HubSpot AEO is a $50 per month self-serve tracker for three AI engines, with a 28-day no-card trial. BrightEdge is a sales-led enterprise SEO platform with AI visibility modules, five engines and no published price. Teams that want a low-cost start suit HubSpot AEO, and large SEO teams suit BrightEdge. DeepSmith is a strong alternative for teams that want tracking and finished, published articles on one self-serve plan from $99 per month.
The choice between HubSpot AEO vs BrightEdge is mostly a choice between two ways of buying. HubSpot AEO is a narrow tracker you can start on your own today, and BrightEdge is a broad SEO platform that added AI visibility and is bought through sales. Whether AI visibility justifies a full enterprise platform depends on whether you already need the rest of it. DeepSmith covers a third case, where you track AI answers and also produce the articles that respond to them.
HubSpot AEO vs BrightEdge: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want AI visibility tracking and finished, on-brand articles published to your CMS from one self-serve plan, starting at $99 per month with a 7-day free trial.
- Choose HubSpot AEO if you want a low published price to start tracking ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, at $50 per month with a 28-day trial that needs no credit card.
- Choose BrightEdge if you already run enterprise SEO and want AI visibility inside the same contracted platform, with five engines, an API, an MCP server and SSO.
| Criterion | DeepSmith | HubSpot AEO | BrightEdge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $99/mo ($80/mo annual) | $50/mo ($45/mo annual) | Not published |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | 25 | Not published |
| Engines at entry tier | 1 (ChatGPT) | 3 | Not published |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | 3 | 5 |
| Free trial | 7 days | 28 days, no card | None |
| Answer history | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| Content generation | Yes | Partial (Marketing Hub only) | Partial |
| CMS publishing | Yes | Partial (HubSpot blog only) | Partial (metadata only) |
| Brand-context grounding | Yes | Yes (Marketing Hub only) | Not listed |
| API | Yes (read-only) | Partial (beta, read-only) | Yes |
| MCP server | Yes (read-only) | Partial (connector) | Yes |
| Security certifications | SOC 2, GDPR, ISO | SOC 2 Type II (HubSpot platform) | ISO 27001, SOC 2 |
| G2 rating | 4.8/5 | 4.4/5 | 4.4/5 |
Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
HubSpot AEO
HubSpot AEO is HubSpot's answer engine optimization tool, launched in April 2026 after HubSpot completed its acquisition of XFunnel in December 2025. It is labelled beta. It runs your tracked prompts every day on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity and reports visibility, sentiment, share of voice and citations against named competitors. It then turns the patterns into prioritized recommendations and a site audit.
It is built for marketers who want an inexpensive, self-serve start, and for existing Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise customers, who get it included. The standalone plan is $50 per month, or $45 per month billed annually, with 25 prompts and 2,500 answers a month. Extra capacity costs $20 per month for each 10 prompts, and no other HubSpot subscription is required.
The standout is the low published price with a trial that needs no card. The real limits are three engines, a small base prompt allowance and one owned domain per setup. Blog drafting from a recommendation and CRM-based prompt suggestions need Marketing Hub, which HubSpot lists at $800 per month billed annually for Professional, plus a $3,000 one-time onboarding.
On G2, HubSpot AEO has 4.4/5 from 145 reviews as of September 2026. Reviewers describe it as easy to set up and like the clear visibility and competitor view, and some find the recommendations generic.
BrightEdge
BrightEdge was founded in 2007 and is based in San Mateo. It sells an enterprise SEO platform with keyword research, share of voice, recommendations, content audits and reporting. Its AI layer starts with AI Catalyst, which tracks mentions, citations and sentiment across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Gemini, with persona testing and briefs built from citation gaps. AI Hyper Cube adds research on AI conversations weighted by search demand, AI Agent Insights reports visits from AI crawlers, and Agent Edge serves agents lightweight pages at the CDN.
It is built for large in-house SEO, content and web teams, and the agencies that serve them. The standout is that classic SEO and AI visibility sit on the same data, with a REST API, a read-only MCP server and SSO around it.
The real limitation is the buying process. BrightEdge publishes no prices, plans or trial, and its pricing page is a contact form and a phone number. Whether the AI modules are included or sold separately is not stated, and neither is how often answers are sampled. Content output stops at briefs, draft assistance, titles and descriptions.
On G2, BrightEdge has 4.4/5 from 882 reviews, and on Capterra it has 4.1/5 from 45, as of September 2026. Reviewers praise the depth of keyword data and the reporting, and complain about high or opaque pricing and a steep learning curve.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and writes
Both tools do the first half of the job well enough, which is finding out where you show up in AI answers. The gap is what happens next. HubSpot AEO can turn a recommendation into a blog draft, but only inside Marketing Hub, and the post publishes to a HubSpot blog while external blogs need copy and paste. BrightEdge gets as far as briefs, draft assistance and metadata pushed to your CMS. Neither record shows a finished article that is researched, linked, imaged and published for you.
DeepSmith closes that gap in one platform. AEO tracks how AI engines answer the questions you define, with mention rate, citation rate, share of voice, the pages that earn citations and the competitor pages that win them. Opportunity Agents read that data and return content ideas, each with the data point that justifies it. The Writer turns a planned idea into a finished article that is researched, internally and externally linked, with a cover image and publish-ready metadata. Autowrite can do that on a schedule with no one in the app.
Deep IQ stores your product, persona, voice and content type once, so every article is grounded in your brand context instead of a fresh brief. From Produced Content you publish straight to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or to your own webhooks. The Apps Library then turns the same article into versions for LinkedIn, X, Medium, Substack, email and other channels, and Multi-Workspace lets you run several brands or clients from one account.
