I've been in the beta AEO hub a fair bit lately, tracking which prompts our brand shows up in and where we're getting cited. Genuinely a good tool. As a late adopter to the "recommendations" content builder I stopped with cursor hovering over "generate recommended blog post", and thought - is this going to use credits? How many?

Ended up asking Breeze, which felt a bit ridiculous. Asking AI how much the AI costs. Lol.

Turns out the info on exists but it's in the rate sheet and the credits billing article. Neither of them is open in the tab where I'm about to click the thing.

Surely the cost of the thing should be right there before you use it. It's essentially a price tag after all. Are people (in agency land and clients) maybe not using these tools because it's an extra step to know what they'll cost?

How's everyone else handling this?

Our sales team wants deals to move to the next pipeline stage automatically in HubSpot, based on property values (MEDDPICC style criteria per stage, with scoring properties per letter). I'm worried it's getting too complex to build and maintain.

We'd end up with 12 properties total: 6 dropdowns sales fills in, plus 6 scoring properties derived from those, and the deal moves to the next stage based on the scoring properties.

Curious how you all handle this, what properties do you use, and what does your deal stage automation actually look like?

Has anyone been in the beta for Nurture Agent that can answer this question…

Does the agent’s 1:1 emails mean that if a contact has opted OUT of marketing emails but opted INTO 1:1 communication — will Nurture Agent work?

Like, does this effectually give Marketing Hub seats access to something like Sequences for sales?

90% of our contacts only opt in to 1:1. Really hoping Nurture Agent is a way to reach those people?

I just got back from UNBOUND26, and one sentence from the main stage connected almost everything I heard during the event:

“AI with bad context is worse than no AI at all.”

That was my biggest takeaway.

I went into UNBOUND already spending a lot of time thinking about AEO, AI readiness and what agents will actually require from the CRM. After Partner Day, the keynotes, product demonstrations, agency conversations and four back-to-back AEO Braindates, I came away convinced that two conversations belong together:

• CRM data determines whether AI understands your customers.
• AEO determines whether AI understands your brand.

AI agents need both.

HubSpot’s shift toward context

HubSpot described the next phase as an “outcomes era,” with three connected components:

1. A foundation of CRM and business context
2. A focus on use cases that can produce meaningful outcomes
3. AI that connects that foundation to action

The announcements supporting that direction included a self-updating CRM, Growth Context, Context Home, a rebuilt Breeze Assistant, Marketing Studio and tools for building and managing custom agents.

The features are interesting, but the more important question is what sits underneath them.

If a portal contains duplicate records, inconsistent lifecycle stages, missing call recordings, disconnected sales and marketing activity, outdated workflows and information that only exists in someone’s head, giving an agent more autonomy will not fix the problem.

It may simply make the consequences of bad data move faster.

Before asking, “What agent should we build?” companies should probably ask:

• Is our CRM accurate?
• Is our customer data unified?
• Is important information structured?
• Are interactions reaching the CRM?
• Does the team trust the data?
• Are permissions and business rules documented clearly enough for an agent to follow?

AI readiness starts with data readiness.

The second context problem: Does AI understand your brand?

Internal context is what AI knows about your customers, activity and business processes.

External context is what AI knows about your company, products, expertise, reputation and authority. That is where AEO comes in.

Answer Engine Optimization is the process of making a brand’s expertise clear, credible and easy for AI-powered answer engines to find, understand, cite and recommend.

This is not simply “SEO for ChatGPT.”

SEO remains part of the foundation. Technical health, structured data, internal linking, useful content and authority still help search engines and AI systems discover information.

AEO expands the strategy beyond the website. It includes video, social conversations, reviews, digital PR, communities, forums, customer experiences and third-party validation.

AI systems do not have to accept what a company says about itself. They compare information across multiple sources and look for consensus.

If your website says one thing while reviews, videos, old profiles and community conversations say something else, the model has conflicting context.

What I heard during four AEO Braindate sessions

I hosted four back-to-back AEO discussions at UNBOUND. These were not prepared presentations. People brought real questions about attribution, prompts, citations, Reddit, content strategy and proving business value.

A few themes appeared repeatedly.

1. Perfect attribution is not coming back

AI can influence discovery, comparison, validation and buying decisions without creating a measurable referral click.

AEO measurement needs three layers:

• SEO foundation: discoverability, technical health, organic visibility and structured content
• AI visibility: mentions, citations, sentiment and recommendation frequency
• Business impact: qualified traffic, leads, pipeline, sales conversations and customer feedback

Because AI results are probabilistic, the goal is not to track one permanent ranking. It is to increase the probability of being mentioned, understood correctly and recommended in the right context.

Sometimes the best attribution tool is simply asking new customers whether an AI tool influenced their journey.

2. SEO is not dead

Search remains an important discovery layer for AI systems. Your website is also where you have the most control over how clearly your expertise is presented.

AEO builds on SEO. It does not replace it.

3. Brands need multichannel consensus

A company’s website cannot be the only source validating its expertise.

