HubSpot AEO Grader or Cockpyt AI: which one should you use for AI visibility?

I co-founded Cockpyt AI, so let me put this before everything else: this comparison sets my tool against a free HubSpot product. You are entitled to expect me to say when the free one is enough. There are several such cases, and I will start with the verdict.

These two products often get pitted against each other in comparisons. That is a category error. HubSpot’s AI Search Grader, also called the AEO Grader, is an instant free snapshot. Cockpyt AI is weekly tracking from 29 EUR excl. VAT. Comparing them is like comparing a blood pressure reading to a heart rate monitor.

HubSpot AEO Grader or Cockpyt AI: which should you use?

Start with the Grader. It is free, it returns a result within minutes, and it gives you something I do not provide: a reading of sentiment and of how AI engines position you against your competitors. There is no reason to pay before doing that.

Move to tracking when your question changes nature. As long as you are asking “where do I stand”, the free tool answers. The moment you ask “is this moving”, “why”, and “what do I fix”, it can no longer help you.

Two tools that ask for different information

Everything follows from this, and it explains the rest.

The Grader asks for four things: company name, geography, products or services, and industry. It then generates the queries it considers relevant to your market and puts them to the three engines. You do not choose the questions, and you never supply your website address.

Cockpyt AI works the other way round. You declare your site and your questions, the ones your prospects actually type. The weekly scan measures your presence on those specific questions, and the monthly audit analyses your site from the AI crawlers’ point of view.

The consequence is clear. The Grader tells you how your brand exists inside the models’ knowledge. A tracking tool tells you whether you come up on your commercial queries. A brand can be well known and absent from the questions that generate revenue.

Why your two scores can diverge completely

Both tools return a score out of 100. They do not measure the same thing, and the gap can be dramatic without either being wrong.

The HubSpot score adds five dimensions: sentiment up to 40 points, presence quality up to 20, brand recognition up to 20, exposure or share of voice up to 10, and competitive position up to 10. More than half the total covers how people talk about you.

The Cockpyt Score rests on three elements: your presence in the answer, your position within that answer, and whether a link to your site appears. Without a citation, it drops to zero.

Take a consulting firm well known in its sector, which AI engines describe glowingly when asked about it directly, but which never surfaces on “best HR consulting firm in Lyon”. High HubSpot score, driven by sentiment and recognition. Cockpyt Score near zero on commercial queries. Both figures are correct.

In my view, this divergence is the single most useful thing to understand for anyone starting in GEO. A good perception score produces no customers if your brand does not appear when someone is looking for a provider. And a high presence score is worth little if AI engines describe you with reservations. Both angles are necessary, and no tool on the market covers both properly.

What the Grader does better than Cockpyt AI

Three things, two of which I do not offer at all.

Sentiment and brand archetype. The report breaks down general sentiment, contextual sentiment by topic, and source-based sentiment. It also assigns a category role, leader, challenger or niche player, and an archetype, innovator, disruptor or traditionalist. That is positioning material my presence measurement does not replace.

The cost. Zero euros, no credit card, against an email address for the full report. For a small business discovering the subject, that is the right first move and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Analysing a competitor in three minutes. HubSpot confirms the tool accepts any brand. You can run three competitors through it and compare, with no account and no commitment. That is faster than configuring a project in a tracking tool.

What weekly tracking adds

Four things, only one of which truly justifies the spend.

Dated history. This is the decisive argument and it is structural. An isolated score compares to nothing. Twelve weeks of readings show whether you are rising, flat or dropping, and let you connect a movement to something you did. The Grader will never do that, by design.

The site audit. Once a month per project, the GEO audit covers crawler blocks, JavaScript-invisible content, protections filtering AI engines, an analysis of 10 of your questions tested under several phrasings, AI-sourced traffic, then a prioritised action plan and a 33-point checklist. The Grader does not look at your site, so a low score does not tell you where to intervene.

The link to your traffic. Clicks arriving from AI engines come through Google Analytics 4 and Search Console, displayed separately. That is what connects a visibility curve to something commercial.

