Writesonic and HubSpot AEO both start with a low-cost tracker, but they split on writing. Writesonic puts article writing and CMS publishing inside its own plans, while HubSpot AEO tracks three engines for $50 a month and needs Marketing Hub for content. HubSpot AEO suits a buyer who only wants to measure, and Writesonic suits one who wants measuring and writing from one vendor. DeepSmith tracks and produces on a published price, with a fixed monthly article allowance and scheduled Autowrite.
If you're weighing Writesonic vs HubSpot AEO, the sticker prices look close. HubSpot AEO is $50 a month and Writesonic Starter is $99 a month, and both track prompts daily on three engines. The difference shows up when you want articles as well as numbers, because HubSpot only generates content inside Marketing Hub, which starts at $890 a month. This page lays out what each plan covers and where the bill changes, and it places DeepSmith next to them as a third way to buy tracking and writing together.
Writesonic vs HubSpot AEO: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want tracked prompts and a fixed monthly allowance of publish-ready articles on one published plan ($99, $199 or $399 a month), with Autowrite producing them on schedule and publishing to your CMS.
- Choose Writesonic if you want tracking, an article writer and CMS export in one self-serve plan from $79 a month billed annually, and Google AI Overviews matters to you.
- Choose HubSpot AEO if you only need tracking for now and want the cheapest way in, $50 a month for 25 prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, or you already pay for Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise.
| DeepSmith | Writesonic | HubSpot AEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo | $99/mo | $50/mo (standalone) |
| Annual price | $80/mo | $79/mo | $45/mo |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | 50 | 25 |
| Engines at entry tier | ChatGPT | ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | 10 (Enterprise) | 3 |
| Free trial | 7-day | 7-day, no card | 28-day, no card |
| Articles at entry tier | 20 per month | 15 per month | Not included |
| Content generation | Yes | Yes | Partial, Marketing Hub only |
| CMS publishing | Yes | Yes | Partial, HubSpot blog only |
| Brand-context grounding | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Citation tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| API access | Yes | Yes | Partial, beta read API |
| Security | SOC 2, GDPR, ISO | SOC 2 Type II (claimed) | SOC 2 Type II (platform level) |
| Review rating | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.7/5 on G2 | 4.4/5 on G2 |
Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
Writesonic
Writesonic started in 2021 as an AI writing tool and now sells itself as an AI search growth engine. It tracks prompts daily and reports mentions, citations, share of voice and sentiment. Around that it adds AI crawler analytics, AI ads tracking, an Action Center that ranks fixes, and an Article Writer that Writesonic says produces long-form pieces of 3,000 to 8,000 words with citations, FAQs and images.
Self-serve plans are Starter at $79 a month billed annually (Writesonic's own comparison page gives $99 for Starter month to month), Basic at $199 and Growth at $399, billed annually. Each tracks ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, with 50, 100 or 200 prompts and 15, 25 or 50 articles a month. The standout is how much sits in the same plan: tracking, writing, site audits and WordPress export are all included. The limit is that the full ten-engine set, most of the Action Center, alerts and the Page Tracker are on Enterprise only. Reviews are strong, 4.7/5 on G2 from 2,133 reviews, though most of them describe the older writing product and reviewers there mention credit limits and drafts that need editing.
HubSpot AEO
HubSpot AEO is HubSpot's answer engine optimization tool, launched in April 2026 and still labelled beta. It runs 25 tracked prompts daily on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity and reports visibility, sentiment, share of voice and citations against named competitors, then turns the citation patterns into prioritized recommendations. The standalone plan is $50 a month, or $45 billed annually, with no other HubSpot subscription required and a 28-day free trial.
