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- [00:00]
Asia Frost
We can actually see what the answer engines said. So we come in here every single day and you can actually see what the answer engines are saying about your brand, what they're saying about competitors, and you can see the performance at a prompt level which will actually tell us, okay, I'm being mentioned a lot, but are those mentions positive? Are they negative? Kind of. What are the answer engine thinking about?
- [00:22]
Biri Amiel
I think that's really important because to your point, yeah, you could be talked a lot about, but if all of that is bad stuff, that's not doing your brand any favors.
- [00:36]
Narrator/Host
This is one of the most important videos on the channel. Everyone, we're walking you through how AI search is changing everything. Today, Asia Frost and Biri Amiel are going to walk you through a transformative lesson in how to change how your brand shows up in AI search. You're in a constant daily battle with your competitors for the share of voice and the recommendations across these AI search engines. And we're going to show you how to how to win. Also, it's really important to understand that there's a new set of sites and tools that are influencing the modern search engines. Chat, GPT and Claude. And these are sites like your blog, Reddit, different media websites, LinkedIn, YouTube. Your website is only doing a small part of the work and you're probably spending way more time on it than you're doing on all those other places. And you have to make a change. Asian Barrier are going to walk you through specific recommendations of how to get improvement in how you show up at these AI search engines. They're going to show you how to do this so that you can go and do it yourself. And the best part is they're going to do this all in a free tool that you can follow along with and then go use for free after the show so that you can do this for yourself. Just scan the QR code or click the link in the description and you can download the new AEO Playbook. It breaks down exactly how you actually get recommended by AI. All right, I'm going to hand it over to Asia and Beary. Welcome to the show.
- [01:57]
Biri Amiel
All right, we have got an awesome episode for you today. We have talked a lot about insights and philosophy behind ao, but we haven't actually showed you how to do it. And that is exactly what Barry and I are going to do on today's episode. We are going to take you through HubSpot's brand new AO tool, just launched to the public and totally free. And we are going to show you what's inside of it, how we generate prompts, what those prompts look like, why those prompts are so important, what that shows about visibility and citation share and how your competitors are doing in AI search results versus you. And then, as if that weren't cool enough, we are also going to show you what to do about it, all the recommendations and all the optimizations that you need to make to dominate in AI search. So stick around. We've got a lot to walk through in a little bit of time. We think you're going to love it very. I don't know about you, I can't go a single second without someone asking me what the heck answer engine optimization is. And now we're launching a tool that will tell you how visible you are in answer engines and help you improve it. So give us a little bit of detail on what exactly HubSpot AO is.
- [03:10]
Asia Frost
So let's walk through it like we're an actual marketer to kind of get you in the head of like, what should you be doing once you get your hands on this tool to actually begin doing a.
- [03:19]
Biri Amiel
Well, I am an actual marketer, so I'm ready.
- [03:22]
Asia Frost
There you are. Great. So now you're actually doing marketing for Dell. I know you love computers, you're a big PC person, so you need to really get this use case out. So let's go through the tool together and actually get that experience. First thing is you're going to actually add the different name variations. And the reason we do that is because if you've actually done any of this by hand, you know that you have to go and look through every single response that he did. The answer to talk about my brand. So we want to make that process really, really easily. Now, Dell, right, they've got all these competitors, hp, Lenovo. We actually want to see how our brand is doing against them. So we're going to own your competitors. And what we're trying to do is really just understand relative to them, right? Like, how is our brand doing?
- [04:10]
Biri Amiel
Well, I would say, you know, if I am the Dell ao, then I really care about HP and Lenovo and IBM, because those are probably the other names that answer engines are giving to potential customers. So if I'm just looking at my own visibility, then I'm really not getting the full picture of what's happening for my brand.
- [04:30]
Asia Frost
Exactly. And what you will see is there's actually some prompts where this matters a lot. Right, because they're talking about a bunch of competitors and you actually have to influence them to Talk about your brand more. There are some prompts where they actually don't talk about competitors at all. And you probably don't need to invest as much in those prompts, and we'll actually see that in the data.
- [04:49]
Biri Amiel
All right, let's keep going.
- [04:50]
Asia Frost
Cool. So we've added our competitors, and now the next thing is we actually have to pick our products and ICPs or ideal customers profiles, or the different Personas that we're going to be targeting. The reason why this step is really important is because with aeo, the first step of brand visibility, what we're trying to understand is, how are the answer engines talking about my brand? But that's not a generic question. It's actually quite a specific question because we want them to know when people are asking about, hey, I need a new computer, what computer should I pick? Or I need a new server, what should I pick? They're talking about specific problems. We know that from the data. So Dell, for example, I want to upload all the different products that I have, and then actually I want to have what are the different types of Personas or customers that are the most relevant for this product. And what we're going to do with that is we're actually going to go and help you figure out what are the best prompts to track for each of those products and each of those Personas to then actually simulate what they would be asking the answer engines to help you understand where to focus.
