What Does AI Say About Your Brand? I Tried Both Tools for You

A while back, I ran a little experiment.

I have a small golf-content website — a few years old, decent SEO, but I'd never done anything specifically to optimize for "being mentioned by AI." Put bluntly, it was untilled ground. A perfect guinea pig.

I wanted to figure out one thing:

When someone goes to ChatGPT or Gemini and asks "which clubs should a beginner golfer get," does AI actually name me?

And if not, why not?

To find out, I opened accounts on the two tools most often compared against each other — HubSpot AEO and Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit — fed the same domain into both, and ran them for nearly a month.

Today, let me walk you through the numbers.

First, let's decode the jargon

AEO, GEO, AI visibility — three terms that get tossed around interchangeably online until your head spins.

Let me untangle them in plain English:

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is, essentially, "making AI more willing to mention you." We used to optimize for Google and call it SEO; now we optimize for "answer engines" like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and we call it AEO. Different thing we're answering to — same essence underneath.

AI visibility is the quantifiable measure of "you being mentioned by AI" — how often you get mentioned, whether the mention is positive or negative, whether it comes with a link, and how big a slice you take. At its core, it's the report card for the craft of AEO.

Why stare at this report card?

Think about it: in 2024, a third of US adults were using AI chatbots, and by 2026 that share is closing in on half. That block of AI summary at the top of Google's search results? Six in ten Americans read it.

The way users look for answers has already changed. If your brand doesn't show up in AI's answers, to that crowd, you basically don't exist.

What are the two tools actually comparing?

Let's get the names and tiers straight first, or it's easy to buy the wrong thing.

HubSpot has two shells here: one called HubSpot AEO, which you can buy standalone without tying into anything else; and another — the AEO features bundled inside Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise — which is wired into the CRM.

Semrush also has two shells: Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit can be bought standalone, or added on top of a Semrush subscription; if you want SEO + AEO in one package, that bundle is called Semrush One.

What I'm mostly comparing below are both the "buyable standalone" versions — that's the pair most people will actually hesitate between.

Straight to the ledger:

	HubSpot AEO	Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
Monthly price	$50	$99 per domain
Free trial	28 days, no card required	None standalone; Semrush One has a 7-day trial, but requires a card
AI engines covered	ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity (3)	ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode (5)
Prompts tracked	25	25
Key difference	Has CRM, can give personalized prompt suggestions based on your business	No CRM, but has a proprietary database of 289 million prompts

The price is double. But the more expensive one isn't necessarily the better one.

How each one actually runs

This section is the key. Both tools look like they're "testing whether you get mentioned by AI," but underneath, they work completely differently.

HubSpot AEO takes the "real ask, real answer" route — it calls the official APIs of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity directly, and every day it actually fires off the 25 prompts you're tracking, captures AI's verbatim response, and shows it to you.

You want to know whether AI mentioned you under a given prompt, in which position, with a link or not — it'll dig all of that out for you.

Semrush doesn't work that way. It has a proprietary database of 289 million prompts, updated daily. You feed in a domain, and it first pulls answers out of that database to show you — speed and breadth are the pitch. Only the new prompts you add manually trigger a fresh, real-time query.

Two approaches, each with trade-offs.

HubSpot's method is accurate and real, but a touch slower and narrower in coverage; Semrush's method is fast and broad, but the answers you see are snapshots pulled from the database, and they may be a few hours off from what you'd get if you asked ChatGPT yourself at that very moment.

Who's smarter about prompts

A prompt is your guess at what users will go ask an AI about. For AEO, prompts are what keywords were for SEO. Guess right, and you get twice the result for half the effort.

Both tools let you add prompts manually, and both proactively offer suggestions. But the way those suggestions are delivered is where they diverge.

Semrush's suggestion engine is very "SEO-flavored" — you enter a domain and a region, and it computes a batch of "synthetic prompts" for you out of that 289-million-strong database. Looks impressive: high volume, nicely structured. But it doesn't know who you are, what you sell, or what your customers look like.

The standalone version of HubSpot AEO also leans generic in its suggestions. But the moment you upgrade to Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise — it plugs into HubSpot's Smart CRM.

