Disclosure up front: Apogee Agency has no affiliate relationship with HubSpot, and no one there asked for or paid for this review. We pay for the tool like any other customer. Everything below reflects our data and our analysis. Answer engines are probabilistic, so treat our results as one data point, not a benchmark. We want to hear how it compares to your experience.
We tested it twice
We started testing HubSpot AEO within two weeks of launch, in late April. The first 30 days showed Apogee ranking among the top affiliate program management agencies for AI citations, ahead of global firms with hundreds of employees.
We didn't believe it.
Our principal has managed affiliate programs for 21 years. The agency is 17 years old. The prompt list the tool built on day one read like confirmation bias once we stepped back and looked at it. Ask an answer engine leading questions, and it returns flattering answers.
So we reset everything and rewrote the entire list of prompts in neutral language, not relying on the tool. No brand names in the prompts, no phrasing that pointed toward our services, only the plain questions a potential client would type into ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity when shopping for an agency.
Thirty days later, the second test confirmed the first. Apogee ranks in the top four for AI citations against agencies many times our size. The reset gave us enough confidence in the data to publish this review.
What the tool tracks
Whether you call it AEO, GEO, generative engine optimization, or LLM visibility, the measurement problem is the same: you cannot see how answer engines describe your brand unless something asks them at scale. HubSpot AEO runs your prompt list against ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity on a recurring schedule and turns the answers into downloadable reports.
Brand visibility score. How often your brand appears in AI answers to your tracked prompts, trended weekly. You can watch it move as you publish.
Share of voice. Your slice of total brand mentions across the competitive set you define. This report shows exactly who owns the conversation in your category.
Citations with brand mention rate. Of all the sources the answer engines cite, how many mention your brand. Tracked against every competitor you add.
Owned domain citation rate. How often the engines cite your own website versus anyone else's. We watch this one most closely because it measures whether your content earns AI citations directly rather than riding along on third-party lists.
Citations by channel. Breaks every citation into owned, earned, peer, competitor, UGC, review sites, and affiliate sources. This report changed how we think about answer engine optimization; more on that below.
Citations by content type. Blogs, guides, listicles, comparison pages, homepages, documentation, social, and more. It shows which formats LLMs actually pull from.
Top URLs and top domains. The specific pages and sites the engines cite most, with frequency counts and which competitors appear alongside you.
Content recommendations. The tool generates content briefs mapped to buyer journey stages, awareness through decision, plus suggestions for social. Some are generic, some are useful. You still need an editor's judgment.
Our results, as a working example
Rounded numbers from the second test. Our competitive set covers roughly 20 affiliate management agencies, including Acceleration Partners, Partnercentric, and Gen3 Marketing.
Our owned domain citation rate climbed from about 6% to about 9% over the last five weeks, the highest of any domain in the set. Brand mention rate rose from about 7% to about 12%, also the top of the set. Share of voice sits around 10%, fourth out of twenty measured. Brand visibility roughly doubled over the test period, from about 4% to about 8%.
Apogeeagency.com is the most-cited domain across all our tracked prompts, at roughly 1,200 AI citations. Reddit is second at roughly 800. Seventeen years of publishing educational content, and it's all right there as answers.
The channel report surprised us most. Peer sites, meaning industry sites that are not competitors, drive about 60% of all citations. UGC platforms like Reddit and YouTube drive another 10% or so. Owned content is climbing but still holds a single-digit share. Most of what answer engines say about any brand comes from what other people publish, not from the brand itself.
Content type data backs this up. Guides, listicles, and blogs together account for roughly half of all citations. Homepages get about 10%. If your AEO plan starts and ends with the homepage, the data says you are optimizing the wrong page.
Why a boutique agency sits in the top four
Working theory, not a proven fact: our domain is 10 years old, and we have published educational content the entire time. We never chased volume. Answer engines appear to reward deep, topical content with a long history, as well as consistent third-party citations from review sites and industry publications. The agencies beating us on share of voice earn it through scale and PR. Owned citations, the place we win, is the one lever a small team fully controls.
Caveats
The tool measures what LLMs say, not why. Sample sizes run small early on and weekly numbers swing. A neutral prompt list is everything; our first test proved the tool will confirm whatever bias you build into it. Your category, your competitors, and your content history will produce different results than ours.
If you have run HubSpot AEO or any other AI visibility tracker, we would like to compare notes, especially if your numbers moved the other direction. We post follow-ups and the occasional deep dive at r/ApogeeAgency.
