Quick verdict: A genuinely capable, fast-to-set-up AI visibility tool with a couple of standout features — but it’s not free (despite what a lot of “best free GEO tools” roundups currently claim), and at $50/month it’s priced above what most solo consultants will want to commit to before they’ve landed a client.

What it actually is: HubSpot has folded AI-search tracking into its marketing suite under a feature called AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), currently in Beta. It tracks how a brand shows up across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, and — unlike some of the barebones trackers in this space — it’s built as a full onboarding flow, not just a form you fill in and forget.

Pricing, confirmed from the account itself: one plan, $50/month ($45/month if paid annually), with a 28-day free trial and a 25-prompt limit during the trial. No permanently free tier — worth correcting if you’ve seen it listed as “free” elsewhere, since that’s not accurate as of testing in August 2026.

Setting it up: Onboarding is a clean 3-step flow. confirm brand details → review competitors, products, and services → prompts.

One real limitation hit immediately: entering the tool’s own domain (hubspot.com) as the tracked brand didn’t work — the setup wouldn’t proceed with it. Switching the tracked brand to otterly.ai went through without issue. Worth noting as a real, first-hand rough edge, not a guess.

The standout setup feature: step 1 auto-suggests brand name variations — case differences, spacing, common misspellings (OtterlyAI, otterlyai, OTTERLY.AI, Otterly Al, and so on) — so the tool catches mentions AI engines phrase inconsistently, not just exact-match text. This is a small thing most competitors don’t surface this clearly during onboarding, and it directly reflects a real problem in this space: AI answers don’t always spell a brand name the same way twice.

Also genuinely useful: step 2 auto-detected relevant competitors on its own — for otterly.ai, it correctly surfaced Profound, Peec AI, Scrunch, and AthenaHQ, all real, direct competitors in the GEO-tracking category, without being told what the category was. That’s a real signal the tool understands brand/competitor context reasonably well out of the box.

A nice trust-building touch during setup, not after: before you’ve even finished onboarding, a live preview shows actual AI-generated answers running through Gemini in real time, with citations, for prompts like “which AI visibility tools show URL-level performance.” You see the real mechanism working before you’ve committed to anything.

What the first day of real data showed: Testing was run with country set to United States, over a single day’s window (Aug 18, 2026 — the trial had just started, so this is a first-day snapshot, not a trend yet).

Brand visibility score: 86.67% — HubSpot’s own composite metric.

Per-engine breakdown for that day:
ChatGPT: 90%
Gemini: 90%
Perplexity: 80%

Share of voice against real competitors, same day:

Tool	Percentage
otterly.ai	21%
Profound	19%
Semrush	18%
Peec AI	13%
Ahrefs	11%
Scrunch	11%
AthenaHQ	4%
Similarweb	2%
Writesonic	1%

Which domains AI engines are actually citing in this category (top domains by citation frequency): semrush.com led at 21 citations, followed by hubspot.com’s own blog at 13 — notably, HubSpot’s content is getting cited as a “peer” source even in a report about a competing tool, which says something about how much AI engines already trust hubspot.com’s existing content library. Ahrefs.com and seranking.com followed at 10 each, and otterly.ai’s own site pulled 9 citations as an “owned” source.

The single most-cited specific page in this category: a Zapier blog post (“best AI visibility tool”) was cited 5 times and mentioned nearly every competitor by name — a strong, concrete example of exactly the kind of comprehensive, comparison-style content that earns repeat AI citations, and a useful real-world reference point for how your own comparison hub page should be structured.

Speed: the one number worth leading with Real, directly comparable data point from testing both tools back to back on the same day. HubSpot returned a full report in under 10 minutes. Otterly.ai, run at the same time, was still showing an empty table with zeros after 15+ minutes. To be fair to Otterly, that gap may reflect a scheduled-scan cycle rather than the tool being broken (worth re-checking Otterly’s report a day later before calling this a hard flaw on its side) — but as a first-session, first-impression experience, HubSpot was the one that actually delivered something to look at quickly, which matters a lot for a reader deciding whether a tool is worth their time before they’ve paid for it.

Beyond tracking: (content tools included) Worth noting since it’s a genuine differentiator from the pure-tracking tools in this category: HubSpot’s AEO feature doesn’t just measure visibility, it also helps create blog content and gives optimization recommendations directly in the same product. Otterly, Peec, and most of the budget trackers are measurement-only — you’d still need a separate tool or your own writing process to act on what they show you. That’s a real reason a small agency might prefer HubSpot over a cheaper pure-tracker, if content creation is also a bottleneck for them.

Honest take: What’s genuinely good: the brand-variant detection and live-preview-during-setup are real differentiators, not filler features. Competitor auto-detection worked accurately on the first try. The data returned (visibility score, share of voice, top citing domains) is detailed enough to actually act on, not just a vanity percentage. It was also the fastest of the tools tested to actually produce a report, and it’s the only one in this early lineup that pairs tracking with content-creation help rather than tracking alone.

What to weigh before recommending it to a budget-conscious reader: $50/month puts this well above Otterly’s ~$29 entry tier, with no permanently free option — for a solo consultant testing the waters, the 28-day trial (capped at 25 tracked prompts) is really the only way to use this without a real commitment. Nothing about the 25-prompt cap felt confusing or restrictive in day-to-day use — it’s a reasonable trial limit, not a dealbreaker. It’s a strong tool if AEO tracking and content creation together are worth paying for as one subscription; it’s a harder sell as a standalone first purchase for someone on a tight budget who just wants tracking.