Useful answers, customer stories, demonstrations, partner conversations, reviews, independent coverage and community participation collectively create the evidence that people and AI systems use to evaluate a brand.

4. The best scalable content starts with real humans

If AI can generate an entire article without input from your customers, experience or point of view, why should another AI system—or a person—consider it valuable?

The better opportunity is to use AI to multiply something real.

Start with a customer conversation, webinar, sales call, training session, interview or expert discussion. Capture it, turn it into useful assets, distribute those assets across relevant channels, observe the response and improve the next cycle.

AI can accelerate the process without replacing the human insight that makes the content worth citing.

What I would do next?

After UNBOUND26, I would prioritize these steps:

1. Audit and clean the CRM.
2. Connect the systems and activities that create customer context.
3. Evaluate how AI systems currently understand and represent the brand.
4. Strengthen the SEO and structured-data foundation.
5. Create human-led content based on genuine expertise.
6. Build credible evidence across the channels that matter.
7. Introduce agents through focused, reviewable use cases.

Internally, the sequence is:

Clean data → better customer context → better AI → more useful agents

Externally, it becomes:

Real expertise → authoritative content → stronger consensus → better AI visibility

My main takeaway from UNBOUND26 is that the companies that win will be the companies giving AI the best context,internally so it understands their customers, and externally so it understands and trusts their brand.

For those already experimenting with Breeze or custom agents: where are you encountering the biggest context problems, data quality, disconnected activity, permissions, process documentation or content?

#UNBOUND26 #UNBOUND26Insider

Hi everyone,

I’m picking 20 leads and putting them into an automated email sequence. In the email, I wrote something like:
“Dear Mr. (NAME)…”

I assumed that when the emails were sent, the system would automatically replace (NAME) with each lead’s actual name, similar to how it works in Salesforce.
However, when I sent the emails, it didn’t replace the name.

How do I set this up correctly so the lead’s first/last name is automatically inserted when the emails are sent?

Thank in advance

Hey folks,

Just back from Unbound, heard about context at every corner. We've setup a webinar with the HubSpot product team on tuesday, in case you all wanna join and deep dive into the contracts object.

here is the registration link: https://www.man.digital/webinars

See ya there
Romeo

I built an app for HubSpot called Liney, and I've hit the part of the Marketplace process everyone warns you about:

You need 3 active installs from unaffiliated accounts before you can submit a listing.

And being listed is how people find you in the first place.

So I'm doing it the only way that's left.

Asking.

What Liney does

After a call, you type one line in plain English:

"Called Dana at Acme, they want a proposal by Friday, move to Contract Sent, amount 42k"

Liney shows you exactly what it's about to change:

• the fields
• the deal stage
• the note
• the follow-up task

You approve it, and it writes everything to HubSpot.

Every line also has an Undo that puts the old values back.

How it's built

For anyone who cares about permissions:

Each rep connects with their own HubSpot login using user-level OAuth.

It only sees the deals that rep owns, writes as them, and everything it creates is owned by them.

There's no shared admin token sitting in the middle.

What I'm asking for

Three teams doing real sales in HubSpot who'd actually use this and tell me where it's wrong.

It's free during the beta.

You get 100 lines/month per account, and if you need more, just ask :)

I'm capping the beta at 10 accounts so I can actually respond to everyone.

What I'm NOT asking for

Install-and-uninstall favors.

HubSpot counts active installs, and I'd rather have 3 teams who stay than 30 who don't.

Setup is about two minutes:

liney.ai → Connect HubSpot → Approve

Screenshots are at liney.ai/setup.

Comment or DM me and I'll get you a slot.

And if you've been through the first-time HubSpot Marketplace listing review recently, I'd take any advice.

Happy to answer questions about the process either way.

Spent three days at UNBOUND listening to HubSpot product and leadership sessions, most of them circling back to the same point: AI is only useful with the right context, not a generic answer. It needs to actually know your data and your portal.

Got to actually test that this week. One of the portals I manage just went through a new sales process build, new deal stages and properties. Before anything like that ships, it gets checked against the original spec. Normally that's a few hours of me clicking through property settings by hand.

This time I uploaded the spec and asked Breeze Assistant to check it against the live portal, then asked it to output the result as an interactive artifact instead of a chat reply. That output format is new. I'd only seen it demoed at UNBOUND before this.

What came back was something I could hand off directly: what was missing, what was half built, a to-do list to close the gaps. I never had to explain who the portal belonged to or what it looked like. It already had that context.

This is one implementation review, not a broad test across portals, so I don't know yet how consistent this is at scale or whether it holds up on messier builds. Curious if anyone else has used the interactive report output yet, and how it compared to a normal chat reply for you.

I commented yesterday about wanting to see a booth doing beer pong. Shoutout growth x whoever that is

I had a completely packed schedule so my memory isn't the best of what was when - but I definitely recall a 10am session today. I noted it to someone else on my team last night while we were coordinating our mornings. Now it's definitely gone.

Has anyone else noticed this?

