u/HubSpotHelp

AMA with Kipp & Kieran

Hey r/HubSpot! We're Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan, co-hosts of the Marketing Against the Grain podcast and co-authors of Loop: Outlearn. Outmarket. Outgrow.
We’re here for an AMA on all things marketing, AI, and building growth that compounds.

Kipp Bodnar is Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot, where he leads global marketing strategy across awareness, demand, and brand. He's also a frequent event speaker and co-author of The B2B Social Media Book.

Kieran Flanagan is SVP of Agentic GTM and Systems at HubSpot. He's spent his career across growth, marketing, and technology. Kieran also writes the AI Marketing Generalist Substack on turning AI into real results.

Ask us anything about:

• How to run Loop Marketing for your business
• How AI is actually changing marketing day-to-day (not the hype — the real use cases)
• Where marketing is headed in the next 1-3 years
• Which AI tools are worth your time and which aren't
• How to build a growth strategy that compounds over time
• Anything else on your mind!

We'll be here answering your questions on behalf of u/HubSpotHelp for 2 hours from 10 AM – 12 PM EDT on August 26. Drop your questions below. We can't wait!

Later this month on Wednesday, August 26th from 10am–12pm EDT, Kipp Bodnar (CMO at HubSpot) and Kieran Flanagan (SVP of Agentic GTM at HubSpot) will be live here on r/hubspot for an AMA.

Kipp and Kieran will be answering any questions you might have. Whether that is marketing in the AI era, HubSpot strategy, growth, or anything else you have been wanting to ask either of them. They also just co-authored a new book, Loop: Outlearn. Outmarket. Outgrow., and will be answering any questions you have about that too.

Stay tuned for the official AMA post, which will go up a few days before. You'll be able to drop your questions there ahead of time before they go live on the 26th.

UNBOUND is coming up in about a month. If you could put one thing on the HubSpot announcement list, what would it be?

Anything from feature request, to integration, or workflow fixes.

The tip, the reframe, the thing someone told you that stuck.

Not just the obvious stuff, but the things that took you a while to figure out in HubSpot, or that you accidentally discovered and now can't imagine working without.

Could be a specific automation setup, a property trick, a reporting hack, whatever. What's yours?

The last thread on this took off more than expected with 9.7K views and some genuinely impressive builds in the comments. Figured it was worth running it back.

Same question: what are you actually building with AI + HubSpot right now? Claude Code, MCP, agents, workflows, internal tools, half-finished experiments all fair game. Share your builds below.

Many of us have had that moment when you stumble across something that's been in HubSpot the whole time and wonder how you ever lived without it. Could be a report, a shortcut, a workflow trick, or a view you didn't know existed.

Drop the feature you wish you'd discovered sooner in the comments and would love to hear how you actually use it day-to-day.

We ran a live AEO webinar last week (AEO in Action) and given the questions and posts we've been seeing on AEO here, figured it was worth sharing the full Q&A. Grouped by category below:

Getting started

Is this different from the AEO Grader courses?
Yes — deeper dive, live demo, and best practices that go beyond what the courses cover.

What's the simplest order of operations to actually start using this?
Use the guided setup in your portal. Enter your domain, HubSpot scans your site, suggests competitors and ICP, generates prompt recommendations — about 4 steps, all editable afterward. Before you do that, it helps to take stock of what owned content and third-party/referral relationships you already have. HubSpot's recommendations will surface the low-hanging fruit from there.

Is there a class for the brand knowledge section? It seems deep.
No dedicated class, but the AEO certifications touch on it. Brand context lives in two places: the Breeze Content sidebar (personas/ICP) and Settings > AI (products, brand details). Small group coaching is available if you want hands-on help.

Can I restrict who's allowed to edit the AEO setup tab?
Yes, admins can lock it down in settings.

Pricing & credits

Is this included in my subscription or an extra cost?
Included in Marketing Hub Professional+. Also available as a standalone subscription if you're not on that tier.

Does the tool itself consume credits?
No. The tool is free to use. The only thing that costs credits is generating a full blog post from a recommendation — 1,000 credits (~$10). That covers the full workflow: Content Agent researches the gap, pulls in your brand voice/ICP/product context, runs SEMrush keyword data, checks competitor citations, formats for AEO, verifies links. Near-final draft, ready to publish. A generic AI tool could do something similar for free but you'd be doing all that research and QA yourself.

If I edit a generated post afterward, does that cost more credits?
No — editing doesn't consume credits.

I don't have the "generate blog" button. Is it gated?
It's in beta. Opt in from the product updates page (top-right dropdown in your portal) — search "AEO."

Competitors

Should I track ~10 competitors or more?
Depends on your category. HubSpot auto-generates a starting list sized to how competitive your space is — verify it, don't just trust it. More isn't automatically better if it dilutes your focus. You can add/edit anytime.

HubSpot picked competitors that aren't actually ours. What do we do?
Edit the list. It's a starting point, not a final answer.

Can I monitor multiple domains or brands under one HubSpot account?
Yes — works for multiple domains and for umbrella orgs running more than one brand.

Content & recommendations

Any tips for refreshing existing content to improve AEO performance?
Clear/bold headings, short listicle-style summaries, schema markup (HubSpot templates or generate it with Breeze/any answer engine). Also worth doing manually: ask your category's questions directly in AI answer engines and look at what's getting cited. The structure of those pages is a signal for how to structure yours.