It's built for marketers who want an easy first step into AEO, and G2 reviewers (4.4/5 from 145 reviews) call it easy to set up with a clear competitor view. The limits are real, though. The base allowance is 25 prompts, extra capacity costs $20 a month per 10 prompts, only three engines are covered, and reviewers ask for Claude. Extra brands can mean another $50 instance. Writing a blog post from a recommendation is documented for Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise only, not the standalone plan.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks, writes and publishes on schedule
Writesonic and HubSpot AEO both start from tracking, and Writesonic also writes. What either leaves open for a marketing lead is the production side on a fixed, published price: how many finished articles you get each month, and whether they get written without anyone opening the app. DeepSmith is built around that loop. It tracks how AI engines answer your prompts, finds the gaps, and the Writer produces a researched, internally and externally linked, brand-grounded article with a cover image and publish-ready metadata.
Autowrite is the part that changes the workload. You configure an article when you plan it, and it writes itself on its scheduled date and lands in Produced Content for review or publishing, straight to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful. Deep IQ stores your product, persona, brand voice and content types once, so each article starts from the same context instead of a new brief.
The measurement side reports mention rate, citation rate and share of voice as separate numbers, with a per-engine breakdown and where you rank against tracked competitors. Pages shows which of your own pages AI actually cites, so you can see which articles are earning citations.
The plans are $99 (Pro), $199 (Grow) and $399 (Scale) a month, or $80, $160 and $299 billed annually. Pro includes 20 articles and 50 tracked prompts, Grow 40 articles and 100 prompts, and Scale 90 articles and 200 prompts. Engines step up by tier, with ChatGPT on Pro, Perplexity added on Grow and Gemini added on Scale, and Enterprise covers all ten. Billing is monthly or annual with no long-term contract, and there is a 7-day free trial. DeepSmith's plans don't include crawler log analytics. For the goal behind it, which is knowing whether AI is picking up your content, tracking reports the pages AI cites and the Writer produces the pages that close the gap. The DeepSmith vs Writesonic page covers those two head to head. A three-way comparison with Profound and Writesonic is also available.
Pricing and what it covers
HubSpot AEO is the cheaper tracker, and Writesonic is the cheaper way to get tracking and writing together. The headline numbers are $45 to $50 a month for HubSpot AEO and $79 to $99 for Writesonic Starter, so for tracking alone HubSpot costs about half as much, and it also gives 25 prompts where Writesonic gives 50.
The comparison changes once you want content. HubSpot's blog generation sits in Marketing Hub Professional at $890 a month ($800 billed annually), plus a one-time $3,000 onboarding fee, or Enterprise from $3,600 a month plus $7,000 onboarding. AEO is included in both, so you don't pay the $50 on top. Each generated post uses 1,000 HubSpot Credits, and Professional includes 3,000 credits a month. Over a year on annual billing, that route is about $9,600 plus the $3,000 onboarding, or $12,600, before extra seats or credits. Writesonic Starter is $948 a year billed annually, and DeepSmith Pro is $960. Marketing Hub covers a lot more than AEO, so it can be a fair purchase if you'd use the rest, but it's the plan you need for content from HubSpot.
Writesonic's limits are different, since several features are gated to Enterprise, and its monthly prices for Basic and Growth aren't shown on its pricing page.
What DeepSmith does: the plans put tracked prompts and a fixed article allowance in one published price. Compared on annual billing, Writesonic's Starter, Basic and Growth are $79, $199 and $399 for 15, 25 and 50 articles, and DeepSmith's Pro, Grow and Scale are $80, $160 and $299 for 20, 40 and 90 articles, with the same 50, 100 and 200 prompts at each step. No other subscription is required. The full tiers are on the DeepSmith pricing page.
Engine coverage
In HubSpot AEO vs Writesonic on engines, Writesonic has a small edge at the entry tier, because it includes Google AI Overviews and HubSpot AEO does not. Both track ChatGPT and Gemini, HubSpot adds Perplexity, and Writesonic adds Google AI Overviews. Neither tracks Claude on a standard plan, and G2 reviewers of HubSpot AEO have asked for it.
