Key takeaways
- Both tools track exactly the same engines: ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Coverage settles nothing here.
- HubSpot bills one instance per brand at 49 EUR excl. VAT. Three brands cost 147 EUR a month, against 79 EUR at Cockpyt AI for three projects.
- HubSpot AEO has been in beta since its April 2026 launch and says so on its own product page. Cockpyt AI is out of beta.
- If your team already works inside Marketing Hub, HubSpot’s measure-to-action loop outweighs everything else.
HubSpot launched its AEO module in April 2026, at 49 EUR excl. VAT per month, covering ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Those are the same three engines I track at Cockpyt AI, from 29 EUR excl. VAT. The comparison is therefore direct, and I am going to make it honestly.
I co-founded Cockpyt AI. You are reading a comparison written by an interested party, and you are entitled to expect it to name the cases where HubSpot wins. There are several, and one of them outweighs every other argument for a good share of readers.
What separates these two tools is neither coverage nor the feature list. It is how many brands you track, and where your team already works.
Does ChatGPT recommend your brand?
Measure your presence and find out which brands get cited instead of you. No credit card.
HubSpot AEO or Cockpyt AI: which one should you choose in 2026?
Choose HubSpot AEO if your marketing team already works inside Marketing Hub, if you track a single brand, and if sentiment analysis belongs in your reporting. The loop between measurement and content creation happens without switching applications, and no specialised tool offers that.
Choose Cockpyt AI if you track two brands or more, if you want a monthly audit deliverable rather than a dashboard, or if European hosting of your data matters to you or your clients.
| Criterion | HubSpot AEO | Cockpyt AI |
|---|---|---|
| Engines tracked | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity |
| Product status | Beta | Out of beta |
| Entry price excl. VAT | 49 EUR/month | 29 EUR/month annual, 39 EUR monthly |
| Questions or prompts | 25 included, unlimited top-ups | 15, 45 or 75 depending on plan |
| Multiple brands | One instance at 49 EUR per brand | 1, 3 or 5 projects depending on plan |
| Sentiment analysis | Yes, scale from -100 to +100 | No |
| Technical audit and action plan | Prioritised recommendations in-app | Monthly GEO audit delivered, 33-point checklist |
| Traffic from AI engines | Not documented | Via Google Analytics 4 and Search Console |
| Hallucination detection | Not documented | Yes |
| Origin of the measured answer | Not documented | Web search or model memory, flagged on every answer |
| Hosting | United States | Europe, GDPR |
| Free trial | 28 days, 25 prompts, no card | 14 days, 5 questions, no card |
What HubSpot AEO does better than Cockpyt AI
Four gaps, one of which settles the decision outright for part of this audience.
The closed loop between measurement and action
HubSpot does not sell a dashboard, it sells a path. A recommendation coming out of the measurement leads to writing the article, updating the page or publishing the post, in the same interface. For a team already settled inside Marketing Hub, that reduction in friction is worth more than any measurement subtlety. I have no equivalent and I will not have one.
Recommendations also draw on the company’s CRM data, which makes them more contextual than those of a tool that only knows your website.
Sentiment analysis
HubSpot scores the tone of mentions on a scale from -100 to +100. Knowing you are cited does not tell you how you are described, and that nuance matters when an AI mentions you with a reservation. This module is missing on my side.
A far more generous free trial
28 days and 25 prompts with no credit card, against my 14 days and 5 questions. Their window lets you see several measurement cycles on a realistic scope. Mine lets you test the product, not build a conviction. That gap is one I take badly.
Vendor solidity
Behind HubSpot AEO sits the XFunnel acquisition and a listed company. When you need a tool signed off by a management team, that argument carries weight, and I cannot offset it with five Trustpilot reviews.
The real cost from two brands onwards
This is the point the entire search landscape has missed, and it is written plainly in HubSpot’s own FAQ: tracking several brands means several instances, at 49 EUR per month each.
| Brands tracked | HubSpot AEO | Cockpyt AI (annual) | Monthly gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 49 EUR | 29 EUR (Solo) | 20 EUR |
| 2 | 98 EUR | 79 EUR (Consultant) | 19 EUR |
| 3 | 147 EUR | 79 EUR (Consultant) | 68 EUR |
| 5 | 245 EUR | 139 EUR (Agency) | 106 EUR |
On one brand, the gap stays modest and can be argued against the feature set. At three brands, you pay nearly double. At five, the annual gap passes 1,200 EUR excl. VAT.
A consultant tracking three clients and an agency tracking five are therefore not comparing the figures printed on the product pages. In my view, this is the only calculation that really counts in this comparison, and it appears in none of the published reviews of HubSpot AEO.
Two products, two levels of maturity
HubSpot AEO carries a beta badge on its own product page, and the module appears as “AEO (beta)” in the site navigation. The launch dates from April 2026. Cockpyt AI is out of beta.
This deserves qualifying in both directions. A beta from a vendor this size is still more stable than the finished product of many players, and the content execution feature is due to roll out later in 2026 according to published tests. You are buying a trajectory as much as a product.
What it means in practice: the scope may change, and so may the pricing. A no-commitment subscription at 49 EUR limits that risk, and it is a sensible move on HubSpot’s part.
What each tool documents about its method
HubSpot publishes neither its measurement frequency nor the number of queries per prompt. I do not hold that against them specifically, since most vendors in this market do the same. But the information is missing if you want to judge how stable the displayed figures are.
