← Marketing Against The Grain
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- [00:00]
A
Everyone has said the blog is dead. It's not. It's actually more important than ever. 62% of AI citations, they're coming from blogs. Today you're actually going to learn how businesses are discovered across these major AI search engines. And we've got data from millions of prompts, not just people out there guessing. We've got real hard data for you today. We're going to help you understand how SEO rankings barely predict whether ChatGPT or Claude is going to mention your product. We're also going to show you that there are three platforms that get excited the most. If you're not part of those platforms, then you're not going to get recommended in AI search engines. We've got Asia Frost, who leads answer engine optimization at HubSpot as well as Biri Amiel, who's the co founder of xfunnel. And I think what's probably the coolest part is we're going to do a live walkthrough of HubSpot's free answer engine optimization tool with Beery. He's going to show you how to build brand visibility, scoring, get competitor share of voice, how to get recommendations to improve your ranking or all for free. All on today's show. Okay, Asia, Biri, I am super excited to have you both here. Asia, I know that you have some pretty awesome data and secrets that you're going to share with us before we even get into the building and the tool. So I'd love to kick it over to you so you can walk us through this. Stop me if you've heard this before. Your support team opens the queue Monday morning. 200 tickets before the first sip of coffee. They already know what's in there. Password resets, order updates, the same questions over and over. What if that part of the job handled itself? HubSpot's customer agent resolves those repeat tickets. Using your actual CRM data and knowledge base. Your team can focus on the conversations that actually need them and your customers can get the answers they need faster. Check out HubSpot.com to learn much more about HubSpot's customer agent.
- [01:55]
B
This was one of the really, really fascinating things that we immediately saw in the data when we looked at which types of content are getting the most citations in AI engines. Blog posts and listicles make up the lion's share of those citations. So just to give you all a quick primer on what a citation is, a citation is when an AI engine cites its source, its showing its math. A mention is when an AI engine just says a name. So if an AI engine says HubSpot, that's a mention that counts towards our overall visibility. If it says HubSpot and it links to the HubSpot website, that's a citation. And ideally you have both. If you look at this, 62% of citations are coming from blog posts. And listicles, which is pretty fascinating, has a ton of implications for your content strategy. When you saw this data for the first time, what was your reaction to it?
- [02:53]
C
Yeah, it's interesting because what we thought about was how should you actually rethink your content strategy based on what's happening? Right. Like, how can we actually use this data to help guide us? And you wouldn't necessarily think that this would be the balance. Right. A lot of the times people put a lot of effort into their product pages, a little bit less on the blog, but actually this kind of changes the paradigm. Right? Because what we're trying to do is create influence on the answer engines. It's a slightly different way of thinking.
- [03:21]
B
It's a totally different way of thinking. And I think what it exposes is that the mentality folks have had going into ago is very similar to the mentality that they had in SEO. That's a mistake. You can't think about what is driving traffic because you're going to focus on the wrong things. You need to focus on what is getting cited, even if it's not directly driving traffic, because that's going to build your influence. So what we did after we saw this data is we were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, back to the blog. We actually need to be thinking about the blog as a primary place to be driving our visibility. And we're not going to see that in the traffic. We're not. We recognize that. We know that we are going to see that in the people that are coming to HubSpot.com directly because an answer engine has told them HubSpot is the best CRM.
- [04:08]
D
Could you maybe just touch on that a little bit more for our listeners? And so in a pre AI world, the strategy of the blog was to create content to rank on Google and then you would see traffic come from that blog, turn into customers. In a post AI world, it sounds like the purpose of the blog is to what if I'm going to create a blog, how do I know whether I am being successful or not in that blog? Strategy?
- [04:38]
B
Yeah. So the purpose of the blog is now to influence. It's shifting from more of a direct conversion channel to an indirect one. And you know, you're successful Because A, your content is getting cited by LLMs and B, because you can see in your log data that LLMs are really visiting that those and using that information.
- [05:00]
A
When you say influence, you mean influence robots. Yeah, it's an important distinction.
- [05:05]
B
B2B2C, you know, business to bot to consumer. Oh, that's good. I just made that up. Okay, well, we'll use that.
- [05:15]
A
Stealing that from Asia before we publish the show.
