting personalized outreach for rep approval.

According to HubSpot, early users report increases in meetings booked and stronger response rates driven by more context-aware outreach – which are hitting 2x the industry benchmark.

Here’s how it works: The agent monitors for specific signals and surfaces high-priority accounts and newly discovered in-market companies, giving reps the context they need to focus on accounts that are ready to buy. The agent also identifies contacts matching your target personas and fills the gaps with new contacts from connected third-party providers. Reps know exactly who to reach at every account – without leaving HubSpot.

Prospecting Agent also drafts personalized email outreach informed by these signals and research. Rest assured that humans are in the loop, and reps can review and approve any messages before sending. The new features are now available with a 28-day free trial, at just $1 per recommended lead.

Smart Deal Progression

Acting like a rep’s automated “second brain,” Smart Deal Progression backs up reps where it matters most. It goes deeper, leveraging context to write follow-ups and suggest updates that reflect the full account relationship, not just the last conversation. After every call between a rep and a prospect, it analyzes the transcript alongside the full deal history to suggest CRM updates. It then drafts an email and surfaces actions.

By combining meeting transcripts with your CRM history – including customer data such as past emails, notes, deal activity, and prior interactions – HubSpot enriches the performance. It applies business context (including your pipeline definitions, deal stages, and forecasting logic) when suggesting updates like deal stage, amount, next steps, close date, or conversation outcome. It also weaves in team context, aligning suggested next steps and follow-ups with how your team executes and manages opportunities.

Customer Agent

While the best customer support relies on humans, hiring more people to handle growing ticket volume isn’t necessarily the answer. It’s also expensive – and between onboarding and training, it can take a lot of time.

HubSpot's Customer Agent already brings an automated solution to the table. It’s an AI agent designed to work alongside human reps, handling routine questions around the clock so teams can focus on the issues that actually need a human.

Customer Agent now works with email, one of the highest traffic support channels – and it’s netting real results. According to HubSpot, teams that have added it alongside their Help Desk are seeing 25% more tickets resolved and 15% faster resolution rates. On average, HubSpot says that its Customer Agent resolves 65% of conversations, with top teams reaching 90%.

New capabilities include granular guidelines for tone and style, channel-specific settings, reply recommendations for human review, multi-brand support, working hours, percentage rollouts, and deploy via workflows for targeting specific ticket types. It's now available with a 28-day free trial, at just $0.50 per resolution.

The verdict

HubSpot continues to be an industry standard for customer platforms, growing beyond the moniker of CRM and evolving into an integrated force for marketers. With AEO becoming a strategic concern that’s permeating the C-Suite, the strengthening of that muscle will be a clear advantage for its current user base – and could reset the table relative to competitive platforms that offer some of the granular features of XFunnel. It checks the essential boxes: multi-engine coverage, brand citation monitoring, competitor benchmarking, and prompt insights buoyed by analytics.

The new and updated agents are a huge plus, and provide both relief and scale for sales reps and teams. This is precisely where AI agents can be high-value assets, delivering ROI on a productivity level by helping to convert lost opportunities into wins.

My recommendation: I’ve always been a fan of HubSpot, and have attended several Inbound Conferences over the years. Part of its strength is decades of deeply earned knowledge content and wisdom resources, which could drive more leadership and hands-on guidance as AEO evolves. That makes it a strong backbone. If you’re considering the addition of any GEO or AEO tool to your martech stack, I would consider where your needs fall (SMB, mid-market, enterprise) and kick the tires – because this is still a nascent category. That said, HubSpot’s integrated toolset offers real efficiencies, and when you couple that with a continued investment in its agentic frontier, it puts the platform in top contention. And all TLAs aside, that could make it your next MVP.

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News

HubSpot Puts Context on the Spot, Enhancing AEO and Agents to Help Marketers Win AI Search