On my side, I measure once a week, with one query per question and per engine, plus on-demand scans. That is less than tools which repeat each prompt dozens of times a day, and I say so because it determines how the data should be read: the overall score reads as a trend across several weeks, and the detail of a single question should not be over-interpreted from one scan to the next.
API measurement and web search: clearing up the confusion
HubSpot features a customer testimonial on its product page that dismisses API data relying purely on model training data, in favour of data grounded in real web searches.
The argument rests on a confusion worth clearing up. Querying an API without web search enabled does amount to querying the model’s memory. That is not the case when web search is enabled, which is what I do. 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 on the market surfaces that, and it changes how a result should be read.
What are the published numbers worth, on both sides?
HubSpot promotes an 1,850 % increase in its AI-sourced leads and a traffic rise among its Marketing Hub customers. Those figures come from internal case studies covering HubSpot’s own strategy applied to HubSpot, with no stated scope and no third-party audit.
That is not an accusation. It is how every vendor communicates, myself included, and I publish no third-party audited data either. The useful rule: treat any performance figure published by a vendor about its own product as a direction of travel, never as a measurement.
What I can put forward falls under the same regime and I present it as such: among the sites I analyse, more than 60 % receive citations whose source is not their own website. Internal data, not audited.
On what is actually established, by contrast, 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. Meaning that any visibility score produced by any tool, mine and HubSpot’s alike, rests on an unstable phenomenon that has to be read as a trend.
What happens after the measurement
Two philosophies serving two audiences.
HubSpot converts data into prioritised recommendations inside the platform: create a page, fix a technical error, publish a video, reach out to third-party sites. Each suggestion is actionable where it appears, in the tool where your content already gets produced.
Cockpyt AI delivers a complete GEO audit once a month per project, on all three paid plans. It combines a technical audit of your site from the AI point of view, an analysis of 10 of your questions tested under several phrasings, an analysis of your AI-sourced traffic, a prioritised action plan and a 33-point checklist, exportable.
The difference is the format of the output. HubSpot produces actions inside a tool. I produce a document you can hand over, bill for, or have someone else execute. For a consultant who has to justify their work to a client, those are not the same thing.
In my view, this is the second real criterion in this comparison, after the number of brands. A dashboard serves the person who executes themselves. A deliverable serves the person who has to convince someone else to execute. Work out which one you are before comparing features.
Which tool for which profile?
Marketing team on Marketing Hub. HubSpot AEO, without hesitation. Paying for an external tool when the measure-to-action loop already exists in your environment makes no sense.
Single brand with a reputation stake. HubSpot AEO. Graded sentiment analysis is what you are looking for, and I do not offer it.
Consultant with two or three clients. Cockpyt AI on the Consultant plan, at 79 EUR excl. VAT for 3 projects and 45 questions, against 147 EUR at HubSpot for the same scope.
Multi-client agency. Cockpyt AI on the Agency plan, with the monthly per-project audit to fold into your client deliverables.
Small business or solopreneur outside the HubSpot ecosystem. Cockpyt AI. The 29 EUR entry ticket and the audit with an action plan cover the need without taking on an entire platform.
Neither tool guarantees a citation in an AI answer. No vendor can.
Frequently asked questions
Do you need to be a HubSpot customer to use HubSpot AEO?
No. HubSpot states that its CMS is not required and that the tool tracks your brand whoever hosts your site. The AEO subscription can be taken without a Marketing Hub subscription. Recommendations gain precision if you have the CRM, without that being a condition.
What is the difference between HubSpot AEO and the HubSpot AEO Grader?
The Grader is a free, one-off diagnostic that returns a score within minutes in exchange for an email address. HubSpot AEO is the continuous tracking platform at 49 EUR excl. VAT per month. The first answers where you stand today, the second answers how it evolves.
Where is each tool’s data hosted?
HubSpot is a US company and its processing falls under its own contractual framework, to be checked against your internal policy. Cockpyt AI processes your data in line with GDPR with European hosting. For some sectors and for public-sector clients, this criterion rules out an option before any feature discussion.
Can you add prompts beyond the plan?
Yes on both sides. HubSpot advertises unlimited prompt top-ups. Cockpyt AI sells packs of 15 questions at 5 EUR excl. VAT, with an extra on-demand scan, freely distributed across your projects.
Do either of them track Google AI Overviews?
Neither does. Both stop at ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Since AI Overviews rolled out in France, that is a shared limitation worth keeping in mind if your business leans heavily on Google traffic.
Can you migrate between tools and keep your history?
No, and that holds for any pair of tools. Scores are not comparable across two different methodologies. Export your data before cancelling, keep it as an archive, and start from zero while keeping the same tracked questions so the scope stays constant.
How many competitors can you track?
Independent tests of HubSpot AEO report 10 competitors tracked, a figure the product page does not detail. Cockpyt AI includes share-of-voice tracking against competitors on all three paid plans. Check this directly with each vendor, it changes fast.
Sources
- HubSpot, AEO product page, pricing, scope and FAQ, accessed 21 August 2026 — hubspot.fr/products/aeo
- 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
- Salesdorado, independent test of the HubSpot AEO Grader, July 2026 — salesdorado.com
- Cockpyt AI, pricing and features pages, accessed 21 August 2026 — cockpyt.ai/en/pricing