- [05:18]
B
No. So I want to talk about this concept of logs because again, I just think it's a real mentality shift from SEO that I really want marketing against the green listeners to understand. A log is like a guest book for your website. Every time a bot comes to your website, it has to sign a note and say basically where it went. And when we look at HubSpot's logs, 20% of the visits that bots are making to our website are going to the blog. So again, if you're just looking at traffic, you're like, oh, okay, Maybe it's just 20% but oh, no, one in five is a lot camp. Our website is massive.
- [05:57]
A
Yeah, it's a lot. But I think if you're watching this, 62% of citations coming from 20% of the bot traffic like shows that bots have a lot of influence. And I don't want people to hear that 20% and think that that's representative of the influence that those articles have. They have a more outsized influence. They get used at a much higher rate when people are actually on the searching.
- [06:21]
B
You look at the ratio of bot visits to the traffic that is directly coming through to the blog, it's going to be way out of proportion. Yes. By which I mean the blog is now an influence channel.
- [06:33]
D
Great. So post AI world, I'm going to create a blog and people will create content on that blog and I will measure the success on how influential it is at attracting agents and then because of that, how visible. I am in an answer engine, which I will need a tool to look at. And luckily enough, we are going to showcase one that you can use for free. Cool. That's a great learning. That is not how most people are thinking about their blog strategy. I think we're thinking about it quite binary. Whether it gets visits or not, is it useful anymore or not. And I think that's a different way to think about blogging.
- [07:08]
B
Yeah, totally. Which is why in HubSpot's AO tool, one of the recommendations that is kind of most frequent and Barry will go into this in much more detail, but it's create A blog post. Okay. But I have another maybe surprising insight to share.
- [07:25]
A
Bring us all the data.
- [07:27]
B
All the data. Oh, we got so much data.
- [07:30]
D
More notable white papers are the hottest thing you can do.
- [07:35]
B
I know, we've really gone old school again. You can't look at which blog posts are ranking to determine which are going to be the most influential in LLMs. So I see so many hot takes on LinkedIn. That's like AO is just SEO with a different letter.
- [07:52]
D
It's LinkedIn, really.
- [07:54]
A
One, two LinkedIn trolls their name. Kieran.
- [07:59]
B
It's not at all the same because when we look at the correlation between what is ranking on Google and what is being cited in LLMs, it is incredibly weak. You can't just look at what has the most backlinks, what has the most keywords. That's not going to predict what is going to be influential in LLMs.
- [08:18]
D
So maybe can I just touch on this because I think this is an important point to really elaborate on.
- [08:24]
C
Really.
- [08:24]
D
When we talk about answer engine optimization, we really think about ChatGPT and AI mode on Google. They're kind of the two biggest. And so does the data tell us that on ChatGPT or AI on Google, that the rank of that blog post has weak relevance in terms of how influential that blog post is in your answer engine strategy? So basically what I'm saying is, like, if you rank in the top 10 on Google, does that have outsized influence in ChatGPT or Google AI mode? Are you saying that to be true or not true?
- [08:54]
B
Well, Kiran, that's an excellent question because we actually see variation by engine. There is a stronger relationship between ranking on Google and appearing in Google's AI systems than there is on ChatGPT. In fact, in ChatGPT, there's almost an inverse relationship. The higher you rank, the less likely you are to show up. It's much stronger for Google. And this makes sense because we know that Google's AI systems are built on the foundation of their traditional indexing and ranking systems, whereas ChatGPT, it's going in its own direction. But I think the net takeaway is that if you are thinking about building your content the same way you used to in the old days when it was all about ranking on Google. You are not going to succeed in this new world.
- [09:42]
C
And let me add a little bit of color to that as well, because a lot of this actually makes sense. If you think about how users are using answer engines, they're using them differently. It's not about searching. Two, three shorthanded keywords anymore. Right. It's about asking a long hyper relevant question to you and your situation. So the answer engines are actually looking for the most relevant content out there, which is why you're unlikely to rank. Because these questions end up being. The average prompt on ChatGPT is like 23, 25 words. It's way longer. Right. So you can't really rank for these things in the same way that you did in the past. So there's actually like a different user behavior that is kind of disconnecting the direct relationship with ranking on Google like you did in, in the SEO days.
