HubSpot AEO Grader review
HubSpot’s AEO Grader is a free tool that reports how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini perceive your brand, and it does that one job credibly: no signup, about two minutes, real output. What it doesn’t do is look at your website, which means it can tell you that you’re invisible without being able to tell you why. This review covers both halves honestly, because we make a scanner that covers the half it skips, and you should know exactly where each tool’s edges are.
What does the AEO Grader actually measure?
Brand perception in AI models. You enter your company name, location, industry, and a description of what you sell, and it queries three AI platforms about your brand, scoring five dimensions: sentiment carries 40 points, presence quality 20, brand recognition 20, share of voice 10, and market competition 10, for a composite out of 100 with a written interpretation.
The framing is explicitly about what models say “based on their training data,” which makes it a perception snapshot rather than a site audit.
What does it do well?
Three things deserve real credit. It’s genuinely free with no account wall, which is rarer than it should be in this category. The sentiment and share-of-voice reads give you a defensible baseline for the question executives actually ask, which is “what does AI say about us?” And the two-minute turnaround makes it an easy first diagnostic before anyone spends money.
For brand-level awareness across the three platforms it covers, it’s the best free option we’ve tested, and we say that as a competitor. It tops the perception category in our free checkers roundup for the same reason.
Where does it fall short?
Four places, all knowable going in. It never looks at your website, so a blocked crawler, a JavaScript-only page, or a buried answer, the fixable causes of AI invisibility, are all outside its vision. It’s a one-time snapshot, with continuous tracking upsold into HubSpot’s paid AEO product at $50/month. It covers three AI platforms, while the retrieval landscape includes more.
And its scoring weights aren’t tied to published citation research, which matters if you plan to make decisions on the numbers; the research that does exist is about page-level citation behavior, a layer the grader doesn’t touch.
What’s the missing half?
The causal one. When the grader says your brand barely registers, the reasons usually live on your site: a firewall silently blocking AI crawlers, which Cloudflare enables by default on new domains, content that only exists after JavaScript runs, or pages that never state an answer plainly enough to lift, when almost 40% of AI citations come from a page’s first 100 words.
Those are exactly the things an on-page scan finds and a perception score can’t. Our free scanner, which is ours and labeled as such, runs 21 deterministic checks against your actual pages, including a fetch with an AI-crawler user agent, and links every failure to a fix guide. The two tools are complements, not substitutes.
Should you use the AEO Grader?
Yes, and pair it. Run the grader for your brand baseline, run an on-page scan for the causes, and read the two reports together: perception tells you where you stand, the site scan tells you what to change. If the grader shows weak presence and your site scan shows a blocked crawler, you’ve likely found your answer in ten minutes, for free.
When you’re ready for continuous monitoring instead of snapshots, the paid tier comparison in our Otterly alternatives guide covers who tracks what for how much, with each vendor’s strengths stated as plainly as we’ve stated HubSpot’s here.
See where your site stands. The free scan takes about fifteen seconds and shows every fix.
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