HubSpot

I didn't plan to include HubSpot. But as I was running this experiment they rolled out their AEO offering in beta — built on XFunnel, which they'd just acquired — and it felt daft to leave the 800-pound gorilla out just because it turned up late.

So I fed it a list of queries from our own HubSpot review. And I'll be honest, the first thing it did genuinely made me laugh: it reeled off a long, frank list of the cons and disadvantages of HubSpot. Its own platform. Credit where it's due — it didn't flinch.

That's the charm of it, and also the tell. It's an honest, capable monitor bolted onto a suite you might already pay for — but it's early, and it shows.

The recommendations

After analysing our visibility, HubSpot recommended commenting on four Reddit threads, and adding 25 new articles to our site about HubSpot.

(Twenty-five. About HubSpot. On our site.)

I don't do that.

It's the exact “just make more” reflex that the better tools in this roundup have started to grow out of. Volume for volume's sake, with a side of light astroturfing. No thanks.

What I did instead

The underlying points weren't worthless, though — buried in the noise were a few real gaps. So I did what I'd actually recommend: I fed the whole list into Claude Code and had it plan a rewrite of the existing article that addressed the legitimate points, without publishing twenty-five new pages or touching Reddit.

The tool was most useful not as an oracle, but as a checklist to argue with.

Who it's for

If you already live in HubSpot, having AEO baked into the suite you open every day is a genuine convenience — one less tool, one less login, one less invoice. For that crowd it's an easy yes to switch on.

If you don't already use HubSpot, this isn't a reason to adopt the whole ecosystem, and I'd treat the recommendations with a healthy scepticism until the beta matures. Promising, honest, and clearly version one.