- [10:22]
B
Yeah, that's exactly right, Barry. Which means that specificity becomes so, so important. You are not writing to a generic person with a broad question. It is not one size fit fits all. It's a very, very specific size fits a very, very specific person. Almost like custom tailoring. And I actually think that this is fantastic news for smaller companies because instead of trying to compete on the same playing field with the biggest dogs, you can be in a pretty specialized arena and you can tailor your content to match. I just think that that's way more feasible for smaller companies to compete and be visible than it ever has been before.
- [11:08]
A
There are so many companies out there in which them and maybe like one other company in the world has all of the data and information on these niche topics. Right. You know, think about it. They manufacture some obscure ball bearing or part and do you have that information publicly available so that people are going to find this very technical long tail, like I'm repairing a wheel on a tractor that is like this. Right. Like that's what people are asking. And because they want to go and find the right part and do the right thing. And if you're not playing there, you're going to just become invisible. And that's, I think, so much the reason why we've been so passionate about answering and optimization, the four of us. It's something we talk about all the time. Just a huge opportunity for businesses. So many businesses I talk to, it's like this has been one of the most transformational aspects of my marketing in the last decade.
- [11:59]
B
Yeah.
- [12:00]
C
Because what it actually does is it ends up making the buyer journey hyper personalized to any person searching. Right. Because they're just getting the most relevant content, the relevant answer to their exact situation. And that's why almost half of HubSpot's buyers are actually coming from ao. The reason for that we're using AO somewhere in that evaluation process, because they're getting direct answers to their specific situation. And that's just a much more precise experience for everybody.
- [12:23]
B
Yeah. And if I can build on that, this is not one of our planned insights. It's a bonus insight.
- [12:29]
A
I love a bonus.
- [12:31]
B
Love a bonus. Who doesn't? If you just look at the direct traffic that HubSpot is getting from LLMs, you would underestimate how much of an influence it is playing in driving people to purchase us. Kip, I think you just gave an interview with the BBC where you shared that 7/percent is is coming from answer engines directly and like, okay, you know, that's not nothing, but it's not overwhelming. We separately ran this survey and almost half of prospects said they used AI search. Beyond that, it was the single biggest predictor of purchase intent. I'm talking across segment, I'm talking across industry, I'm talking across role. If you come from AI search, that above all other things is going to determine whether you go with HubSpot. And so I think again, like if you're just thinking in terms of traffic and rankings and these old KPIs, you're going to miss the boat. And it is a important boat to be on.
- [13:31]
C
And I'll add that's something that we saw with all of X Funnel's customers as well, where consistently the traffic didn't meet the impact that the marketer felt like the AEO is actually having on their business. There was a big gap there, right? The leads were coming, they were growing, they were converting at a faster rate. And just the direct attribution there was, there was a gap there because you just can't see the bots. Right? You're creating that influence. That influence has a bigger impact than what you're seeing just in terms of traffic from humans.
- [14:00]
D
It sounds like in the kind of pre world we would really care about keywords, high authority links and direct traffic, then we would look to see how much of that direct traffic turned into customers. I think what you're pitching in this kind of post AI world for answer engine optimization is you should really care about your personalization of content, make it really tailored for your customers. I think there is still some value in traditional SEO because Google seems to be much more strongly weighted towards content that does still rank high within its own historical like blue link system. And then you should think of this as much more like an influential channel and something that is probably having an outsized impact on your business and helping your business grow. But it's like much harder to actually see the impact of that. It's just harder to track.
- [14:58]
A
We're right back to today's show, but first 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, it is harder to track.
- [15:46]
B
Yeah, that's something I mean, Barry and I have been talking about since our very first call. But I think that there are ways to get at that data and get at those insights, which hopefully is something HubSpot will do for a lot of people.
- [16:01]
C
A lot of marketers are kind of bucketing a lot of AEO in terms of like brand, right. Which has always been not the easiest thing to measure. But when it's working, it's working and you can feel it, right? Like the deals are closing faster, you're getting higher quality leads coming through the door, better signups. So a lot of things are working. And so AEO seems to kind of fall in a similar bucket, which is when we get into the demo, we'll see what brand visibility really has become kind of the key metric for AO because of that.
