HubSpot AEO Grader: Your Score Explained + Alternatives

The HubSpot AEO Grader, now renamed AI Search Grader, is a free one-time check that scores how three AI engines (OpenAI's GPT-5.4 mini, Perplexity and Google Gemini) describe your brand, on a scale from 0 to 100. You enter a company name, location, products or services and industry; no account is needed and HubSpot says the result is ready in under two minutes. It does not ask for your website URL, so it measures brand perception, not whether AI systems can read and cite your site.

Last reviewed: September 28, 2026, against HubSpot's AI Search Grader page. The old address hubspot.com/aeo-grader redirects there.

What the AEO Grader checks

According to HubSpot's own page, the tool works like this:

• Inputs: company name, location, product or services, industry. No URL.
• Engines: "GPT-5.4 mini (OpenAI), Perplexity, and Gemini (Google)", with results cross-validated across the three.
• Output: a snapshot report with an overall score out of 100 and five dimensions.
• Cost and effort: free, no account required, under two minutes.
• Competitors: HubSpot says the grader "accepts any brand name", so you can run it for a competitor as well.

How the AEO score out of 100 is calculated

HubSpot publishes the weighting of the five dimensions:

Dimension	Points	What it tells you
Sentiment Results	40	How positively or negatively the engines talk about you
Presence Quality	20	How well your brand is represented in the answers
Brand Recognition	20	Whether the engines know who you are
AI Share of Voice	10	How often you appear compared with others in your field
Market Competition	10	How you are positioned against the competitive field

The weighting matters when you read your number. Sentiment alone is 40 of 100 points, while share of voice is only 10. A well-known brand that is described kindly can score high even if it rarely appears in the answers that precede a purchase.

What the score does not tell you

HubSpot does not claim the grader covers more than the above, so treat these as checks you still need to run yourself:

1. Can AI crawlers reach your site? The grader never sees your URL. Blocked crawlers in robots.txt, a firewall rule or bot protection will not show up in the score.
2. Are the engines you care about included? HubSpot lists three engines. Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot and Claude are not among them. For Google's AI features, Google's documentation on AI features and your website is the reference for what your site needs.
3. Do the results match your buyers' questions? The page does not describe choosing your own prompts. HubSpot's paid product is the one it positions for tracking "specific prompts".
4. Is the result stable? It is a one-time snapshot. AI answers vary between runs, so one score is one sample, not a trend.

AEO grader vs. GEO grader

AEO stands for answer engine optimization, GEO for generative engine optimization. GEO is also the name of the research paper "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" by Aggarwal et al. (2023), which studied how content changes affect visibility in generative search answers. In practice the two labels overlap, and tools called "AEO grader" or "GEO grader" answer one of two different questions:

• Perception grader (HubSpot's type): How do AI engines describe my brand today? Input is a brand name, output is a perception score.
• Site grader: Can AI engines access, understand and quote my website? Input is a URL, output is a list of technical and content findings.

You need both answers. A perception score without a site check tells you that something is wrong but not where. A site check without a perception score tells you what to fix but not whether it changed anything. Our free GEO Score is a site grader: it checks crawler access, answer-shaped passages, structured data and entity consistency for a URL.

What to do with your score

If you scored well

Check where the good perception comes from. If AI crawlers cannot reach your pages or your pages contain no passage worth quoting, the engines are describing you from third-party sources. That score depends on other people continuing to write about you accurately. The free AI crawler check shows in a minute whether GPTBot, PerplexityBot and others are allowed in.

If you scored poorly

A low grade tells you there is a problem, not which one. There are four usual causes:

• Access: AI crawlers blocked by robots.txt, a firewall or bot protection. Often the cheapest fix.
• Structure: no passage on your pages that a model can lift as a direct answer.
• Entity: contradictory company facts across your site, directories and profiles, so no model can place you with confidence.
• Sources: answers in your category are built from portals and publications where you do not appear.

Diagnose which one applies before you pay for monitoring. A monthly dashboard at this stage mostly confirms a problem you already know about.

If the report contains something factually wrong

Treat that as the top finding. A model confidently misstating your products, ownership or location does more damage than a missing mention. The fix is to find the contradiction in the public evidence and remove it: outdated product pages, old directory entries after a rebrand, a subsidiary described as the parent company.

A 20-minute manual check to run next

The one thing the grader cannot give you is results for your own questions. Run these five prompt types in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google (with AI Overviews), and note which brands and which sources appear:

1. Category: "What are the best [product category] providers for [customer type] in [country]?"
2. Problem: "How do I solve [problem your product solves] without [common drawback]?"
3. Comparison: "[Your brand] vs. [main competitor]: which is better for [use case]?"
4. Brand facts: "What does [your brand] offer and who is it for?"
5. Trust: "Is [your brand] reliable? What do customers say?"

Write down three things per answer: whether you are named, whether the description is correct, and which URLs are cited. The cited URLs are your to-do list: those are the pages the engines trust in your category.

Free and paid next steps

• GEO Score and AI crawler check (free): the site-side counterpart to the grader, see above.
• HubSpot AEO (paid): HubSpot's ongoing monitoring product. HubSpot describes it as tracking visibility across specific prompts, comparing competitors and giving prioritised recommendations, "at only $50/month".
• Other monitoring tools: Otterly.ai, Peec AI, Scrunch AI, AthenaHQ and Profound track AI visibility over time. Pricing and engine coverage change often; our reviews of Otterly.ai and Peec AI cover the details.
• Measurement with your own prompts: our GEO audit checks whether AI search engines cite your pages for the questions your buyers ask, and what to fix if they do not. Pricing on request.

Frequently asked questions

What is the HubSpot AEO Grader?

A free, one-time check from HubSpot that scores how GPT-5.4 mini, Perplexity and Gemini describe your brand, from 0 to 100. HubSpot now calls it AI Search Grader.

What does AEO stand for?

Answer engine optimization: optimizing content and brand signals so that AI-powered answer engines mention and cite you. GEO, generative engine optimization, is often used for the same goal.

What is an AEO score?

In HubSpot's grader, a number out of 100 made up of five weighted dimensions: Sentiment Results (40), Presence Quality (20), Brand Recognition (20), AI Share of Voice (10) and Market Competition (10). Other tools use their own, different scoring.

Is the HubSpot AEO Grader free?

Yes. HubSpot states there is no cost and no account is required.

Is the AEO Grader the same as HubSpot AEO?

No. The grader is a free one-time snapshot. HubSpot AEO is a paid monitoring product that HubSpot lists at $50 per month.

What is the difference between an AEO grader and a GEO grader?

The label matters less than the input. Graders that take a brand name measure perception in AI answers; graders that take a URL check whether your website can be crawled, understood and quoted. HubSpot's tool is the first kind, our GEO Score the second.

Is AEO worth it?

If your buyers research in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews, yes: that is where shortlists form. Start with the free checks and your own prompts, and pay for monitoring only once you know which of the four causes above you are fixing.

Verdict

The HubSpot AEO Grader is a useful free snapshot of how three AI engines talk about your brand. It is not a site audit: it never looks at your website, it covers three engines, and it samples one moment. Run it, then check with a site grader such as the GEO Score whether your site can actually be cited.

To place this measure in the wider context of technical access, content and measurement, read our generative engine optimization guide.