HubSpot AEO is a low-cost beta tracker on three engines, and Scrunch is a wider monitoring platform that also works on the site layer AI agents read. Scrunch suits teams that need more engines and more tracking dimensions, and HubSpot AEO suits teams that want a cheap starting point, especially ones already on Marketing Hub. DeepSmith is a strong alternative for teams that want tracking and publish-ready article production on one self-serve plan, published straight to their CMS.
If you are weighing Scrunch vs HubSpot AEO, the decision mostly comes down to how much tracking depth you need and what you want to happen after the data comes in. HubSpot AEO starts at $50 a month and runs on three engines. Scrunch starts at $250 a month and tracks position, query fan-out, shopping results and AI crawler visits. DeepSmith sits next to both as a platform that tracks AI answers and also produces the articles that close the gaps.
Scrunch vs HubSpot AEO: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want AI visibility tracking and publish-ready articles on one self-serve plan from $99 a month, with finished pieces published to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity, Contentful or your own webhook.
- Choose Scrunch if you need four engines on the entry plan ($250 a month for 125 prompts), position and query fan-out data, or work on how AI agents read your site.
- Choose HubSpot AEO if you want a $50 a month starting point on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, or you already pay for Marketing Hub and want drafts inside it.
Comparison table
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Scrunch | HubSpot AEO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | $250/mo (Core) | $50/mo |
| Annual price (per month) | $80/mo | Not listed | $45/mo |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | 125 | 25 |
| Engines at entry tier | 1 (ChatGPT) | 4 | 3 |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | 9 (Enterprise) | 3 |
| Free trial | 7 days | 7 days, card required | 28 days, no card |
| Citation tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Query fan-out | - | Yes, limited on Core | Not listed |
| AI crawler analytics | - | Yes | Not listed |
| Content generation | Yes | Partial | Partial, Marketing Hub only |
| CMS publishing | Yes | Not listed | Partial, HubSpot blog only |
| API | Yes, read-only | Yes, Query API Enterprise only | Partial, beta |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Yes | Yes, platform level |
| Review rating | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.6/5 on G2 | 4.4/5 on G2 |
Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
Scrunch
Scrunch is an AI search visibility platform founded in 2023 and acquired by Sitecore in 2026. It tracks prompts across up to nine AI platforms and reports brand presence, position, sentiment, citations and competitor share. Past monitoring, it offers Agent Traffic analytics, site audits, and an Agent Experience Platform (AXP) that serves lean page versions to AI agents at the edge. It is built for mid-market and enterprise marketing, SEO and web teams, plus agencies. A Profound vs Scrunch comparison shows how it stacks up against another enterprise-focused tracker.
Core costs $250 a month and includes 125 prompts, 5,000 responses a month, five seats and one brand workspace on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot. Enterprise is quote-based and adds Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Google AI Mode and Grok, along with AXP, the query APIs, Looker Studio and SAML SSO. Core is limited to one country, one persona and one language, and Scrunch does not publish annual prices. Its content generation line is also unclear, since the pricing grid lists basic content generation on Core while Scrunch's own comparison page says it does not offer AI-generated content. For a closer look at the vendor alone, see our full Scrunch review.
As of September 30, 2026, G2 shows 4.6/5 from 73 reviews. Reviewers praise ease of use and actionable recommendations, and they report gaps in niche-topic coverage and engines gated to higher tiers.
HubSpot AEO
HubSpot AEO is HubSpot's answer engine optimization tool, launched in April 2026 and still labelled beta. It builds on HubSpot's December 2025 acquisition of XFunnel. It runs 25 tracked prompts daily on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity and reports visibility, sentiment, share of voice and citations against named competitors. It is aimed at marketers without deep AEO experience and at companies already on Marketing Hub, and no HubSpot CMS or other HubSpot subscription is needed for the standalone plan.
The standalone plan is $50 a month, or $45 a month billed annually, with 2,500 answers a month. Extra capacity costs $20 a month for 10 more prompts. It is also included in Marketing Hub Professional (25 prompts) and Enterprise (50 prompts). Blog drafting from recommendations and CRM-based prompt suggestions need Marketing Hub, and the standalone plan covers one brand and one domain.
