By Aja Frost, Senior Director of Global Growth and Paid, HubSpot
Ask your sales team how customers are finding you, and the answer is increasingly: ChatGPT.
Monthly AI sessions are already 56% the size of global search. To put that into perspective, Google has existed for nearly 30 years; ChatGPT has been around for just three and a half.
So, what does this shift mean for how buyers discover and choose brands?
My team at HubSpot analysed millions of AI answers to figure out what influences them and, more importantly, what marketers should be doing.
Before we jump into the insights, a few terms you should know.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is how you get your brand to show up in the answers from AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. A shout-out without a link is a “mention,” and a link to your website is a “citation.” Both mentions and citations matter: Mentions build awareness, while citations drive traffic.
Your blog is your most important asset
It’s tempting to look at declines in blog traffic and decide to put time and budget elsewhere. But you should do the opposite, and here’s why: Our data showed 62% of AI citations come from blog posts and listicles – making them the most commonly cited page type by a wide margin.
AI looks for content that’s structured, scannable, and data-rich, which is exactly what a well-written blog post delivers. Even if organic traffic is down, your blog is one of the most important channels for building AI visibility. It’s where LLMs go to understand your product, positioning, and value prop.
Last year, we noticed that ChatGPT was quoting outdated pricing details, so we published a series of blog posts dedicated solely to our current pricing. ChatGPT visited them almost immediately after we published… and started giving people the right prices the next day. Super straightforward, super important – because anyone asking an LLM about your pricing is a high-intent lead.
All that to say: If there’s something AI should know about your brand (pricing, use cases, how you compare to competitors), put it on your blog.
But freshness is critical.
The content AI cites is 25% more recent than what Google typically surfaces; on ChatGPT specifically, cited content skews about 1.2 years newer. Keep your priority pages up to date (with the latest information, fresh quotes, etc.). If your pricing page hasn’t been touched in 12 months, AI is likely skipping right over it.
There’s a shift from keywords to context
The shift from SEO to AEO isn’t about starting from scratch. It’s about understanding what AI prioritises when someone asks a question.
The average ChatGPT prompt is roughly 350 words; a typical Google search is five. When AI gets that much context, it’s looking for content tailored to a specific persona or use case, not broad, high-level pages.
Backlinks no longer predict visibility
For 20 years, backlinks have been the dominant currency of SEO. More links meant higher rankings.
But when we looked at thousands of high-ranking Google pages – the ones with the strongest backlink profiles – we found zero relationship with AI visibility. Pages with massive link authority were not being cited more often by AI. Some of the most-cited sources had little to no link authority.
Why?
Answer engines are optimising for something different. Google is trying to find the most authoritative page on the web. Answer engines are trying to find the best paragraph to answer the question. So instead of asking how many backlinks a page has, the model is asking: Does this directly answer what someone just asked?
Content clarity and specificity often outweigh domain authority. For smaller brands, that’s good news. It means you can show up ahead of much bigger competitors with well-structured, useful content.
Answer engines look for consensus
AI doesn’t just check your website. It looks for multiple independent sources saying the same thing about your brand across YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, forums, and reviews. When someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation, it’s synthesising what the internet collectively says about you.
LLMs love user-generated content because it is authentic, constantly refreshed, and available in large volumes. If your brand isn’t showing up consistently across those platforms, you’re missing key opportunities to help AI form an opinion about you.
What to do right now
Start by finding out where you actually stand. You can use an AEO tool or pick 10 to 15 questions that your buyers are likely to type into ChatGPT or Gemini, like “What’s the best project management tool for a five-person creative agency?” Run the questions through an answer engine and see which brand names come up. If yours isn’t on the shortlist, that is your baseline.
Then create or update five blog posts with the information you most want AI to cite. Turn your headers into questions, add an FAQ section, and make sure everything has a visible “last updated” tag. You’re not just writing for humans anymore. You are making it as easy as possible for AI to find, read, and repeat key details about your brand.
Publish five use-case or persona-specific pages, e.g. “best CRM for a 10-person sales team” rather than “What is a CRM?” The more specific the content, the likelier it is to match the actual question someone is typing.
Build a content plan for one off-site channel and commit to it. YouTube, Reddit, or LinkedIn, wherever your audience already is.
Measure visibility over time. Roughly half of cited URLs change every single month. AEO Sensor is a free dashboard that tracks how answer engine responses are shifting across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, so when your visibility changes you can tell whether it is an industry trend, a model change, or a signal that your individual strategy needs attention.
Look at directional visibility: are you showing up more consistently, across more prompts, than you were last quarter? That is the trend worth caring about.
In Australia, 42% of business leaders who understand AEO still aren’t applying it consistently*. This means there’s a genuine first-mover advantage for brands willing to start now. Build your presence now while your competitors are still figuring out where to start.
HubSpot-commissioned study conducted by Lonergan Research in 2026 among 1,033 Australian Business Leaders in organisations of 50+ employees.