- [16:27]
A
Yeah, we're going to get into the tool in just a second. We got a couple other secrets we want to share before we get into that. And I think Asia, I think the next one you're going to show is a little bit more around how you think about how you show up online beyond your website. We talked a little bit about your website and your blog, but it's changed dramatically where you need to show up, right?
- [16:49]
B
Yes. I think that your website is obviously a incredibly important channel, but there's a whole other dynamic that is happening in AI search, which is if backlinks aren't this good predictor of whether or not you are trustworthy, what is. And the answer, it turns out, is other humans talking about you and not just other humans talking about you anywhere. But there are three specific platforms that play a very outsized role in building that trust with LLMs, and those are YouTube, Reddit and LinkedIn. Barry, does it surprise you at all that those are kind of the trifecta? Do you look at that and you're like, yeah, that kind of checks out.
- [17:41]
C
I mean, you think about where you spend time, where we spend time, you know, online. I'm kind of on LinkedIn, probably a little bit too much Reddit also, you know, so it's like you've got your personal life, maybe on Reddit, maybe on YouTube, about LinkedIn and more of your business life. And that's like where the answer engines can get a signal, what real people think about a particular brand. Right. And I think, like, that adds a whole new dimension of quality that is somewhat validated. They're looking for these signals, right? That's kind of how they're thinking about it. YouTube is also an interesting one. I mean, it's part of the Google ecosystem, right? So it makes a lot of sense. And also there's just way more content, much more rich content. So that one also makes sense. So to me, it's interesting. It just adds a whole new dimension of authenticity to your blog and validation on that content. The advantage is most marketers are active on at least one of these channels, right? These are kind of owned social channels. You have control over these. So there's actually a lot you can do on these channels.
- [18:40]
D
I suspect that, again, these look different for each platform because ChatGPT's access to YouTube may be different from Google. So I'm interested. Do you have to think differently about where your citations are coming from for each of those platforms? And the second thing is actually on YouTube, what is a citation on YouTube? Is it like a mention within that video or is it a link in the description? Like what equates to a citation? And I guess maybe my third, if I can have a bonus question, is the access to LinkedIn is also different depending on the platform. So, like, is it a citation in the person's post? Could you talk through, like, what access they have? What counts as a citation? Maybe what's different across each platform?
- [19:22]
B
Yeah, so there is definitely a symbiotic relationship happening with these platforms. And then the LLMs, Google owns YouTube. Microsoft, which obviously has a relationship with OpenAI, owns LinkedIn. Reddit has signed partnerships, believe with both. And so the lems have these kind of pipes of data. And that is one of the really appealing things about these partnerships. Like, the LLMs need a ton of fresh Information all the time. The signal that Barry is talking about, I would encourage people to not think about, oh, I need to build citations on this platform for this engine and this platform for that engine. I think that that's overly complex and kind of unnecessary. Like, if you're just like, these are the big three, where can I make the most progress on, you know, one or two or even all of these? Like, that's going to be the most productive for most companies rather than trying to design engineering specific strategies. And then to answer the question about what is the citation? So the way that I would think about a citation is it is a link and we're going to attribute it to the domain in the Link. So if ChatGPT is saying, you know,
- [20:49]
A
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
- [20:50]
B
And this is coming from www.LinkedIn.com backslash Karen Flanagan spicy hot take, that will be a LinkedIn citation. And so if someone, let's say, Kieran, your spicy hot take is that HubSpot AO is the best AO tool out there and no one else should even try. And ChatGPT cites that, that will help boost HubSpot AO's visibility. And it's going to be a LinkedIn citation.
- [21:18]
D
Right. And YouTube's the one I'm actually interested in. Is it the, is it a mention in the video? Like if I say, hey, you know, I love a certain product because they can pull from the transcript or is it a link in the description? Do we know?
- [21:33]
B
So mention would be if Chatbots says, you know, such and such brand new tube, a citation would be, you know, I'm pulling this from a YouTube video. And that YouTube video. It could say such and such brand name is the best. It could say such and such brand name is the worst. It could not mention a brand name at all. But mention is what happens on the answer engine. And then a citation is the link to an external source.
- [22:04]
C
Yeah, but Kieran, specifically to your point, in YouTube, we are seeing them pull from like the transcripts.