- [05:52]
Biri Amiel
One of the first things that my team saw when we first started diving into ao, which now feels like a long time ago, but, you know, wasn't that long ago, was, oh, our customers are asking answer engines very different things depending on who they are, where they live, what their challenge was. And I think with SEO, then you kind of. You're like, all right, there are 50 to 100 keywords that I really need to care about. Well, there is an exponentially greater number of prompts or questions that folks are asking answer engines that you need to be tracking and figuring out all of those questions by hand, as I said, was like a long, arduous process that I would not like to repeat anytime in this lifetime or any of my others. And now I don't have to, because at least in this lifetime, HubSpot AO will automatically generate those likely questions for you.
- [06:47]
Asia Frost
Right. I can't tell you how many of these exercises we've done with customers to really try to figure this out. Right. Pulling in data from a ton of different sources to really try understand what are those set of prompts. But what we've done here is actually distill that framework into making it really easy for a marketer to come and get started. Because those prompts are really how we understand what the answer engine is thinking about us.
- [07:13]
Biri Amiel
Let's just look at these because I think they're really interesting. Like, why do enterprise laptop fleets struggle with premium performance needs? That's a question that maps to the awareness stage of the buyer's journey. Whereas you might have an enterprise executive asking, what's the best premium laptop? Like, I want a PC, or maybe, I don't know, I want a PC, but I want a really, really good laptop. These are all much more contextual than the types of keywords that we would typically think about in search.
- [07:42]
Asia Frost
Exactly. And this jives with what we know about how people are using answer engines. Right. One, the answer engines know some stuff about us, but people are asking way more specific questions because the answer engines are giving them specific responses. So we really have to accommodate for that and think about it in a much more specific Persona and like product specific, problem specific way than just that 4 or 5 keyword kind of SEO phrase that we were used to.
- [08:10]
Biri Amiel
Yep.
- [08:11]
Narrator/Host
Does your experience with AI sound a little something like this? You've been prompting for 20 minutes. The output is polished, confident and completely useless. And that's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business. HubSpot's AI works with your actual customer data. Every interaction, every signal your team has generated over time. So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it. Check it out@HubSpot.com so you've got your
- [08:38]
Asia Frost
prompts, you've got your ICPs, then we can actually come into the tool and what you will see is that we can actually see what the answer engine said about each of these prompts. We actually go and you can go to full prompt analysis. We send these prompts to the answer engines every single day. So you're getting fresh data and your visibility will probably adjust slightly every single day and even more slightly if there's a change in how. In what the answer engines are looking for.
- [09:07]
Biri Amiel
You know, in the other episode then we talked about how much volatility exists in answer engines. And so I think that that is a fantastic reason, A, for this tool to ping the LLMs daily and B, for teams to log into their dashboards daily.
- [09:27]
Asia Frost
Yeah. So we ping the LLMs daily. Right. And you can come here every single day and you can actually see what the answer engine are saying about your brand, what they're saying about competitors, and you can see the performance at a prompt level, but you can also zoom out and look at these fluctuations one click higher and actually say, okay, across all the prompts that I have, how did I do across each of the brands? And we can see here, for example, like, there's like some fluctuations in the performance over time.
- [09:56]
Biri Amiel
So if I'm this Dell marketer, I'm like, okay, you know, 72%. SAG's not bad.
- [10:02]
Asia Frost
Yeah. So what do we do from here? Right. Well, in a vacuum, that doesn't necessarily say anything, but I think the big question is, how are we doing against our competitors? So again, we want to make that really easy. And so one of the key measurements to look at that is share of voice. How are we actually doing against our competitors? And so here we can see that in terms of all the problems that mentioned a brand, Dell had 52.8% of those mentions, whereas Lenovo had 42%. And kind of the rest kind of filled it out. But here we can actually see what the brand is doing against all those competitors. To actually tell you, okay, is this 71 good? Am I better than my competitors? Am I worse? The other dimension you want to look at is actually sentiment analysis, which will actually tell us, okay, I'm being mentioned a lot, but are those mentions positive? Are they negative? Kind of. What are the answer engine thinking about me?
- [10:52]
Biri Amiel
I think that's really important because to your point, yeah, you could be talked a lot about, but if all of that is bad stuff, that's not doing your brand any favors.
- [11:01]
Asia Frost
Yeah, exactly. So again, I'm a Dell marketer. I've got, you know, 72ish percent here relative to the conversion. I'm still number one, but, you know, Lenevo is kind of breathing down our neck. How do we actually go from here? Right, so we know we've got our prompt set up. The first thing we want to do in order to begin to improve that, we actually want to dive into what's actually influencing the opinion of the answer engines. To talk about me 52% of the time versus Lenovo 42% of the time. And so the place where we often like to spend time is actually thinking about what channels are driving the opinions of the answer engines the most. And here we can see that, for example, for Dell, peer content, meaning not direct competitors, but kind of like other players in the ecosystem are driving a lot of that content. They've got about 55% PR, like earned media is 26%, and then their own website is only 4%. So then the question is, where do we actually need to invest our time and resources to improve that as the Dell marketer?