Is a TL;DR at the top of a page actually helpful for AEO?
Yes — early summaries help, and detailed structured content further down builds credibility.

A competitor is driving recommendations against my own brand. What does that even mean?
It likely means they're publishing comparative content that's showing up in AI answers frequently, and their framing of your product is shaping how answer engines describe you. That's your signal to build out your own comparative content.

Are some recommendation types more important than others?
HubSpot ranks priority by number of prompts impacted and citation rate.

Prompts

Should AI generate our prompts or should we write them ourselves?
Both — test which performs better. AI-generated prompts pull from your CRM/metrics context; you know your business better than the model does. Worth noting: AI-generated prompts consume tokens.

Where does HubSpot actually source prompts from — SEMrush?
Prompts run directly against the answer engines. Suggestions come from your CRM context and initial setup, not a third-party keyword tool.

Do citation reports tie back to specific prompts I've entered?
Yes — the Prompts section lets you drill into a specific prompt and see its associated recommendations.

Measurement

How soon will AI engines pick up new or updated content?
There's no universal SLA — ChatGPT doesn't guarantee any fixed ingestion window, and every engine differs. Stop chasing a number. Monitor your visibility score trend in HubSpot AEO instead.

Brand mentions in AI answers don't always drive clicks the way SEO does. How do we actually measure this?
Clicks and referral-source tracking are still central. Worth knowing: SEMrush found AI referral traffic converts at 4.4x the rate of traditional organic search.

How does our existing HubSpot SEO foundation relate to AEO results?
Complementary, not redundant. Key difference: answer engines pull from more than your website — Reddit threads, YouTube, review sites, competitor comparisons. AEO is about building presence across the sources AI actually trusts.

Regional & platform

How does HubSpot handle regional differences outside the US?
ICP setup factors in your prospective customers' location to inform region-specific results.

I don't see Claude in the list of tracked LLMs. Why not?
On the product team's roadmap.

Can AEO integrate with WordPress or Asana?
No direct integration with either yet. AEO tracks by domain not CMS, so WordPress sites are covered that way. Asana has been flagged to the product team.

Miscellaneous

Why does AEO treat "Crest," "CREST," and "crest" as three separate products? Isn't AI smarter than that?
The AI probably does understand they're equivalent — this isn't an AI limitation. AEO is doing measurement, not interpretation. Visibility scoring tracks the exact variations you configure, intentionally case-sensitive, because capitalization genuinely changes meaning for some brands (see: HubSpot's capital S). It's a deliberate tradeoff to avoid false positives and keep scoring explainable.

How can AEO actually help with marketing campaigns?
Recommendations from visibility gaps can be actioned directly into content, then tagged to a campaign in the recommendations flow — automatic performance tracking against that campaign.

HubSpot is doing a live session next week for folks trying to figure out the practical side of AEO. You will learn how to see where your brand is showing up, where competitors are showing up instead, and what to do next inside HubSpot.

They’re also walking through:

• gap identification
• content creation + measurement
• a few AEO best practices you can use right away
• live Q&A

It’s happening on Wednesday, July 1 at 11 AM ET with Crystal King, Shane Ryan, and Jeff Skoroda and you can register here. 

Sharing this for anyone who’s been trying to make sense of AI search visibility, or who want to improve performance. 

What are you building with AI + HubSpot right now?

Could be Claude Code, a custom GPT, workflows, agents, internal tools, scrappy automations, or something half-finished that still feels promising. Would love to hear what people are actually making, what’s been genuinely useful, and what your setup looks like.

The AI-Augmented HubSpot Stack Mini-Series is almost here. If the On-Demand Bootcamps were the "learn the concepts" tracks, this is the "now actually wire it up" one.

The mini-series consists of three live sessions that move from strategy to implementation to long-term support:

• July 14: Where AI agents actually fit in your HubSpot stack and how to decide what to build first
• July 15: Live build using Claude Code to create a contact enrichment endpoint wired into a workflow, written from plain English
• July 16: Production patterns including logging, error recovery, governance, and how to make sure your build can be maintained over time

They build on each other, so if you can make it to all three it is worth it.

Register here before July 8th!

HubSpot for Startups AMA

Hey r/hubspot, I'm Gary Corcoran, I lead the international side of HubSpot for Startups and I’m hosting an AMA on June 9th at 8 am - 10 am PST | 11 am - 1 pm EST | 4 pm - 6 pm IST.

My job is to connect early-stage founders with the tools, programs, and people that actually move the needle. Day-to-day that means working with incubators and accelerators to get the right stuff in front of the right founders, and making sure the ones who are ready to scale aren't falling through the cracks.

I've been in the startup and partner ecosystem for a while, which is part of why this role clicked for me. I care a lot about what's actually useful to founders, not what looks good in a deck. And I'll be honest with you, we've gotten some things wrong over the years, and I'm happy to talk about that too.

Ask me anything about:

• How HubSpot for Startups actually works (and how to get real value from it, not just the 90% discount)
• What we're building for early-stage vs. Series A companies
• Working with incubators and accelerators as distribution partners
• What founders get wrong about GTM in the early days
• Anything else on your mind about HubSpot or the startup space

Drop your questions below early or come back day-of. I'll be here for 2 hours starting June 9th let's talk.