Ross Hudgens sits down with Aja Frost, Sr. Director of Global Growth & Paid at HubSpot, to open up the playbook behind one of the most advanced GEO/AEO programs in SaaS.

Aja shares how HubSpot has been investing in answer engine optimization since early 2023 and how the company turned a very public blog traffic decline into a "Phoenix from the ashes" story, becoming the single most visible CRM in LLMs.

They get tactical on writing for the bot (her "B2B2C" framing and "tofu with a twist" content strategy), why visibility beats citation share as a KPI, how HubSpot tracks prompts down to the feature level, and why audience size barely predicts who gets cited.

Aja also breaks down HubSpot's creator and affiliate strategy, the durable (and not-so-durable) ways to earn off-site mentions, a deep dive on doing Reddit authentically, and how she reorganized her 65-person team around products instead of web properties.

Show Notes

0:00 – HubSpot's GEO playbook

2:21 – Why AI evaluation predicts purchase intent

03:48 – Becoming the top CRM in LLMs

06:31 – Writing for the bots

11:07 – How HubSpot tracks its prompts

18:16 – Audience size doesn't predict citations

25:15 – Affiliates and valuing a citation

37:30 – The Reddit deep dive

49:27 – Inside HubSpot's reorg

Show Links

Aja on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajafrost/

Aja’s website: https://ajafrost.com/

Aja on The HubSpot Marketing blog: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/author/aja-frost

AEO Sensor: https://www.hubspot.com/aeo-sensor

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