- [22:09]
D
Yeah, that's what I'm curious.
- [22:11]
C
Specific. Like this is where this was stated within the video.
- [22:15]
D
It's pretty fascinating because it means that YouTube is a. Everyone is a TV channel. Right? Like in those, some people's citations get put into the answer engines as like mini ads. I know there are kind of citations that say, hey, we pulled it from here. But it does like change the way you think about YouTube.
- [22:33]
C
It also means the bots are watching a lot of tv. In that case, yeah,
- [22:37]
B
Screen time through the roof.
- [22:39]
A
But to close this out, I'd say a lot of companies that are watching this probably actually don't even have a good handle on how people are talking about them on Reddit and on YouTube.
- [22:49]
D
Right.
- [22:50]
A
And it's not just like you as your own company trying to get your message out there. It's also like if people are talking shit about you, it's going to show up in a much more prevalent way in these answer engines than it has previously before in things like Google search. And so it's both the opportunity, but also like the protection side of this new discovery engine is very, very different. I know we want to get into the product Asia. Why don't you just speed run the last two stats and secrets for us and then we want to get straight into show how you actually build and address some of this stuff.
- [23:24]
B
Yeah. So I think my penultimate insight is that things change really quickly. I didn't mean this to be an SEO versus a setup, but it's kind of turning into it. SEO is much more stable than AEO is. So most citations, what we are seeing is that most citations disappear after six months with a pretty significant percentage changing in one. Yeah. So if you look at this chart and your heart starts beating faster, that's probably the right reaction because it means that we all need to be much more on our game and much more involved in constantly creating optimizing, refreshing content than we were in the SEO days. But you know, that's also kind of fun, right? Like it means that if your competitor takes their eyes off the ball, there is a chance for a new competitor to come in.
- [24:19]
A
Hopefully you can't set it and forget it. You gotta be on the game.
- [24:24]
B
Yeah. This is an always on thing because the landscape can change quickly, which I think is probably a good transition to the product. Like I think we've hopefully gave everyone a very good reason to really care about ao. Now the question is, how do you actually do it?
- [24:43]
C
Yeah, let's do it. So we joined HubSpot in December. Before that we were working with some of the best AEO teams out there, from HubSpot to many others. And what we wanted to do was really take the XML platform and connect it to the HubSpot platform and really give HubSpot customers all the benefits of the end to end system that HubSpot has in terms of HubSpot's marketing hub hubs platform to really give you all the tools you need to do AO in one place in the deepest way possible. And that's what we built. So let me share my screen.
- [25:17]
A
First of all it's not just like lightweight vanity work. This is like how you actually build a real funnel of people going from these engines into your business. The second thing we have not said yet enough, you can click the link below and do this for yourself for free right now. This is hot new product just came out and you can go and try this all for yourself for free and do it in the same amount of time. Biri's doing it right now.
- [25:42]
B
It just launched today. There's a link in the bio for you to go check it out yourself. You can try it totally free for 28 days. Beer. Give us a spin through the tool.
- [25:52]
C
When you log on to the HubSpot AO tool, the first thing is, you know, we're just getting a little bit of information from you, but then we go out and we use if you're an existing HubSpot customer or all the data that we actually have about your brand to really help do the setup. And if you're not on HubSpot, we go and get that information from your website and any public information that we can find. The first thing that you need to set up is how is your brand called? So that when we actually review the answers, we want to know what is your brand referred to and is it showing up in the answers. So if you've done this manually in the past, you probably like command effing or setting up your Excel formulas. We want to make that really, really easy because that can be really painful.
- [26:31]
B
Yeah. The process was incredibly time intensive for my team. I think it took weeks off of our lives. Like, this is huge what you are showing here.
- [26:43]
C
Yeah. And really like, you should be focusing on the actions, Right. Not actually like, is my brain in the response or not? Let the technology do all of that.
- [26:51]
B
Let the technology do the heavy lifting. I love that. We should also say that you are running this demo for Dell, which provides computers and software. And Dell is a heavyweight in the software world. And so we should expect to see that kind of represented in the prompts that the tool is going to suggest.