Once CRM is connected, things change.

It knows your products, your customers, your closed deals. The prompt suggestions it gives are grown out of your real business, not stamped out from a template. And the longer you use it — the richer the data in your CRM gets — the sharper the suggestions become.

That's the difference between having a CRM and not having one. One looks at "what the whole internet is asking"; the other looks at "what your customers are asking."

Citations and mentions — how to read them

After a month of running both, my deepest impression was this: the two tools' interface philosophies are almost mirror opposites.

HubSpot AEO gives you a dedicated Citations Tab. Click in, and it's all broken out — by content type, by channel, by your share — in a single chart. Numbers like owned citation rate (your own site's citation rate) vs. competitors sit front and center, in the most prominent spot.

At a glance, you can see which of your content pieces AI is treating as source material.

Semrush, on the other hand — I'll admit, the first time I went in looking for citation data, I got lost.

There's no dedicated Citations Tab. To see "how many times AI cited me," you have to wind your way through AI Visibility → Visibility Overview → Citations. To see "which specific pages of mine did AI cite," you scroll further down to Cited Pages.

But once you wind your way in, you find something HubSpot doesn't have: Competitor Research → Sources → Missing — it tells you, when competitors got cited by AI, which third-party websites AI looked at.

That's basically a printed list of your competitors' backlink sources.

Want to catch up to your competitors? That's a gold mine.

Let's be blunt — one wins on "content," one wins on "technical"

Actionability. I'll just give you the conclusion for this section.

On turning insight into content, HubSpot wins. On getting your site technically flawless, Semrush wins.

HubSpot AEO gives you concrete content suggestions — and I don't mean just directions. It literally tells you: write a blog post like this, use this title, target this audience, these are your primary and secondary keywords. One more click on Content Agent, and it'll even pull a first draft for you (this one requires Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise).

From "I see I'm not being mentioned" to "I've written content that can get mentioned" — the path is connected, closed-loop, all under one roof.

Semrush's suggestions lean more "directional" — tweak your brand voice, add some visual elements, things like that. It doesn't tell you which specific piece to write. For that kind of hand-held content guidance, you have to add on Content Toolkit separately.

But flip it around, and on the technical checkup front, Semrush is genuinely strong. It has a long-standing Site Audit tool, and inside it they've added a dedicated AI Search Health score — whether your robots.txt is blocking AI crawlers, whether pages load too slowly, whether structured data is written wrong — it strips all those details bare in one pass.

HubSpot is weaker here. It gives you pointers, but it doesn't run a full audit that deep.

So think of it this way: HubSpot is the "writes for you" type, Semrush is the "audits for you" type.

What connects to what

On integrations, HubSpot wins again.

The reason is simple — HubSpot itself is a marketing platform. CRM, CMS, email, ads, analytics — it all lives in its own house. Insights from AEO can flow directly back into CRM, forming closed-loop attribution: which prompt drove the traffic, which deal it eventually closed — you can trace that line.

Semrush's strength is in third-party integrations — WordPress, Trello, Google Docs, Facebook all hook in, and the SEO toolchain is complete. But it has no CRM, and no CMS. To get from insight to published content, you have to assemble your own tool stack.

In one sentence: HubSpot keeps the work inside its own house; Semrush farms it out to a crew of outside partners.

How steep is the learning curve?

Nothing to agonize over here — HubSpot is clearly easier to pick up.

Its onboarding is like having a seasoned salesperson walk you through the showroom — after you type in your domain, it asks you what business you're in, who your customers are, which kinds of prompts you care about, and walks you in step by step.

Semrush, by contrast — you type in your domain, and — bam — you're dumped straight into the dashboard. Features packed onto the screen until it can't hold any more, no one to guide you. Veteran SEO folks are in their element; a marketing newcomer is likely to spend half an hour dazed first.

It's not that Semrush is hard to use — it's that it just has so many features. Simple and powerful have always been mutually exclusive.

So which one should you buy?

I'll give you two sets of criteria. Just find the box that fits.