Hallucination detection. A wrong price, a service you no longer offer, a mix-up with a namesake. You will not find these by testing the questions you already thought of.

One transparency point I can claim

My calls go through the official APIs with web search enabled. Models do not always use it and sometimes fall back on their memory, so I flag on every recorded answer whether the engine drew on web search or on its own memory. As far as I know, no other tool publishes that, free or paid.

The limits both tools share

Neither tracks Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Claude or Copilot. Neither measures ChatGPT product carousels. And neither guarantees a citation, which HubSpot states plainly: recommendations are AI-generated, not human-verified, and results are not guaranteed.

A deeper limit applies to the whole market. A study published by SparkToro in January 2026 ran 12 identical prompts almost 3,000 times through 600 volunteers: the odds of getting the same brand list twice came out below 1 in 100. A single score, free or paid, describes one draw. On my side the score aggregates 45 observations per scan on the Solo plan, which stabilises the whole, but the detail of an individual question still has to be read carefully week to week.

The order in which to use them

Week 1. Run the Grader on your brand, then on two or three competitors. Note the score, the sentiment and the category role assigned. Cost: zero.

Week 2. If your presence and share-of-voice scores are low, the problem is editorial. Publish, earn citations on third-party sources, fix your pages. No subscription will do that for you.

Weeks 6 to 8. Run the Grader again. If the number moved in the right direction and that satisfies you, stay on the free tool with a quarterly check. HubSpot itself recommends monthly tracking and a quarterly deep audit.

The moment to switch comes when you have to report to a client or a management team, when you track more than one brand, or when you want to know which specific queries your competitors are winning.

In my view, half the people who subscribe to a tracking tool do it too early. They buy a thermometer before changing anything about their diet. If your brand appears nowhere, you do not have a measurement problem, and paying 29 EUR a month to watch a flat line for six months helps nobody.

Frequently asked questions

Do the Grader and Cockpyt AI query the same models?

The same families, not the same versions. HubSpot documents GPT-5.2, Perplexity’s Sonar model and Gemini 2.0 Flash, a lightweight version. Cockpyt AI queries the conversational versions through the official APIs. Your two results are therefore not directly comparable.

Can you use both in parallel?

Yes, and it is the most sensible combination: the Grader once a quarter for sentiment and positioning, weekly tracking for presence on your commercial queries. The Grader costs nothing, there is no reason to skip it.

Why is my HubSpot score good when I appear on no queries?

Because 40 points out of 100 come from sentiment and 20 from recognition. A high score can reflect a brand that is well described but rarely recommended. Share of voice and competitive position, which measure your actual presence against competitors, total only 20 points.

Is the Grader suitable for a consultant tracking several clients?

For a first client diagnostic, yes, and it works very well in a meeting. For monthly reporting, no: there is no history, no structured export and no notion of a project.

Do you need a HubSpot account to use the Grader?

No. The tool is accessible without a subscription. The detailed report simply requires filling in a form with your email address.

How long before either score moves?

Allow 3 to 8 weeks after your fixes, whichever tool you use. Models take time to absorb new content or citations earned elsewhere. A gap observed within 48 hours reflects answer variability, not a result.

Do these two tools track AI Overviews?

Neither does. Google’s generative surfaces inside search results are distinct from conversational apps, and neither tool covers them today.

Sources

• HubSpot, AI Search Grader page, score dimensions, models queried and FAQ, accessed 23 August 2026 — hubspot.fr/ai-search-grader
• Rand Fishkin and Patrick O’Donnell, New Research: AIs are Highly Inconsistent When Recommending Brands or Products, SparkToro, January 2026 — sparktoro.com
• Berk Atıl et al., Non-Determinism of “Deterministic” LLM System Settings in Hosted Environments, Association for Computational Linguistics, December 2025 — aclanthology.org/2025.eval4nlp-1.12
• Cockpyt AI, pricing and features pages, accessed 23 August 2026 — cockpyt.ai/en/pricing