HubSpot launches AEO tool to help Indian businesses show up where buyers are now searching: AI answer engines

2026-07-12 06:57:06 Technology

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Bangalore, 23 April 2026 - HubSpot, the agentic customer platform for scaling businesses, is launching a new solution that shows marketers how their business appears across answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, and gives them recommendations to improve. It's called HubSpot AEO.

Early users are already seeing results. Docebo, an enterprise learning platform, now gets nearly 15% of its leads from AI traffic. Fresha, a wellness software company, is seeing more AI traffic than ever before. Both had something most marketers don't: visibility into where their business was showing up in answer engines, and the tools to act on it.

Why marketers need to prioritise AEO

Answer Engine Optimisation, or AEO, is the practice of improving how often a business appears in AI-generated answers across platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. It's a new discipline that works differently from SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). While SEO helps businesses rank in traditional search results, AEO helps them appear in answer engines, which take into account brand presence, news media, reviews, social, and owned content to decide what gets cited.

Marketers are already feeling the shift. Organic traffic for HubSpot customers is down 27% year-over-year*.

But HubSpot AEO beta users who are prioritising answer engines have seen AI referral traffic grow 20% compared to customers not using the tool.*

The shift is particularly pressing for Indian businesses. Recent HubSpot research found that while 84% of marketers are familiar with AI-era marketing concepts such as AEO, more than half (53%) have already adjusted their channel strategy to optimise for AI visibility. At the same time, 52% cite difficulty adapting to changes in the market environment, including search disruption and changing buyer behaviour, as a top challenge limiting marketing effectiveness, signalling strong demand for tools that help bridge the gap between awareness and action.

"Indian marketers are highly aware of the shift to AI search, but awareness of the challenge alone doesn't drive results. More than half are still struggling to adapt to how search disruption and changing buyer behaviour are reshaping discovery. HubSpot AEO gives marketers the visibility they need to understand where their brand is showing up in answer engines. When teams use HubSpot AEO within Marketing Hub, it’s the first and only solution to use a customer’s own CRM data to suggest prompts that real buyers are actually using in LLMs. That means teams can act on visibility gaps with the full context of their business, not just with generic recommendations," said Adarsh Noronha, Country Director, India & SAARC, HubSpot.

What HubSpot's AEO tools do

Most AEO tools make businesses start from scratch: broad categories, generic questions, prompts you’re guessing reflect how your buyers actually research.

When HubSpot's AEO tool is used in Marketing Hub, it includes two capabilities that other tools don't:
CRM-powered prompt suggestions: Instead of manual guesswork, HubSpot suggests prompts based on what it already knows about your business and buyers.

Recommendations connected to execution: When HubSpot's AEO tool identifies a gap, marketers can act on it directly inside HubSpot: creating content, publishing social posts, or updating existing pages without switching tools.

Additional capabilities include a brand visibility dashboard with sentiment analysis, competitor share of voice tracking, and citation analysis showing which sources AI is drawing from. The ability to act on recommendations directly inside the tool is coming later this year.

These capabilities are designed to address a key gap identified in HubSpot's India research, where 40% of marketers cited data silos and lack of integration between systems as a primary barrier to more effective personalisation, underscoring the value of AEO tools that connect insights directly to execution within a unified platform.

HubSpot AEO is designed to be accessible to any marketing team, being available integrated in Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise, or as a standalone solution for teams who want to get started without a full platform commitment.