As of September 30, 2026, G2 shows 4.4/5 from 145 reviews. Reviewers describe it as easy to set up and use. The most common complaints are the 25-prompt cap, no Claude tracking, and recommendations that read as generic. If your shortlist has other trackers, the Profound vs HubSpot AEO comparison covers the enterprise end. A Peec AI vs HubSpot AEO page covers a lower-priced rival.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and publishes
Scrunch and HubSpot AEO both do the measuring well enough to be on a shortlist, and the question for many teams is what happens next. Scrunch describes no CMS connector, and its own materials are inconsistent about whether it writes articles at all. HubSpot AEO can turn a recommendation into a blog draft, but only for Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise subscribers, which start at $890 a month ($800 billed annually) plus a $3,000 one-time onboarding fee. Those drafts open in the HubSpot blog editor, and a blog hosted somewhere else means copying and pasting. Our DeepSmith vs Scrunch page covers that pairing in full.
DeepSmith keeps both jobs in one platform. The AEO module tracks mention rate, citation rate, share of voice and sentiment across the engines on your plan, shows which of your pages AI actually cites, and shows which competitor pages win the citations you want. Opportunity Agents read that data and return content ideas, each carrying the data point that justifies it. Content Studio then moves an idea through New Ideas and Planned Content to the Writer, which produces a finished article that is researched, internally and externally linked, and delivered with a cover image and publish-ready metadata. Autowrite can do this on a set date with nobody in the app. Deep IQ stores your company, product, persona and voice context once, so every article is grounded in it.
Finished articles land in Produced Content, where you can review, edit and publish to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or send them to your own webhook. The API is read-only and the MCP server, with 23 read-only tools, connects assistants such as Claude and Cursor to your workspace data.
Pricing is public. Pro is $99 a month ($80 billed annually) with 20 articles, 50 tracked prompts and 5 seats. Grow is $199 a month with 40 articles and 100 prompts, and Scale is $399 a month with 90 articles and 200 prompts. Enterprise is custom and covers all ten engines. There is a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract, and DeepSmith is rated 4.8/5 on G2.
Engine coverage
Scrunch wins on engine coverage. Its Core plan tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot, and Enterprise reaches nine platforms by adding Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Google AI Mode and Grok. HubSpot AEO tracks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity on every plan, and its own pages do not list Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Copilot, Claude, Grok, Meta AI or DeepSeek. G2 reviewers have asked for Claude in particular.
The Scrunch advantage has a limit. Five of its nine engines are Enterprise only, so a Core buyer gets four. HubSpot's three engines are the same at every price, which makes it simple but not expandable. If your buyers mostly ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, the gap between the two matters less than it first looks. If they use Copilot or Google's AI answers, HubSpot AEO leaves that part unmeasured.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith covers ten engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek. Coverage rises with your plan, from ChatGPT on Pro to Perplexity on Grow and Gemini on Scale, and Enterprise covers all ten.
Tracking depth and data method
Scrunch wins on depth. Beyond presence and citations it reports where your brand sits in an answer (top, middle or bottom), shows the sub-queries an engine ran, tracks shopping results, and sets a country and language per prompt. The sub-query view is limited on Core and full on Enterprise. If you want background on why that data matters, query fan-out explained walks through how AI engines break one question into several. Scrunch also watches AI bot visits to your site through its Agent Traffic feature, which sorts crawler activity into training, indexing and retrieval, and the idea is covered in more detail in a guide to analyzing server logs for AI crawlers.
HubSpot AEO has a simpler metric set, with a visibility score, sentiment on a -100 to +100 scale, share of voice and citations. Its one clear edge on method is that every tracked prompt runs daily. Scrunch collects a new prompt daily for 14 days and then refreshes about every 72 hours, with on-demand refresh available. HubSpot does not document rank within an answer, fan-out, shopping, ads or crawler analytics.
Neither vendor fully explains its collection method. Scrunch says it uses a mix of browser automation and official platform APIs without saying which applies to which engine. HubSpot does not say how paid AEO collects answers or which model versions it runs, and it calls the first few weeks of data directional.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith reports Mention Rate, Citation Rate, Share of Voice, Sentiment and Visibility Trend, with per-prompt answer history so you can read exactly what each engine said. Discover Prompts builds a starter set from your product, persona and buyer-stage context, so you are not starting from a blank list.
