AEO

More of your audience now gets answers from AI instead of a list of links. So when someone asks an assistant about your category, the response draws on sources you may never even see, and your brand either shows up in it — or doesn’t.

To improve visibility in AI answer engines, content and SEO marketers need to add AEO keywords gap analysis to their strategies. Traditional SEO keyword gaps show which terms a company isn’t ranking for versus the competition. An AEO keywords gap uses the same principle but with broader criteria, identifying the prompts and questions where a given brand is cited in AI search, but another isn’t.

Measuring success is a leading challenge for answer engine optimization (AEO) that marketers report today. In HubSpot’s State of AEO 2026 report, it was the top challenge among B2B marketers at 23%; among B2C marketers, 26% cited it, behind only understanding how AEO works at 29%.

Over the past few months, the HubSpot Blog team has been testing and comparing various AEO tools, including Scrunch vs. Semrush, and here’s the high-level takeaway if you’re trying to choose: Scrunch is a dedicated answer engine optimization (AEO) tool built to monitor how your brand shows up in AI answers, while Semrush folds AI visibility tracking into the SEO suite many teams already run.

There’s no single right answer to how often you should run AEO prompt tracking, because the answer depends on what you’re trying to detect. But the question has two parts that people often blur together: how often data gets collected, and how often your team makes decisions from it.

Profound and Peec AI are two of the most frequently compared tools in the AEO category right now, and the decision isn’t so straightforward. The two platforms take different approaches to data collection, pricing, and what happens after you read a visibility score.

Buyers now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for recommendations before they ever open a search results page, and marketers need a way to see whether their brand shows up in those answers. That’s why Profound vs Semrush for AEO lands on so many shortlists.

The way people search for information is changing. Instead of scrolling through a list of blue links, more users are turning to AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and Perplexity that deliver direct answers to questions.

Learning how to identify content gaps for AI visibility starts with a question that traditional content gap analysis doesn’t always answer: where could a brand contribute something useful to an AI-generated answer, but isn’t being mentioned or cited?

For most teams, the answer to “which prompts should I track?” is this: track a representative sample of branded, unbranded, and competitor prompts across buyer stages, personas, and priority markets. Don’t fall into the trap of tracking everything.