How to Check Whether AI Mentions Your Brand
Search behavior has quietly changed. Buyers no longer type a query into Google and click through ten blue links — they ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini a question and take the answer at face value. If your brand isn't part of that answer, you're invisible at the exact moment a buyer is deciding who to trust.
The problem is that most marketing teams have no idea whether this is happening to them. Traditional analytics tools weren't built to track AI-generated answers, so brands are often flying blind. This is the gap HubSpot's AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) tool was built to close.
In this post, we'll break down how to actually find out if AI is mentioning your brand, what HubSpot AEO measures, and how to use that data to show up more often in AI-generated answers.
AI-powered search results now include specific brand names, product recommendations, and vendor comparisons — which means an AI answer can make or break a buyer's shortlist before your website ever gets a click. A Gartner survey found that 79% of consumers expect to use AI-enhanced search, with 70% expressing at least some trust in AI-generated results, showing how AI visibility now directly shapes buyer discovery and decision-making.
The challenge is measurement. Traditional analytics tools often struggle to track AI citations correctly, since AI-referred visits frequently show up as direct or unattributed traffic, and users tend to copy-paste URLs from AI answers rather than clicking inline links. On top of that, traditional SEO tools don't measure brand sentiment or perception within a generated answer at all — so even if you notice a traffic bump, you still don't know how AI is describing you, or whether it's helping or hurting your brand.
That's the exact gap AEO tools are designed to fill.
HubSpot AEO is a CRM-powered toolset designed to track, analyze, and improve a brand's visibility within AI-generated answers. Instead of guessing which questions matter, it uses your actual customer data, industry details, and competitor segments to automatically suggest high-intent prompts that real buyers are likely to use, rather than requiring manual brainstorming like standalone AEO tools do.
HubSpot's AEO tool gives you four things: a visibility score, prompt tracking, citation analysis, and prioritized recommendations. Its main dashboard tracks your score over time across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, and it doesn't just show you the gap — it tells you what content to create or update to close it, right inside HubSpot.
There are a few ways to get started, depending on how deep you want to go:
AI Search Grader (free, one-time check): A free one-time diagnostic that sends your brand information to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini and scores your brand across five dimensions using deterministic scoring, producing a total score out of 100.
AI Search Sensor (free, ongoing): Gives you a high-level view of the AEO landscape — tracking shifts in citation and mention frequency, AI-referred traffic trends, and industry benchmarks — designed to help you spot landscape-wide patterns rather than measure one specific business.
HubSpot AEO (paid, ongoing monitoring): An ongoing monitoring tool that tracks visibility across specific prompts, compares competitors, and delivers prioritized recommendations, starting at $50/month. It's available three ways: included in Marketing Hub Pro/Enterprise, as a standalone product at $50/mo ($45 billed annually), or via the free AEO Grader for a baseline.
Once it's set up, HubSpot AEO reports on a handful of core metrics that together answer "is AI mentioning me, and how?"
Brand Visibility Score A top-level metric representing the percentage of tracked prompts in which your brand appears in AI-generated answers.
Share of Voice (Citation Share) A competitive benchmark showing your brand's percentage of mentions relative to the total brand mentions in your category across all tracked prompts. On the competitive landscape dashboard, this is paired with competitor visibility, an absolute measure of how often each individual tracked brand appears in AI answers.
Sentiment Analysis A scored evaluation from −100 to +100 of the overall tone — positive, negative, or neutral — that answer engines use when describing your brand. This matters because it tells you not just whether AI mentions you, but how it talks about you, which directly influences buyer perception.
Citation Analysis A breakdown of the specific domains, URLs, and content types — such as blogs, Reddit threads, or industry publications — that AI models are referencing to form their answers.
Prompt Tracking Measures how your brand shows up in AI answers for the specific prompts you select, so you're starting from real buyer context instead of guesswork. Trials start with 25 free prompts, and there's no cap on how many additional prompts you can purchase over time.
Start with a free check. Run the AI Search Grader by entering your company name, location, industry, and product or service. It sends your brand information to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini and asks each model how it characterizes your brand based on its training data.
Set up your brand details. Add every variation of your brand name a buyer might type — the matching is case-sensitive, and skipping variations means the tool undercounts your real mentions.
Add your competitors. The tool suggests competitors based on your brand details; edit each for accuracy and add your top two or three direct rivals, since this step is what activates Share of Voice.