Citation and competitor analysis
Scrunch has the deeper citation view. It lists top cited domains and URLs, splits citations by owner type (your brand, competitors, third parties, social), supports up to three custom citation segments, and shows which of your own pages get cited with a trend per URL. Core benchmarks five competitors and suggests others from the responses it collects. Seeing AI citations versus brand mentions as two separate numbers helps when you read any of these dashboards.
HubSpot AEO covers the core of this work. Its Citations tab reports top domains, top owned citations and an owned-domain citation rate against competitors, split by content type and channel. Competitor visibility and share of voice run on the same prompts. HubSpot does not state a competitor limit.
In a HubSpot AEO vs Scrunch matchup on citations, Scrunch has more to offer, and HubSpot has enough for a first look at where competitors are cited and you are not.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith's Pages view shows which of your pages AI engines cite, each page's share of your total citations, and the prompts driving them. Its competitor view shows who wins citations for your prompts, on which exact pages, and how each competitor performs by platform.
Pricing and value
HubSpot AEO wins on entry price. It costs $50 a month against $250 for Scrunch Core, and the trial is longer and needs no card (28 days against 7 days with a card required, which converts to paid unless you cancel). Per prompt, the two work out the same at the entry tier: $250 for 125 prompts and $50 for 25 prompts are both $2 a prompt, and HubSpot's add-on packs cost $2 a prompt as well. Scrunch includes a fourth engine and 5,000 responses a month in that price, while HubSpot includes 2,500 answers.
The picture changes once you want more than tracking. According to HubSpot's Marketing Hub pricing page, the plans that include blog generation and CRM-based prompts start at $890 a month, and each generated post uses 1,000 HubSpot Credits against 3,000 included credits a month on Professional. Scrunch's advanced features, including AXP, the query APIs and Looker Studio, sit on a quote-based Enterprise plan, and Scrunch's pricing page shows no annual rates. Buyers who find Core's price high can browse these Scrunch alternatives. In this Scrunch vs HubSpot AEO review, neither vendor lets you price a full tracking-to-content workflow from public numbers alone.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith publishes every self-serve price. Pro at $99 a month includes 20 articles a month alongside tracking, so a team that wants both does not buy two products. Annual billing brings Pro to $80 a month, and the 7-day trial lets you try real data and real drafts before you pay.
From insight to action
HubSpot AEO wins at turning a recommendation into a draft, and Scrunch wins at changing the pages AI agents read. HubSpot's recommendations carry a content type, channel, priority, projected citation lift, status and assignee, and a site audit checks structured data, canonical tags and crawlability. On Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise, a recommendation can become a researched blog draft in your brand voice, opened in the HubSpot blog editor.
Scrunch pairs its Signals and recommendations with Content Gaps, which turns a missing-content finding into a brief, and with a page optimizer that recommends and produces optimized versions of existing pages. On Enterprise, AXP can serve those versions to AI agents at the edge. Scrunch describes no CMS publishing, and the scope of its content generation is not settled in its own materials. For other options that connect the two halves, a roundup of tools that both track and write for AI search is a good place to compare.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith runs the whole loop in one workspace. Tracking finds the prompts where you are missing, Opportunity Agents turn them into ideas with the evidence attached, the Writer produces a publish-ready article grounded in Deep IQ, and Produced Content publishes it to your CMS. Autowrite schedules the writing so the pipeline keeps moving in a busy week, and Apps Library turns a finished article into LinkedIn, X, newsletter and other channel versions.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith fits marketing teams that want to see where they show up in AI answers and also produce the articles that close the gaps, without stitching a tracker to a writing tool and a publishing step. It works for one brand or several workspaces, from the $99 Pro plan up.
- Scrunch fits a team choosing between Scrunch or HubSpot AEO because it needs four or more engines, position and fan-out data, and AI crawler analytics, or a web team that wants to work on how AI agents read the site. Agencies can look at Agency Core at $500 a month, though its quotas are not published.
- HubSpot AEO fits a team that wants a low-cost starting point on three engines with a 28-day no-card trial, or a Marketing Hub customer who wants AEO and blog drafting inside the tools it already uses. Keep in mind the beta label and the 25-prompt starting cap.
If you want to see tracking and article production working from the same data, start a free trial of DeepSmith at app.deepsmith.ai.
