← Marketing Against The Grain
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Tools like ChatGPT and Claude are telling your customers to go and buy your competitors products or services and you don't even know it. Today I'm going to give you the masterclass and how to transform how you are found and recommended in AI search engines. You can't wait any longer. Chat, GPT and Claude are out there recommending your competitors instead of you and you're losing business because of it. That all changes today. On today's show I'm going to walk you through how to do an audit of how you appear on AI search engines. I then am going to walk through the best practices to change and increase the amount of recommendations you get across. Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google Gemini. And then I'm going to walk you through a case study of how to actually apply those best practices so you know exactly how to do them once you finish watching today's episode. Okay, let's get right into it. So for the purpose of today's show, I I'm going to use some queries that typical buyers would use. Something that's very typical that would be asked for is what is the best CRM for a 200 person B2B SaaS company that's scaling from SMB to mid market. We need something our sales and marketing teams can both use. Crucial Google search used to get a list of 10 links. Now in AI search what you're seeing is the AI is giving real in depth recommendations. See look, it doesn't even start with any companies, right? What actually matters this is AI setting the stage for what you should evalue and actually setting the evaluation criteria for your product or service, not you. Fortunately for me, in this particular case HubSpot CRM came in as the number one best overall option in this case. What's challenging now is that these questions are being asked across different search engines and across different AI engines. You've got that same exact prompt. HubSpot is the most natural fit for that profile. A 200 person B2B SaaS company, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Fresh Sales and Zoho. So you're seeing a very different kind of response. Similar companies, but not the exact same. And these companies are positioned in different ways. The reasons that the AI is giving is very different. And AI is getting this information from your website, from Reddit, from ranking and review websites, from LinkedIn, from YouTube, all of these sources. So you, your customers and your community are really determining what AI is saying when they're answering this response. And you'll see that these results really different like this is perplexity, same question and perplexity. You now have a whole different set of of how the information is portrayed. Again, still HubSpot, Salesforce and Zoho. But why the recommendations are what they are continue to change. And if we go over to Google Search, Google Search is now moved very heavily to what's called AI mode. And so what you'll see is that same question in Google Search is running through Google's Gemini models and it's going to give its own recommendation. But again, very different set of customers, very different set of reasoning depending on which tool you go and ask these questions in. The trick is for your company, there are a whole host of questions people answer. At HubSpot, we just launched an awesome tool to help you track and manage all of this. It's called HubSpot AO. You can click the link in the description below to try it for free. But today I want to show you what you can do to get your team or your CEO back bought into. This is a problem that your company needs to solve in your marketing. So you obviously want to change how you're getting recommended. Across all of these AI engines you see similar but yet very different responses across the four major AI engines that I just showed you. What I want to walk you through is what this looks like. Before I've recorded, I had a series of of five questions that I went and asked all these AI engines, took all the answers and put them in one page so it'd be easy for us to all go through it. We sell marketing platforms so you can see from a marketing platform perspective, hey, we're evaluating marketing automation platforms. We have a 12 person marketing team run inbound and outbound and need strong reporting. What should I be looking at? And it shows you across ChatGPT. The response led with HubSpot. Okay, cool. Led with HubSpot across all of them. That's interesting. But something changes very drastically here when I get to customer service platform which we have an amazing customer service product. It's used by tens of thousands of businesses. We see a whole host of different competitors and we see the results change drastically. So ChatGPT says Zendesk. You've got Claude saying Zendesk and Intercom and their fin product and HubSpot's way down the list and it's kind of like an add on. If like you're a HubSpot customer, you should consider it. Google Gemini again, it's thinking about Zendesk, Salesforce, Intercom, Jira Perplexity, Zendesk Intercom, Freshdesk, HubSpot. So clearly we're not showing up how we want to be in this particular topic. We view ourselves as a leader in customer service software. So to be positioned behind these other companies is a big concern. What I'm trying to show you here is that you can ask more complex questions because remember in the old days of Google search you would just have a couple words that you were looking up. Now people are putting in sentences, multiple sentences, paragraphs around their situation and trying to get more advanced and more personalized recommendations. And so it's like we are currently using Salesforce, but it's too expensive and too complex for our team. What are the best alternatives for a mid market company? This is again something lots of people would ask as they were going forth and looking obviously. Again, you can go track all of this in HubSpot AO and we'll run these prompts for you every day and show you how your results are changing every day. We just dropped our AEO playbook. This is the exact strategy we use at HubSpot to make it the number one most visible CRM in AI search. It breaks down the five decisions that determine whether you show up in AI answers and gives you a seven step workflow to actually execute it. Get it for free, scan the QR code or click the link in the description. You should go and come up with these same prompts for your business. You can even ask Claude chatgpt, your AI tool of choice, say, hey, this is my business, Research my business and based on that, give me 10 of the most likely prompts my buyers are searching to find answers related to my product or service and it will go and give you those 10 prompts back and you can do exactly what I did. You can go one to one and you can search them and you can see how you show up and you can compile a report. I made a webpage, you could do a PDF, whatever you want and you would go and show that to your team, to your boss, to your CEO, whomever is appropriate, depending on the size of your company and say we have some real big gaps relative to what our buyers are asking and how we're showing up and we have to close those gaps. So many businesses are not yet participating in how they show up in these AI search engines. And we have data that over half of buyers are now using these tools to make complex buying decisions, to do research, to build their consideration set. So if you're not showing up here, you're going to be left behind and Your buyers are going to get pointed to one of your competitors. So I strongly recommend you get a set of prompts, you take those, you search them through and you actually