AEO Citation Tracking
Friday, July 24, 2026
What it is
HubSpot rebuilt the AEO Citations table into a full-screen view with two new columns, Content Type and Brand Mentioned, plus search, so you can see which sources are citing you and in what context.
Why it matters
The old table was hard to find, thin on context, and impossible to filter. The redesign turns citation data into something you can actually read and act on.
The Take
Chris Carolan
We're following all these recommendations for a world that may not exist.
The table itself is a real win. The old AEO Citations view was buried, contextless, and unfilterable; the full-screen redesign with Content Type and Brand Mentioned columns and search finally makes citation data legible. If you are running AEO, go look at it.
The premise underneath it is the argument. On the show this turned into the whole episode: is anyone actually opening an LLM and typing a branded best-of prompt? Chris moved his own portal's score from 0 to 0.11 percent and its brand sentiment from 0 to 80 percent in real time, just by pasting prompts into the tool that then measures the citations those prompts generate. That is the vanity-metric loop in miniature. Track it as a diagnostic if you want, but do not let the score become the goal. The work that actually earns citations is the same work it always was: make genuinely good content and be a good human. Optimizing for a world of prompts nobody runs is how you end up with no time left for that.
Watch Us Discuss This
The full segment from the show, us working through this update start to finish.
FAQ
Does this touch my portal?
Only if you are on Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise and using HubSpot's AEO tooling. It is a redesign of the existing AEO Citations table, not a new product.
What should I actually do?
Open the redesigned table and use the new Content Type and Brand Mentioned columns to see who is citing you and how. Treat the citation score as a diagnostic signal, not a target to game.
Is AEO just SEO?
On the show the case was made that it is close: you are targeting topics instead of keywords. The tooling is new; the discipline of making genuinely useful content is not.
Produced by Value-First Media