- [27:11]
C
Exactly. So imagine I'm a marketer, right? And like, I want to make sure that my brand is represented on AO. So I come to the HubSpot AO tool and I begin this onboarding process, right? So we're going to go get the brand, we're going to get the competitors, then we're going to actually go and look at all the different products that we offer, Right. So Dell, right, it's got the XPS line, it's got Alienware, it's got a bunch of different computer lines here, like a latitude. Each one of these products actually serves multiple ideal customers. And the reason why that's important is because what we're trying to do is we're trying to understand how is AI, how are the answer engines talking about my brand? But it's not just my brand, it's actually more specific than that. Right. Because each customer is asking questions about a specific product or specific set of problems that they have. So we're getting all that information to actually then help you understand how AI is talking about.
- [28:05]
B
I mean, I've seen this before and I'm still wowed.
- [28:08]
C
Yeah, it's gone a long way. So you can also pick the region because people in different places might actually ask different types of questions. The product might have different features. But then again, right, you're a marketer. We're trying to understand how the answer engines are talking about you. So once we know what your. Who your competitors are, we know a bit of information about your brand, we probably know more if you're using HubSpot's other products, like their CRM. But then we're actually going to go and look at what are the prompts you should be tracking across different levels of intent to really understand what AI is saying about your brand.
- [28:42]
B
Yeah, I can translate that. For the layperson who might be watching this, when we say prompts to track, we mean these are the questions that your future and current customers are asking AI. And you need to know what AI is saying in response to those questions.
- [28:59]
C
And everything starts from that. So once we've generated these prompts, and again, we're doing a lot of work on the back end to pull in a bunch of data to help understand what, what are people asking, what are the questions you should be tracking on the answer engines? So as a marketer, we want to make that really, really simple for you. So now you've got your prompts. Let's go then. Actually measure what the answer engines say. So what we're doing is we're taking each of these prompts and we're actually sending them to the different answer engines. Like, these answers are real. We're sending them every single day to ChatGPT, we're sending them to Gemini, to Perplexity, we're actually getting the actual answer. And so we're doing that for all the different prompts that you have loaded into the system to, at the end, get a brand visibility score. And as a marketer, you know, we all like our dashboards, we all like our graphs. This is the graph that you're going to be checking every single day. And what brand visibility says is it tells us in what percentage of the answers does our brand appear. And so you've done the autoboarding, you've set up your prompts, you've got a brand visibility score. This is the metric you want to improve. How do we do that? We can actually begin to dive into the data and we already know that the way the answer engines come up with an answer is by going out and getting data from different blogs, like Asia said in the beginning, different social networks and coming up with an answer about what your brand is. But how can you actually be strategic and plan this ahead? So the two graphs that I like to look at, we actually have like a full citation analysis about what's influencing your brand. And so you can look at the different sources that are influencing your brand visibility. So that's 70%. How did the answer even get to it? Well, here we can see that 55% of the content came from peers, right? Whereas right now only 4% came from owned content. But a lot of that is actually blog, right? So to Asia's point, we've got blogs, we've got product pages. A lot of that is coming from the website. So listicles are very heavily represented here. So you can actually get a high level view of what are the key channels that are influencing my brand visibility and what are the key content types when actually planning out my content strategy and other Asia's team, your team spends a lot of time actually looking at these two to help plan ahead.
- [31:12]
B
This has been some of the most transformative data that I've ever looked at in my career as a marketer. And I think your team, Gary has done an excellent job of making these charts really readable. It almost obfuscates how mind blowing this data is. Because what this data is really showing us is like when answer engines are deciding who to trust for their opinions, where do they go? And that is a map to the places that marketing teams need to be present on. So if you see that, you know, your competitors make up a huge share of your citations, okay, that's a real problem. That means that the content that's on your website, it's not doing its job and, and you need to make it way more effective. If you see that review sites are super influential, well then great, you know which review sites you need to be way more active on. It's just, it's really, really important data and I haven't seen it depicted so clearly anywhere else.