Define your Ideal Customer Profile. Select what you want to track and define the ICPs doing the searching — job titles, company sizes, industries, and revenue ranges — since thin ICPs produce generic, less useful prompt suggestions.
Set your location. AI answers vary by region, so match this setting to where your buyers actually are, and plan separate prompts and budget if you serve multiple regions.
Let it run, then validate manually. After setup, wait roughly 24 hours for data to populate, then validate results manually before acting on them. HubSpot sends each prompt to the answer engines daily, so you can read the exact text each engine returned and see whether your brand was mentioned, in what context, and alongside which competitors.
Review the four dashboard views. The AEO tab breaks down into four views — Dashboard, Prompts, Citations, and Recommendations — with the aggregate dashboard showing your overall visibility score and how it fluctuates over time. Some daily variance is normal, since it reflects how frequently the underlying AI models update their training and retrieval behavior.
It's worth being honest about the limits of any dashboard, including this one. AI engines validate brand authority by cross-referencing a brand's digital footprint across every channel it appears on — owned, earned, and third-party — not just your own website. If you skip the underlying research, you risk populating the tool with your own marketing language, generating a score that just reflects how often AI mentions you when asked questions shaped like your own copy, and mistaking that number for real buyer visibility.
Put simply: a visibility strategy built only around owned content and direct brand mentions optimizes for the small share of the conversation your brand already controls, while the harder and more consequential work is understanding the places your buyers trust most and the story those sources are currently telling about your brand. The dashboard is the measurement layer — the strategy still has to happen around it.
The shift isn't hypothetical. HubSpot reports organic traffic down roughly 27% for its customers, while AI referral traffic is up 20% for beta users prioritizing answer engines, with AI-referred leads converting at roughly 3x. That combination — falling organic traffic and higher-converting AI traffic — is exactly why "does AI mention us" has become a metric marketing teams need to own, not a curiosity.
If you are unsure whether ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity are mentioning your brand, you may already be missing buyers who are using AI to research solutions in your category.
Start with HubSpot’s free AI Search Grader to understand your current visibility. Once you have a baseline, use HubSpot’s AEO tools to track mentions, identify content gaps, and improve how your brand appears across AI-generated answers.
At HuboExperts, we believe the score is only the beginning. The real opportunity comes from combining AI visibility data with buyer intent, content strategy, and CRM insights to turn stronger brand visibility into qualified leads and measurable pipeline growth.
1. How can I find out if ChatGPT or Gemini mentions my brand?
The fastest way is HubSpot's free AI Search Grader. Enter your company name, location, industry, and product or service, and the tool asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini how they characterize your brand, returning a score out of 100.
2. What is AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)?
AEO is the practice of optimizing your brand's presence so it appears in AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, rather than just in traditional search rankings.
3. Is HubSpot AEO free?
There's a free entry point (the AI Search Grader) and a free ongoing landscape tool (AI Search Sensor), but full prompt-level tracking with HubSpot AEO is paid. It's available for $50/month standalone ($45/month billed annually), or included with Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise.
4. What's the difference between AI Search Grader and HubSpot AEO?
AI Search Grader is a free one-time diagnostic snapshot, while HubSpot AEO is an ongoing monitoring tool that tracks visibility across specific prompts, compares competitors, and delivers prioritized recommendations continuously.
5. What is a "brand visibility score"?
It's a top-level metric representing the percentage of tracked prompts in which your brand appears in AI-generated answers — essentially, how often you show up when relevant questions are asked.
6. What does "Share of Voice" mean in AEO?
Share of Voice is a competitive benchmark showing your brand's percentage of mentions relative to the total brand mentions in your category across all tracked prompts — it tells you how you stack up against named competitors, not just whether you appear at all.
7. Can HubSpot AEO tell me if AI is saying negative things about my brand?
Yes. HubSpot AEO measures how positively or negatively your brand is described in AI answers on a scale from −100 to +100, so you can see sentiment, not just presence.
8. Do I need a HubSpot CRM to use HubSpot AEO?
HubSpot AEO is available as a standalone product, though its prompt suggestions are more tailored when connected to CRM data, since it's built to use your actual customer and competitor context.
9. How many prompts can I track with HubSpot AEO?
Trials start with 25 free prompts, and you can purchase additional prompts at any time with no limit on how many you can add.
10. Why does my AI visibility score change from day to day?
HubSpot sends each tracked prompt to the answer engines daily, and some daily variance is normal because it reflects how frequently the underlying AI models update their training and retrieval behavior.