Pick HubSpot AEO if —

• Your customers are mostly on ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity;
• What you want is personalized, business-specific prompt suggestions (this one needs Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise);
• Your team is mostly marketers, not SEO veterans;
• You value ease of onboarding and a closed loop more than feature count;
• $50/month is acceptable to you.

Pick Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit if —

• Your customers are mostly on Google AI Overviews or Google AI Mode (these two are covered only by Semrush);
• You don't mind using synthetic prompts;
• Your team is mostly SEO-backgrounded and wants technical depth;
• You're willing to pay another $139.95/month for the SEO base (the $99 is just the AEO add-on, doesn't include SEO);
• You need broader AI engine coverage, including Claude, Copilot, Grok, and DeepSeek (this one requires Semrush Enterprise).

One last detail to watch: the $99/month is for one domain only. The more domains you have, the sharper the bill.

How I recommend you verify

Don't just go by reviews. Trying both tools is the best money you'll save.

Here's how I'd do it:

1. Open HubSpot AEO's 28-day trial and Semrush One's 7-day trial at the same time;
2. Use the same domain — that way the comparison is apples-to-apples;
3. Week one, spend half an hour a day in each, poking around the interface, looking at prompts, looking at citations;
4. From week two on, follow each tool's suggestions and actually write a few pieces of content — keep a spreadsheet with two tabs to track them;
5. Run it for three months, and see which side's content actually moves your AI visibility.

AEO, like SEO, needs time to compound. Making the call three months in is a hundred times smarter than deciding on a whim today.

Are there other options?

Yes. Let me name three, just so you have a sense of the field.

Profound: the broadest coverage — it tracks 10 AI engines, including Meta AI, Grok, and DeepSeek. The biggest selling point is a pile of pre-built "content agent" templates that let AI help you draft AEO-friendly articles. But every piece of content goes through a human approval gate before publishing. Starting price $99/month, ChatGPT only.

Scrunch: the technical play. Its flashiest feature is called AXP — it builds a "mirror version" of your site that only AI crawlers can see, invisible to regular users and search engines. It can also plug into GA4 to see how many deals actually came in from AI referrals. Starting price $250/month, covers 4 engines — not cheap.

Ahrefs Brand Radar: beyond LLMs, it also covers social platforms — YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit are all tracked. It has a database of 406 million prompts, the biggest of these three. If you're already using Ahrefs for SEO, then AEO data and SEO data live in the same dashboard — convenient. Starting price $199/month.

If you're already on any of the above and you want HubSpot's "CRM-driven personalized prompt suggestions," you can add HubSpot AEO on the side — it coexists with the others, no conflict.

Three questions I get asked most

"Can I use both together?"

Yes — and this is the combo I recommend most: Semrush for traditional SEO, HubSpot for AEO. One audits, digs into keywords, checks backlinks; the other uses CRM to give you prompt suggestions based on your customer profiles. Each minds its own lane, no stepping on toes. It also saves you the $99 you'd otherwise pay to add the Semrush AI package a la carte.

"Beyond the visibility score, how do I measure success?"

Eventually it has to come back to the business. After three months of AEO work, are there more AI-sourced leads in your pipeline, any real closed deals — that's what success looks like. To do that accounting, HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise's multi-touch attribution model can connect the line from "AEO investment → real closed deal." Semrush can't give you that, because it doesn't touch CRM at all.

"AEO vs. SEO — which should I do first?"

Get the SEO foundation in place first, then talk about AEO. If your site is still riddled with technical problems and the content is thin and sparse, get the SEO solid first. Good AEO is built on the shoulders of good SEO.

But once the foundation is solid, don't put off AEO indefinitely. AI search usage is growing fast, and AEO content compounds — planting three months early can mean a difference of orders of magnitude by year-end.

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Back to that little golf website from the very beginning.

After running this month-long experiment, my biggest takeaway isn't "which tool is better." It's this:

The way users look for answers has quietly switched runways. Standing on the runway now isn't just one referee named Google — it's a whole row: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews.

The tool is secondary. Realizing this is happening — that's the real first step.

As for who my golf site ended up picking —

Ha — I'll leave that one for you to find out yourself.

Run it once, and I trust the answer will surface on its own.

Here's hoping that, three months from now, you look back at today's decision and have no regrets.