Inside HubSpot's Category-Leading GEO Program w/ Aja Frost

**Ross Hudgens** (0:11)
Aja, I recently saw your AEO sensor and thought it was amazing.

**Aja Frost** (0:16)
Thank you.

**Ross Hudgens** (0:16)
Yeah. Beyond that intro, the fact that you all are doing more and more came top of mind for me to bring you on. I've seen you've had some great talks come out recently and some content online. You did an AirOps webinar that was really good as well. HubSpot has always been known as category leading to me from a strategy standpoint in the search world. A lot of people would look to your team for industry leading best practices, and you continue to stay ahead of the curve there.
The fact that you're obviously taking this geo thing, AEO thing quite seriously made me think that you're probably cutting edge on that side. We'd love to deep dive into your practices today and go further there. Excited to have you here.

**Aja Frost** (1:02)
Yeah. I'm excited to open up the playbook and show you what's in it. We have definitely been deeply investing in what we call AEO since the really beginning of 2023 I remember when ChatGBT broke through, and I actually just went back and I found a memo that I wrote to my leadership team around that time that said, here's what this means for HubSpot, here's what this is going to mean for our customers, and here's what we should do about it. Now, I didn't get everything in that memo right. But what I called that I think has turned out to be quite accurate is, discovery has moved to LLMs.
That is the primary way that I think most folks are now discovering and evaluating products.
If your company isn't thinking about how to optimize, not just your visibility, but the specific things that LLMs are saying about you, it's like you're not on the first page of Google. The paradigm has really shifted.

**Ross Hudgens** (2:13)
On that exact comment, one of the interesting things I've literally had a conversation last week on your point of most, we have a lot of B2B clients. I know you likely do at HubSpot. You're mostly B2B, right? B2B is small business?

**Aja Frost** (2:26)
B2B, yep.

**Ross Hudgens** (2:28)
So the kind of refrain I like to give is like, we had 5% of our traffic LLMs, and then at a certain point, 40% were self-attributing from LLMs.
Are you finding a percentage is pretty high? I'm sure it's pretty high for you, your customer base. What's the pulse there?

**Aja Frost** (2:49)
Yeah, well, it's interesting that you say self-attribution, because that's definitely, unfortunately, the most accurate way to understand the true influence that LLMs are having on your funnel. If you just look at the direct numbers, it's going to vastly under-report. So I think that that's what most folks should be doing. They should have some sort of self-attribution motion. But yeah, we are finding that not only is it most customers, but it is the single biggest predictor of purchase intent across segment. So whether you're up market, down market, HubSpot serves both, then if you used AI to evaluate us, you're likelier to buy.
We really attribute that to our fantastic presence in LLMs, which yeah, is something that we've been really cranking on.

**Ross Hudgens** (3:48)
So on that note, the HubSpot story line, you all crushed for a long, long time on the blog.
One of those category leading things I'm referencing where you had ton of traffic there, somewhat public story is some people publish some things that that traffic went down a decent amount to that blog. You're not independent and alone in that. Of course, many SaaS companies have seen a very similar story to that blog. But some kind of correct me if wrong, but it feels like with this geo thing, there's been a little bit of Phoenix of the Ashes from the Ashes moment. But what is the current status of that blog set up and maybe you could speak to it?

**Aja Frost** (4:30)
I love that analogy. Yes, it was a very public, well-documented, serious decline in traffic.
Painful at the time, as you can imagine. But ultimately, I think turned out to be a blessing in disguise because we lost all that traffic from pretty low intent broad keywords, like, what is content marketing?
And I think that loss of traffic really predicted what was going to happen to most companies publishing educational content online, which is AI intercepts that traffic. And if someone is getting that answer in an AI overview or AI mode or Claude or Chat to Petit, I mean, you know, pick your poison, they're never making it to your website. And so, much earlier than most companies, we had to think about, okay, how are we going to replace that demand and how are we going to optimize for a world in which our content is having an indirect influence on the buyer. Our content is reaching the buyer in a different modal and a different pain than on our website. So we've become, through all of our work, the number one most visible CRM in LLMs, which I'm really, really proud of.