compile a report of what that might look like. Again, you can use the HubSpot AO tool below. If you want to automate all of that, there's a 28 day free trial and you can put this all together for free there as well. Okay, let's say you have this and you've done the work for your business, just like I have here. And let's go back to question number three, because again, question number three, we do not like how we are showing up. So how do these AI search engines get these answers? So when it comes to ranking better in these AI search engines, you've got a few things that matter. In traditional Google search, it used to be about backlinks, now it's about brand mentions. Do you have consensus? If the AI is out there looking at the conversations online, are they going to see that you have authority and strength and, and a high density of mentions for your brand? And you drive this through PR and earned media. If you go on podcasts, if you participate in communities like Reddit and G2 and LinkedIn, and do you have a guest content strategy where you're publishing content on other sites where people might be able to discover you? The second thing you can do is these review platforms like Yelp, Google Reviews, anything that's a review platform has a lot of AI authority because it has a lot of contextual information that your buyers are giving and putting out there that the AI engines can go look at, see if it applies to the question that they're getting, and go ahead and put what those buyers are saying and use that to inform their given response. So if you're not participating on review sites, it's a big opportunity. You can run a campaign with your customers to generate more reviews, incentivize them to get more reviews, engage with and respond with every review. And if there's something you want to reframe, your response can be helpful to reframe that issue as the AI goes and looks through it. And you want to make sure that your business and your products, you're in the right categories, that you are represented in the right way, so that when AI goes and looks at them, they'll know what your product is and what you're actually trying to do. Now, the third thing here is that domain authority has a threshold, which means that you have to do some work to actually build your own authority. And that means you got to publish original research. You have to build free tools that people might link back to and send some authority back to you. You want to partner for editorial placements. We've talked a little bit about that. And also if there's anybody linking back to your site and they're going to broken links or 404 pages where it's a dead end and AI might look at that and be like, oh, well, I thought these people were a fit for this. But it goes back to this dead end page. There's no context. I'm going to move on to the next thing. You want to fix those problems to make sure that the AI bots have the full context of what you're trying to do. So I'm going to give you a specific example relative to that query in just a second. But if I were you, what would I do Monday morning to actually transform and change how you show up in AI search engines? Earlier in the show I told you about this querying. What are the best customer service platforms for a B2B company doing about 50 million in revenue? We want AI powered ticket resolution, but don't want to rip out our whole stack. So I did a summary here of like, we're conditional. We are included across all four, but like not really the number one choice. Zendesk is currently the number one choice and Intercom's two, the second choice on three out of the four. And the root cause is that AI models have learned to describe HubSpot Service Hub, which is our customer service product, as a CRM add on, not a standalone service platform. The product is being cited for ecosystem fit, not for service depth. That's a positioning problem, not a product problem. I think this is a great way to think about this. How you position and tell the stories around your products are really going to drive how you show up in these AI engines and how they tell your stories on your behalf. And so I put a little plan together here of things that you would actually do. So the first thing to do is understand how they describe us. So we've done that work and we'd probably want to do a few other prompts. The next thing you want to do is exactly what we'd say. You want to go and do some work on the review platforms. In our case it'd be G2.com, Capterra, Trustpilot. And we want to audit service hubs G2 category listing, ensure that it appears under Help Desk software. If this is a category, we want to be a Part of Click Customer Service Software. AI customer service software. We want to launch a targeted review campaign, like I said, to get more customer reviews. Created a dedicated trustpilot response cadence so that we would be able to respond and engage in real time. These are going to make big changes in how we show up in these review sites. And these review sites are going to inform how we show up in those AI search engines. We then need to think about how we are mentioned along for this specific topic. So we could have publish a dedicated page around HubSpot Service Hub versus Zendesk on HubSpot.com, which is going to be a very valuable URL because that's going to tell the LLMs, ChatGPT Cloud, et cetera, that oh, this is what HubSpot's perspective of these two products and how they compete against each other. You want to do some pr? Can we get some more traditional public relations and earned media around this product? Can we get some data to show how our customers are using the product to understand the state of AI so we can get some credibility for being a really great AI customer service product? These are all things that are going to change how we show up in these individual responses. Then the last thing you're going to want to do is basically change what the AI models, how they learn about our product. And so that's fixing the product page, create customer stories specifically around this subject, this search query around Service Hub. We want to develop a cost of complexity calculator. If you create free tools and calculators, you get more links and more authority and you're going to change. So we could, for example, create a cost of complexity calculator to actually get more authority on this topic and be seen as a leader in, in the customer service space. So these are real actionable things that we can go do over the next few weeks to change how we show up. And you can literally take this episode for the gaps that you've identified and use the same methodology to figure out what your action items can be to actually fix how you show up in ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and Perplexity. Your customers are out there, they're looking and using AI more than ever to make buying decisions and you want to be a part of that and you want to not just be mentioned, but you want to be mentioned correctly and well relative to your product, your service and what you're trying to accomplish. This is, I believe, one of the biggest marketing opportunities of 2026. And I think it is critical that everybody gets started on this right away. I hope that you found this really helpful. You can use HubSpot AO if you want to automate a lot of that link to start a free trial down below in the description. Or you can check out that QR code on the screen above and I'll be with you real soon On Marketing against the grain this data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Whoa. I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails. And here's a task from 3 days ago I totally missed HubSpot grow better.