Plans start at $99 per month for Pro, with 20 articles, 50 tracked prompts, 5 seats and ChatGPT tracking. Grow is $199 and adds Perplexity with 40 articles and 100 prompts, Scale is $399 and adds Gemini with 90 articles and 200 prompts, and Enterprise is custom and covers all ten engines. Annual billing brings those to $80, $160 and $299 per month. There is a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract. DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified and rated 4.8/5 on G2.
Engine coverage
In BrightEdge vs HubSpot AEO on engine coverage, BrightEdge wins, with five engines against three. BrightEdge tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Gemini, so it is the only one of the pair that sees Google's own AI surfaces. HubSpot AEO tracks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity on every plan, and G2 reviewers ask for Claude and broader coverage. BrightEdge does not publish which engines come with which plan, so the five engines are what the product covers, not a promise about any one contract.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith tracks ten engines, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek. Coverage rises by plan, with ChatGPT on Pro, Perplexity on Grow, Gemini on Scale and all ten on Enterprise.
Pricing and value
HubSpot AEO wins on pricing, because it is the only one of the two with a price you can read. The standalone plan is $50 per month with 25 prompts, and the 28-day trial needs no card. BrightEdge publishes nothing, so a figure only appears after a sales conversation and the contract terms are unknown until then.
The price comparison has a catch for HubSpot AEO. The $50 plan tracks and recommends, but drafting blog posts from those recommendations needs Marketing Hub, which is a different order of spend. Extra prompts cost $20 per month for each 10, so a team tracking 100 prompts pays for the base plan plus 75 more in packs.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith publishes its prices and includes the writing in them. Pro at $99 per month covers 50 tracked prompts and 20 articles, and Grow at $199 doubles both. A free trial lets you see real data and real drafts before you pay.
Tracking depth and answer history
Whether you pick HubSpot AEO or BrightEdge, the core measures are close to a tie, with HubSpot AEO ahead on answer history and BrightEdge ahead on research. Both track mentions, citations, share of voice, sentiment and competitors on the same prompts, and both show which of your own pages earn citations. HubSpot AEO stores the exact response each engine returned and trends it over time, and scores sentiment from -100 to +100. BrightEdge reports Mentions Presence and Citations Presence per engine, rates each response Positive, Neutral or Negative with its reasoning, and lets you read the full answer behind a rating, though the records do not confirm how long it keeps answer text.
BrightEdge goes further on research. AI Hyper Cube weights AI conversations by real search demand and shows every answer that cites a given URL, and AI Agent Insights reports visits from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini agents. HubSpot AEO documents nothing like either. Neither tool describes tracking where your brand ranks inside an answer.
What DeepSmith does: Every tracked prompt in DeepSmith carries its own mention and citation rate per engine, with the full answer history and the specific pages of yours that were cited. DeepSmith's plans don't include crawler log analytics, and its tracking points at the pages AI actually cites and the competitor pages winning those citations, which is the input the Writer and Opportunity Agents use.
Data access, security and platform
BrightEdge wins on data access and security documentation. It has a REST API, a read-only MCP server with OAuth, GA4, Adobe Analytics, Google Search Console and Looker Studio connectors, SAML SSO, and a trust page listing ISO/IEC 27001, 27701 and 42001 alongside SOC 2. The SOC 2 report type is not stated, and the audit scope was not inspected, so these are vendor statements.
HubSpot AEO is thinner here. It has a beta read-only API for prompts, runs, answer text and citations, and a connector that lets Claude and ChatGPT read AEO data. HubSpot's platform holds SOC 2 Type II, but the report does not name AEO in its scope, and SAML SSO sits at the Marketing Hub Enterprise tier. For a team that must connect AI visibility data to BI tools or pass a procurement review, BrightEdge has the more complete paper trail.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith has a read-only REST API with scoped keys and 120 requests per minute per workspace, an MCP server with 23 read-only tools that works with assistants such as Claude, Cursor and Copilot, and signed webhooks for content status changes. It is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified.
From insight to action
The two split here, with HubSpot AEO stronger at drafting new posts and BrightEdge stronger at improving pages that already exist. HubSpot AEO gives each recommendation a content type, channel, priority and projected citation lift. In Marketing Hub, a recommendation becomes a researched blog draft in your brand voice, which costs 1,000 HubSpot Credits and opens in the HubSpot editor. BrightEdge turns citation gaps into briefs, and its Copilot, Content Advisor and Publishing Agent work on existing pages, pushing title tag, meta title and H1 changes to your CMS. No full article generation is described.
Both stop short of a published article on your own site for the price of the tracker. HubSpot AEO needs a suite purchase to get there, and BrightEdge's output ends at briefs and page edits.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith runs the whole loop in one plan. Tracking finds the gap, Opportunity Agents propose the article with the evidence attached, the Writer produces it in your stored brand voice, and Produced Content publishes it to your CMS. Repurposing then adapts the finished article for each channel, so distribution is a step in the workflow instead of a separate project.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith: you run content as a growth channel and want one platform that tracks AI answers, writes the articles that close the gaps, publishes them and repurposes them, on a published price with a 7-day trial. It also fits agencies running several brands, since each workspace has its own context and plan.
- HubSpot AEO: between the two, it fits a small marketing team, or a team already on Marketing Hub, that wants to start tracking ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity without a sales call, and can live with three engines and a base of 25 prompts.
- BrightEdge: between the two, it fits a large SEO organization that already needs enterprise keyword research, reporting and audits, wants AI visibility on the same data, and is comfortable with a sales-led contract and a longer learning curve.
Start a free DeepSmith trial to track your own prompts and see the articles that respond to them.
