
Customers and prospects are ditching traditional search in favour of researching with AI for quick, personalised answers, according to marketing specialist HubSpot.
In fact, it says, usage of tools like ChatGPT to answer questions is up 37%, while search engines are down 11%.
For marketers who have been focused on getting their brands discovered with SEO, now is the time to master a new craft: Language Model Optimisation (LMO).
A HubSpot spokesperson said: “We’ve always given marketers the tools they need to connect with their customers and drive growth. We did it with our Website Grader that helped millions of marketers optimise for search engines. And we’re doing it today with the launch of AI Search Grader, the first free tool that helps brands understand how they show up in Large Language Models (LLM) and AI search.”
Nicholas Holland, VP of product and GM of Marketing Hub at HubSpot, said: “What marketers have been doing for years to attract customers won’t be as effective in the future. People just aren’t using traditional search like they used to.
“As the tides are turning toward AI search, we want to help marketers stand out and get discovered in this new environment. That’s exactly what AI Search Grader will give marketers – a new, free way to connect with their customers in the AI era.”
Today, marketers are manually testing how their brands are showing up in AI search: visiting different experiences, crafting specialised prompts, aggregating responses, and synthesising results – all just to get a fraction of the information they need. And there’s little guidance to help them act on what they find.
HubSpot’s AI Search Grader eliminates the need for AI expertise and takes the guesswork out of how a brand is showing up in AI search. It does prompt engineering for marketers and contextualizes their brand’s performance to make LMO simple.
AI Search Grader includes:
- Overall grade gives marketers and business owners an at-a-glance view of how their brand is performing across all AI search engines we monitor.
- Insights into brand visibility:
- First-of-its-kind brand sentiment score looks at language used in AI responses to help marketers understand how their brand is being discussed and perceived.
- Share of Voice (SOV) score measures brand visibility compared to competitors in the same category.
- Personalized analysis enables marketers to learn what they’re doing well and easily spot where they need to improve to increase their brand awareness and sentiment.