How Brands Win in ChatGPT Search

We can actually see what the answer engine said. So we come 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. Are those mentions positive? Are they negative? Kind of what are the answer engines thinking about? 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, nothing's not doing your brand any favors. 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 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 Claw. 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 all those other places and you have to make a change. Asia and Biri are going to walk you through specific recommendations of how to get improvement in how you show up in 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 Biri. Welcome to the show. All right. We have got an awesome episode for you today. We have talked a lot about insights and philosophy behind AEO but we haven't actually showed you how to do it. And that is exactly what Biri and I are going to do on today's episode. We are going to take you through HubSpot's brand new AEO 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 show is about visibility and citation share and how your competitors are doing in AI search 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. Biri, 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 AEO is. 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 AI. So I am an actual marketer. So I'm ready. There you are. Great. Now you're actually doing marketing for Dell. I know you love your big PC person. So you need to really get the 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 actually done you do this by hand, you'll 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 get all your competitors. And what we're trying to do is really just understand relative to them, right? Like how is our brand doing? Well, I would say, you know, if I am the Dell Aio, 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. 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's 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. All right, let's keep going. 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 Aio, 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? Where 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, ancient those personas to then actually simulate what they would be asking the answer engines to help you understand where to focus. One of the first things that my team saw when we first started diving into Aio, 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 Aio, 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 proposes that I would not like to repeat any time in this lifetime or any of my others. And now I don't have to because at least in this lifetime, HubSpot Aio will automatically generate those likely questions for you. 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 to understand where those set of prompts. But what we've done here is actually distill that framework and to make it really easy for a marketer to come and get started. Because I'm sorry, really, how we understand what the answer engines thinking about us. 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, 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. 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 really have to accommodate for that and think about it in a much more specific persona in like product specific problem specific way than just that four or five keyword kind of SEO phrase that we were used to. Does your experience with AI say on 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 at HubSpot.com. So you've got your prompts, you've got your ICPs. But 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 and what the answer engines are looking for. 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 LLM's daily and B for teams to log into their dashboard, daily. Yeah. So we ping the LLM's daily, right? And you can come and hear 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. We 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. So if I'm this Dell marketer, I'm like, okay, you know, 72%. So it's not bad. 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, OK, 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, OK, I'm being mentioned a lot. Are they negative? Kind of what are the insurringes thinking about me? 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. Yeah, exactly. So again, I'm a Dell marketer. I've got 72% here, relatively particular-- I'm still number one, but Lenovo is breathing down our neck. How do we actually go from here? So we know we've got our problem 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 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 the global question is, where do we actually need to invest our time and resources to improve that? As the Dell marketer, you feel good about this? Neutral, bad. Yeah. I think the big eye opener here is the existing content on our website is only hitting 4%. We've invested all this time into our website. We know the blog is coming back. What's going on here? It's actually using blog a lot. 55% from peers and the 7% from competitors, that's all blog. So essentially, our existing content needs to be much more oriented towards AEO, towards these answer engines to drive impact. We probably need to adjust our strategy to actually be more AEO focused to actually drive this. Yeah, which begs the question, OK, well, how do I do that, theory? Yeah. So honestly, I've gotten that question, like, I don't know, 1,000 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. This is kind of our secret sauce in a future, which I am slightly puttified to give away, but also so glad that our customers or anyone who wants to try the free trial can access. 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 recommendation, 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 engines 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 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 back 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. Yeah, this is so cool. So this is actually one of the most used features we had at X funnel because everybody's like, OK, what do I need to do? And the next question is, oh, I've got to tell my boss, if it's working, you can opt 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. Yeah. That was the question that I always got. OK, your team is spending a lot of time on this. Yeah. So I love that this helps you answer that question. And easily. Exactly. If you just watched 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 hubset.com/aofree for 28 days. We really hope you check it out. 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 that 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 here, say, not went 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 podcast. 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. Call support tickets, emails, and here's a task from three days ago I've totally missed. HubSpot, grow better.