How to Set Up HubSpot AEO: A Step-by-Step Guide 

Setting up HubSpot AEO takes about twenty minutes. Setting it up so the data is worth reading takes longer, because three of the setup decisions are difficult to correct later and quietly distort everything the tool reports. 

This guide walks through the sequence, flags where mistakes are expensive, and ends with the workflow to run once data starts arriving. For what the tool does and whether it is worth buying, see our guide to HubSpot AEO. 

Before You Start: Access and Permissions 

Access to AEO comes through one of three routes, according to HubSpot’s knowledge base: a Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise subscription with Marketing Access permissions, a standalone HubSpot AEO subscription, or a 28-day HubSpot AEO free trial. 

There is also an AI settings requirement that catches teams out. HubSpot’s prompt documentation states that a Super Admin must switch on several settings: access to generative AI tools and features, CRM data, customer conversion data, files data, and access to Breeze Assistant. 

In regulated organizations that is a conversation with security rather than a toggle. HubSpot points to its AI Trust FAQs and model cards for the detail, and notes you can configure what data is shared. Start that conversation before you plan a launch date. 

Table 1: What you need before starting. 

Step 1: Open AEO and Start Setup 

In HubSpot, click More, then go to Marketing > AEO. If More does not appear in your account, navigate to Marketing > AEO directly. Click Get started. 

Step 2: Set Up Your Brand and Domain 

The first dialog asks for four things: your brand name, your domain, your brand name variations, and a business type. 

Brand name variations are the step to slow down on. HubSpot’s documentation is specific: separate each variation with a comma, and note that variations are case-sensitive, so enter each exactly as it appears. 

Think about how your brand actually appears in the wild: 

• The legal name and the trading name, if they differ 

• Spacing and punctuation variants 

• Common abbreviations and acronyms your market uses 

• Product names buyers use as shorthand for the company 

• Frequent misspellings 

Anything you omit is a mention the tool will not count, which shows up later as a visibility score that looks worse than reality. 

The business type dropdown (for example, B2B) shapes the prompts HubSpot generates, so choose the one that matches how you sell. 

Step 3: Add and Manage Competitors 

HubSpot pre-populates a competitor list you can edit. You can edit a competitor’s name, domain and brand name variations, add more, or delete ones that do not belong. 

This is the step with the longest tail. HubSpot warns that changes to competitors only affect future data runs, and advises setting your dashboard date range filter to start after any change. In practice that means adding a competitor in month three leaves you unable to compare cleanly against the first two months. 

Two mistakes to avoid: 

• Listing aspirational competitors. If buyers never compare you with a market leader, including it will depress share of voice and tell you nothing. 

• Omitting the real alternative. In B2B the competitive set often includes adjacent tools and incumbents. Ask sales which names appear in lost deals. 

Give competitors the same brand-variation treatment you gave your own. An unrecognized competitor variation inflates your share of voice, which is a more dangerous error than understating it. 

Step 4: Define Products and Ideal Customer Profiles 

Next you select or add products and ICPs. HubSpot is explicit about why this matters: prompts are generated based on your selected product and ICP, and these selections decide how your brand’s visibility is analyzed. 

A vague ICP produces vague prompts, which produce a visibility score for questions nobody in your market asks. Write ICPs the way a salesperson would recognize them: industry, size, the role that owns the problem, and the situation that triggers a search. 

If you are on Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise, HubSpot generates prompts using your business context, which is one of the two features that differ from the standalone product. 

Step 5: Review and Select Prompts 

HubSpot then generates suggested prompts. You can edit them, generate more (which HubSpot says adds another 8 to 15), or add your own manually. When you are finished, click Add and track [#] prompts. 

Three review criteria: 

1. Would a buyer type this? Prompts should read like real questions, not keywords. 

2. Is the phase right? Every prompt is assigned one buyer journey phase, and HubSpot advises against changing it. Make sure your set is not all Awareness. 

3. Is the language right? HubSpot’s documentation notes prompts should be in the language the selected ICP would naturally use in their location. 

Your prompt allowance is finite, so choose deliberately. Prompt strategy is covered properly in HubSpot AEO prompt tracking. 

Table 2: Published limits. Source: HubSpot knowledge base, last updated 27 August 2026. All tiers cover ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. 

Step 6: Understand What Happens Next 

Once prompts are tracked, data collection begins. HubSpot states that AEO runs tracked prompts daily and advises reviewing performance across multiple days or weeks before evaluating trends, because responses change over time. 

Resist the temptation to report anything in week one. Set the expectation with your leadership team now, before someone sees a low first number and treats it as a result. 

One more operational note: HubSpot says that after deleting prompts it can take up to 72 hours for changes to appear. 

Step 7: Read Your First Visibility Numbers 

On the Dashboard tab, brand visibility shows how often your brand is mentioned among the prompts you track. HubSpot states it is analyzed on prompt coverage, frequency across answer engines, and relative competitor presence, and that a lower score may mean you appear in fewer prompts, appear inconsistently across engines, or are mentioned less often than competitors. 

A sentiment tab reports how positively or negatively your brand is described, and how that changes over time. 

Do not benchmark this against anyone else’s number. It depends entirely on which prompts you chose. The detail is in HubSpot AI visibility. 

Step 8: Review Competitor Share of Voice 

The Competitor landscape section reports share of voice, which HubSpot defines as your brand’s mentions divided by the total brand mentions from all competitors across your tracked prompts, alongside a competitor visibility comparison. 

Read it as a relative measure, not a market share figure. It reflects the competitor list you configured and the prompts you chose. See competitor analysis. 

Step 9: Analyze Your First Citations 

On the Citations tab you will find which sources the answers draw on. HubSpot defines a citation as recorded when an answer engine includes a link to a webpage or a domain name embedded in its answer, and notes clearly that citations are separate from brand mentions, since a source can be cited without mentioning your brand. 

The reports include owned domain citation rate versus competitors, citations with brand mention rate versus competitors, citations by content type, citations by channel, top domains, top owned citations and top citations overall. 

This is where most of the actionable information lives, which is why it has its own article: citation analysis. 

Step 10: Work Through the Recommendations 

The Recommendations tab turns citation patterns into suggested actions, organized into all recommendations, site audit, owned content, social amplification and outreach. Each carries a content type, channel, recommendation type, priority, status, assignee and a projected citation lift. 

There is also a site audit that scans your pages for content and technical issues. Run both the content and technical audits during setup, since they surface fixable problems independent of any AI trend. Our technical SEO checklist for AI search covers the same ground from a non-vendor angle. Prioritization is covered in AEO recommendations. 

Step 11: Build the Ongoing Workflow 

Setup is the easy part. This is the rhythm that makes it worth the subscription: 

Table 3: An ongoing AEO workflow. 

The last row matters. HubSpot’s documentation notes that improvements may not appear immediately and should be reviewed across multiple analysis cycles, so you need a record of what changed and when. 

A Note on Multiple Brands and Domains 

HubSpot states that AEO supports tracking one owned domain per setup. If you manage several brands, the documented options are organizing prompts into groups to track brand-specific visibility, or using the Brands add-on to set up separate brands in your account. 

Decide this before setup rather than after, since prompt allowances are shared.

Frequently Asked Questions 

Key Takeaways 

• Resolve the Super Admin AI settings and any security review before you plan a launch date. 

• Treat brand name variations as a data-quality exercise; omissions permanently understate your visibility. 

• Build the competitor list with sales input, since later changes only apply to future data runs. 

• Weight prompts toward Evaluation and Decision phases rather than filling the allowance with Awareness questions. 

• Set up the review rhythm and a record of what you changed and when, or improvements will be unattributable.