If you've been watching the marketing technology space at all this year, you've probably noticed a pattern. Every major platform is racing to answer the same questions: Is your builder showing up when someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini for a recommendation instead of doing a Google search? How do you measure that data?
Several platforms have started rolling out features to try to answer those, and HubSpot is one of them, with a feature it calls AEO. It's a useful example to walk through, both for what it does and for how to think about the numbers it gives you.
What is AEO?
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization, a new discipline built around a real shift in how buyers search. Tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity are increasingly delivering direct answers to questions instead of lists of links. When someone asks "What are the best home builders near Nashville?" they may get a paragraph naming a few builders directly, without ever clicking through to a single website.
You might be asking yourself if this is going to compete with SEO, and the answer is no, they can actually complement each other. The difference between AEO and SEO is the goal: traditional SEO is about ranking in a list of links on Google and getting people to click through to your website, while AEO is about whether or not your builder gets named in an AI-generated answer, even if the buyer never visits your site. At the end of the day, SEO and AEO rely on many of the same strategies, and improving one can help you improve the other.
The core idea is straightforward: if home buyers are starting their research using AI tools, you want your builder to show up in those results. AEO is the practice of understanding and improving that presence.
What This Tool Actually Does
HubSpot's AEO feature is one of several tools now available for tracking this. Others on the market, like Semrush's AI Toolkit, Profound, and Peec AI, are built around a similar set of core ideas, even though the exact methodology, prompt sets, and reporting differ from tool to tool. HubSpot AEO gives you four things: a visibility score, prompt tracking, citation analysis, and prioritized recommendations.
A visibility score is usually the headline metric. It shows the percentage of tracked prompts where a builder's brand appeared in an AI-generated answer, typically across a few major platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. If a tool is tracking 25 prompts and a brand appears in 18 of those AI answers, the visibility score comes out to 72%.
Prompt tracking lets you see the actual response each AI platform returned for a specific question. Those prompts are the types of questions a home buyer might actually type into an AI tool: things like "Who are the best home builders near Fort Worth?" or "What builders offer new construction under $400k in the Phoenix area?" HubSpot auto-suggests prompts based on your CRM data, but you can also add your own. There is no hard cap on the number of prompts you can track, and most builders will expand their list over time as they add more communities, locations, and buyer profiles.
Citation analysis shows which websites and content types are being referenced when AI tools generate answers about a given market. This tells you whether your own content is being pulled in, or whether competitors and third-party sites are driving the conversation instead.
What Drives AI Visibility for Builders
This is the part worth paying close attention to, because the answer is not a new strategy.
To show up in AI-generated answers, your content needs to be easy for answer engines to find, understand, and trust. That means writing in natural language that matches how buyers actually ask questions, answering directly in the first few sentences of each section, and structuring pages so each section makes sense on its own.
That is good web content. It has always been good web content. A builder with detailed community pages that answer the questions buyers are actually asking, with clear descriptions of location, price range, home types, and what the process looks like, will naturally surface better in AI answers than a builder whose site has thin content and vague community descriptions.
This is also where the local piece comes in. AI tools do not automatically know where a buyer is searching from the same way Google Maps or local SEO does. AI assistants are increasingly drawing from pages that clearly communicate location, service availability, and specific geographic details, making community pages with very specific local content strong candidates for citation in AI answers. If your Raleigh community page says "located in the greater Raleigh area," that is a lot less useful to an AI answering "best new home builders in Raleigh, NC" than a page that names the specific submarket, the school district, the nearby employers, and the price range. The location specificity lies in your content, not in the tool itself.
Third-party mentions matter, too. A strong AEO strategy goes beyond your own site to include your presence on review sites, third-party blogs, and everywhere else answer engines look. Google Business Profile, builder directories, and local press coverage all factor into how AI tools understand and represent your brand in a given market.
Are the Numbers Trustworthy?
AI visibility reporting, from any vendor, is still new. There is no industry-wide standard for how a visibility score is calculated, which prompts are representative, or how often an AI platform's answers are sampled, so two tools looking at the same builder in the same market can produce different scores simply because they built their prompt sets differently. That makes these numbers easy to overtrust. A visibility score can look precise (a clean percentage, a clear trend line) without capturing enough context to be a reliable read on how buyers in your specific market are actually finding you. A low score might reflect a genuine content gap, or it might simply reflect a narrow prompt list, so treat the output as directional rather than definitive.
HubSpot's own data shows organic search traffic across its customer base dropped 27% year over year, with more answers being delivered via AI tools without any click-through at all. That said, the pace of that shift looks different for local and regional builders than it does for national brands, and home buyers remain highly local and specific in how they research. For builders, AI visibility is an emerging consideration rather than an urgent one, but it's worth tracking now so you're positioned well as that behavior continues to shift. The key is not to reallocate dollars from other advertising areas but to view AI visibility investment as a new expansive territory. When builders have gone “all in” on AI citations, the negative impacts have been real because the consumer isn’t moving as fast with technology as companies are.
If you're evaluating whether to track this, it's worth looking into more than one source. HubSpot's AEO feature is a reasonable option if you're already in the HubSpot ecosystem, but other tools like Semrush's AI Toolkit are also worth a look, and comparing outputs across more than one tool is a good way to sanity-check any single score.
The good news is that the foundation for strong AI visibility is the same one that drives strong search performance in general: clear, well-structured, location-specific content that actually answers the questions buyers ask. If you are already investing in that, you are further along than you might think, regardless of which tool you use to measure it.