Past the entry tier the two diverge. Writesonic names ten engines on Enterprise, including Claude, Google AI Mode, Copilot, Grok, Meta AI and DeepSeek, so the ten-engine set is there if you take a custom plan. HubSpot AEO has three engines on every plan, including Marketing Hub Enterprise, and its pages don't say how answers are collected or which model versions run.
What DeepSmith does: it covers the same ten engines on Enterprise and Custom plans, and the self-serve plans step up with price, from ChatGPT on Pro to Perplexity on Grow and Gemini on Scale. The tracking is set against the prompts you pick, with Discover Prompts suggesting a starter set from your product, persona and buyer-stage context.
Tracking depth and citation analysis
Writesonic goes deeper on what it measures. On top of visibility, share of voice and citations it records query fan-outs, AI crawler analytics on every plan, AI ads tracking and prompt volume estimates drawn from a dataset it says holds 2 billion conversations. Some of the most useful pieces are Enterprise only, such as the Page Tracker, which shows how each of your pages lifts visibility.
HubSpot AEO covers the core well. It reports a visibility score, sentiment on a -100 to +100 scale, share of voice, the exact answer each engine gave, and citations by domain and URL, including a list of your own most-cited pages. It doesn't document crawler analytics, shopping or ad tracking, or fan-outs, though the lack of documentation isn't proof that the features are missing. For a first AEO program the core is often enough.
What DeepSmith does: it reports mention rate, citation rate and share of voice with per-prompt history and full answer text, and it shows which of your pages earn citations and which competitor pages win the ones you don't. Sentiment is tracked as well, and the data is available through a read-only API and an MCP server.
From insight to action
Writesonic is the stronger of the two for turning findings into content, because the writing is in the plan. Its Article Writer is included from Starter at 15 articles a month, with one-click export to WordPress, Sanity, Contentful, Webflow and Ghost, and the Action Center ranks on-page, off-page and technical fixes in a limited form on Growth and fully on Enterprise. Writesonic says the articles are publish-ready, which is a vendor claim, and reviewers there often mention editing generated drafts.
HubSpot AEO gives you the recommendation but not the writing on the standalone plan. Each recommendation shows a suggested title, summary, audience and keywords, with the prompts and citations behind it. In Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise you can generate a blog draft from it in the brand voice, which opens in the HubSpot blog editor. Publishing to a blog outside HubSpot means copy and paste.
What DeepSmith does: the loop closes inside one plan. Opportunity Agents read your AI visibility data and your Content Map and return ideas with the data point that justifies each one, then New Ideas, Planned Content and the Writer turn them into articles. With Autowrite the article is produced on its date with no one in the app, and it can be published to your CMS from Produced Content. It's produced as a finished article rather than a first draft, so the review is for editorial judgment and not for rebuilding the structure.
Support, security and reviews
Whether you pick Writesonic or HubSpot AEO, both vendors sit in a similar place on trust. Writesonic claims SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and HIPAA compliance, though the report itself could not be checked. HubSpot lists SOC 2 Type II at the platform level, though AEO isn't named in that scope, and SAML SSO is at the Enterprise tier of the suite. On reviews, Writesonic's 4.7/5 on G2 comes from a much larger base than HubSpot AEO's 4.4/5 from 145 reviews, but the Writesonic base is mostly the writing product. Writesonic also offers a dedicated AI search strategist on Enterprise.
DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified and rated 4.8/5 on G2, and self-serve plans start with a 7-day trial and no long-term contract.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith: the broadest fit for a marketing lead who wants to know where the brand shows up in AI answers and also wants the articles that close the gaps, produced on schedule at a published price, with brand voice and product context stored once and applied to every piece.
- Writesonic: the better pick of the two if you want tracking and writing under one vendor on a self-serve plan, need Google AI Overviews at the entry tier, or want crawler analytics and ads tracking included from the start.
- HubSpot AEO: the better pick of the two if you only need tracking at the lowest published price, or if your team already runs on Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise and wants the CRM-based prompts and in-editor drafting.
Start a free DeepSmith trial to see tracking and article production on your own prompts.