- [32:10]
C
So a lot of your strategy and how you're going to be actually like allocating budgets to different channels will be to actually position these in a way that helps improve your brand visibility. And here we've got some like what are the top domains influencing it? But here's the data, let's actually translate that data into action. And this is an area where we spent a lot of time, not just the technology, but we actually have like experts, we've got the best AO people in the world actually building our recommendation algorithms. And so what we're doing is we're ingesting all the data about the citation, about your brand visibility, about who your brand is. And we've tried to actually narrow that down to make it really easy for marketers to go and take action. So based on each of the prompts that we have here, what we do is we're creating a set of recommendations. So here we have an example, for example, to create a product page that should go on your website and it is high priority. Now we're not just making these recommendations up, we're actually showing you what you need to do. Right? So this is actually a recommendation even in a different language where you can tell what you want to do. Publish a vendor list that evaluates cloud ready servers for HIPAA compliant. Yeah, Dell stuff, very technical. But really we've got the keywords in here. It's almost like a mini content brief. And we're also showing what's driving this recommendation and I think that's really, really important because you know, we don't want to make stuff up. We want every action that we recommend to be directly tied to a potential outcome. Because if you're going to put time and effort into it, let's make sure that it works. So here are the associated prompts and like the content type distribution actually shows like why we made this recommendation and other listicles that actually influence it. But again, we want to make this really easy and once you actually do it, we want to actually help you. You can track the URL that you published, so we can track the impact of every action that you take.
- [33:58]
B
Can I just say, the first time I saw this it gave me goosebumps. Because the hardest part about aeo, well, there are a lot of hard parts about aeo, but the hardest part about AEO is okay, now what the heck do I do? Like there are so many different directions that you could go in. Even the most beautifully visualized data can kind of get your head spinning. And this removes all the ambiguity, it's like, do X, Y, Z and this is the highest priority, so do this first. And it is just, I think, something that really differentiates HubSpot AEO from the other tools on the market. And I know that your team, as you said, is putting a ton of time into this, and it's only going to get better and more comprehensive and more strategic. And the more we learn from the HubSpot customers who are executing these actions and seeing the results, the smarter the tool is going to become. So there's just so much that gets me really jazzed here.
- [34:54]
C
Yeah, exactly right. We want to make this as easy as possible and we want to take advantage of all the edges and all the opportunities and all the different tools that we have within HubSpot, because again, to win an AEO, you really have to double down on the blog. But then you have to go and amplify that content across channels. And so you will see that our recommendations and the actions you can take essentially let you take advantage of all that to really win an aeo. These things go hand in hand. So to Summarize, in the HubSpot AO tool, you'll be able to track visibility of your brand across countless prompts of different products of different ICPs. And we'll actually help you generate these prompts. You can dive into the citations to help understand what should your content strategy be, where you should be investing, across what types of articles. And then we actually make all that really, really easy with expert LED recommendations that you can actually see why we recommended each action to make it really easy for you to go back and improve your brand visibility.
- [35:52]
B
Barry, thank you so much for walking us through the tool. I think that it is going to make a huge difference for the marketers who use it. And if you want to be one of those marketers, then check out the link in our description again. You can try it for free for 28 days. We really hope you take it for a spin.
- [36:10]
A
Hey, everyone. You know, Kieran and I have been doing the podcast for a while now. We've been at this for a couple years. We love it. We could not be happier to be doing this, but we wanted to take things to the next level. We want to level up the impact we're having with marketing Instagram. So the next step of our journey is something we're really, really excited about about. We're going to launch the Marketing against the Grain newsletter. And Marketing against the Grain newsletter is going to be amazing. If you are a marketing leader practitioner, you're in the trenches doing marketing every day. This is for you. We're going to deliver right to your email inbox and you're going to get all the behind the scenes frameworks, practices, tutorials from us, from guests we have on the show, and from people even beyond the podcast that we think are going to be helpful and and really have an impact on your day to day, week to week doing marketing. You're going to love it. It is something we've been talking about for a while. We're really excited to have it out in the world. We've already got a hundred thousand marketers who are on this newsletter. Please join. It's completely free. We'd love to have you as part of the Marketing against the Grain community. And it's easy. You can click the link in the description below or you can head to marketingagainsthegrain.com subscribe this data is wrong. Every freaking time.
- [37:27]
B
Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.
- [37:32]
D
Whoa.
- [37:33]
A
I can see the client's whole history.
- [37:34]
C
Calls, support tickets, emails. And here's a task from 3 days
- [37:39]
D
ago I totally missed HubSpot grow better.