- [12:03]
Biri Amiel
Like, do you feel good about this? Neutral, bad.
- [12:06]
Asia Frost
Yeah. I think like the big eye opener here is the existing content on our website is only hitting 4%.
- [12:14]
Biri Amiel
Yeah.
- [12:15]
Asia Frost
We've invested all this time into our website. We know the blog is coming back. What's going on here? Right. Where like it's actually using blog a lot. 55% from peers and the 7% from competitors. That's all blog. So essentially, like, our existing content needs to be much more oriented towards ao, towards these answer engines to drive impact. We probably need to adjust our strategy to actually be more AEO focused to actually drive this impact.
- [12:39]
Biri Amiel
Yeah. Which begs the question, okay, well, how do I do that theory.
- [12:45]
Asia Frost
Yeah. So honestly, I've gotten that question like, I don't know, a thousand times by now at least. And so we had to do something about it. Right. And the way we've actually come about our recommendation engine is interesting because it's built on top of the citation and the prompt analysis. But we also brought together the best experts in AEO from the HubSpot team, from the X Funnel team to put together this algorithm that really helps us understand how to improve your performance on answer engines.
- [13:15]
Biri Amiel
This is kind of our secret sauce in a future which I am slightly petrified to give away, but also so glad that our customers or anyone who wants to try the free trial can access.
- [13:28]
Asia Frost
Yeah, this took a lot of iteration. Right. It wasn't just like, let's put something out. We've actually implemented all of these recommendations over the past months and measured their impact to boil us down to these set of recommendations. Right. And now we're opening up to customers. What we try to do here is make it really easy for you to understand. One, what should you be doing? So here it's great. A listicle, right? That's kind of a common format that the answer, just like on the blog. But we're also saying this is high priority. The reason why it's high priority is because perhaps the visibility on this prompt is very low. Or this recommendation is relevant for a lot of prompts, but we're actually showing you exactly what you should be doing. Right. So here there's like almost like a mini content brief. And then we're also showing you the data behind what's driving this recommendation. Right. So we're seeing kind of listicles being the most common content type for this recommendation. And we're Seeing all the listicles that influence that. So we have a data backed formula to actually create these recommendations and we want to make it really easy for you to go and take action in all of these. Now let's say you did right, you created this listicle. Now the next question is, did it matter? Did it work? And we're actually making that really easy. You can actually drop that URL in here and then you will see this graph populate with did the brand visibility of this prompt go up after I took the action? So it's almost like a bit of experimentation. We can actually take action and measure it all right. Within this tool.
- [14:54]
Biri Amiel
Yeah. This is so cool.
- [14:56]
Asia Frost
So this is actually one of the most used features we had at X Funnel because everybody's like, okay, what do I need to do? And the next question is, well, I got to tell my boss if it's working or not to know if we should do more. So we're trying to answer both of those questions with this tool by giving you one the recommendation. But to the ability to track these actions.
- [15:12]
Biri Amiel
Yeah, that was the question that I always got. Okay. Your team is spending a heck of a lot of time on this.
- [15:20]
Asia Frost
Yeah.
- [15:20]
Biri Amiel
So I love that this helps you answer that question and easily.
- [15:25]
Asia Frost
Exactly.
- [15:25]
Biri Amiel
If you just watch this and you were pretty mind blown by what Barry was showing, we have good news. You can check out the tool today. And not only that, you can do it for free. So go to HubSpot.com ao free for 28 days. We really hope you check it out.
- [15:41]
Narrator/Host
I want to tell you about a podcast I love. It's called Nudge. It's hosted by Phil Agnew. It's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals and it's the UK's fastest growing business podcast. What I love about it is that the Nudge listeners love no fluff, no bs, evidence based marketing tactics they get in each episode. You're going to want to listen because this is like an MBA's worth of insight in every single podcast. And entrepreneurs, you're going to love the show because it's filled with repeatable, proven studies, not hearsay. Not one off success stories. Marketers, you're going to love it because it discusses the psychology behind great marketing and what marketers are getting wrong. Listen to the Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.
- [16:26]
Asia Frost
This data is wrong every freaking time.
- [16:29]
Biri Amiel
Have you heard of HubSpot?
- [16:32]
Narrator/Host
HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.
- [16:35]
Asia Frost
Whoa.
- [16:35]
Narrator/Host
I can see the client's whole history.
- [16:37]
Asia Frost
Calls, support, tickets, emails, and here's a task from three days ago. I totally missed HubSpot.
- [16:44]
Biri Amiel
Grow better.