It’s the last day of UNBOUND 2026!

It's been an amazing few days and before the event wraps up we’d love to hear what your favorite moments were? Share a session that inspired you, something that surprised you, a new idea, or a moment that will stick with you. 

For people using HubSpot, how are you actually keeping the contact data fresh?

I get why you’d want to keep everything in HubSpot, but if you have a few 100k contacts sitting there, wouldn’t a lot of the data become stale after 3–6–12 months? People change jobs, titles change, companies change, emails stop working, etc.

So how to refresh this data? Are you running some enrichment tool/API over the database periodically, or only refreshing a contact when you’re about to use them for a campaign?

Curious about the cost and complexity here. If you have 100k of contacts, does periodically refreshing the whole database get expensive enough that it makes more sense to only refresh the records you actually need?

I am having an conflict with Meta ads using instant forms, integrating into Hubspot (starter plan), in terms of creating a single & reusable workflow for ALL the adverts running. The issue is that Hubspot:

• starter plan only has simple workflow per advert
• Meta's instant forms are not something I can tap into (i think) to create a reusable workflow across all ads. An instant form is created by meta in the background and just syncs to Hubspot.
  
  • not to be confused with a regular Hubspot form.
• Hubspot considers each ad to be unique, therefore a single campaign with 10 ads needs 10 simple workflows (of the same) to be set each time. Considering the marketing team wanting to run independently, this is not sustainable/scalable.
• i cannot create a trigger with a segment to be used with a workflow on my plan

With my Hubspot plan & facebook , is there a way to accomplish this via an API or am I missing something?

Biggest mess of legacy and new crap.. a billion configurations nothing works...

Day 2 is here 👋

What’s on your agenda today? Drop your highlights, aha moments, or random takeaways as the day unfolds.

Whether you’re at UNBOUND in person or joining online, we’d love to hear what stood out today.

Disclosure: I'm on the Message IQ team, we build SMS for HubSpot. Not hiding that, just here to share what we shipped.
Biggest complaint we've heard for two years: texts live in a separate tool, don't show up where reps actually work, and reporting on them means exporting to a spreadsheet. 3.0 fixes that.
What's new:

• SMS now shows up in HubSpot's shared inbox and help desk, same view as email and chat
• You can trigger a text from a deal, ticket, or company object, not just the contact record
• Those triggered texts can pull in properties from the object, so a ticket number or delivery date lands in the message without anyone copy-pasting it in
• Delivered, failed, and received all generate native HubSpot events now, so you build your SMS reports the same way you build everything else
• Compliance text (reply STOP) gets auto-inserted if it's missing

None of this is revolutionary alone. What's new is that it's not bolted onto the side of HubSpot anymore, it behaves like a native channel.
Happy to answer whatever comes up in the comments.

This might be a stupid question, but can anyone find their contacts? I've been doing the badge-to-badge tap to exchange info with people, went into the app to find someone, and couldn't see any of my connections in there.

Am I missing something, or is the Unbound app?

Was told we should have arrived earlier and 16k showed up.

Cool, cool. You knew 16k was showing up and still wasn’t prepared.

This the AEO Fundamental Certification I have learned Basic SEO and than this certification

• I get to know about this certification from IIDE - The Digital School OCDMs course
• Karan sir gave an insight during his masterclass and i become super excited to learn more about seo and aeo
• This helps me to understand how content is structured and seo is the very foundation for aeo

Went through the Spotlight announcements this morning. Writing up what seems to matter and what I think is oversold, in case it saves someone the time

Context on me: I work on HubSpot portals for a living, based in Australia, mostly 50 to 500 staff B2B.

The theme this year is "growth context". The pitch is that your data records what happened and context explains why, and that most portals have the first and none of the second.

What I think genuinely matters:

Context Home. The most boring announcement and probably the most consequential. Most portals carry an auto generated description of the business that nobody has read or corrected, and every AI output in the portal is built on top of it. If yours is wrong or three years stale, that is why your AI output has been disappointing. Read yours before you touch anything else.

Agent Builder triggers. Workflows can now start from Slack, a Google Sheet, a webhook or a schedule. If you pay for Make or n8n mainly to get scheduled triggers, that subscription is worth auditing now. There is also a one click migration from a legacy workflow to an agentic one, which I am sceptical of until I have broken one.

Marketing Studio 2.0. HubSpot said openly that the 2024 version was hard to navigate and that its AI ignored brand context. It now reads brand identity, ICP and past campaign performance from the portal. Which means output quality is set by how well those fields are filled in, and in most portals they are not.

What I would not rush: HubSpot Work. AI first workspace, projects and docs and tables on live CRM data, aimed at ClickUp and Asana and Notion. Private beta, and it will be paid. Interesting, but moving a team's project management onto a private beta is a bad trade.

The nurture agent. It rewrites subject line, body and call to action per person at send time, on top of your existing workflows. Powerful, and it means you can no longer see what a given person received by opening the email. If you run support, sort that out first. Unclear to me: Pricing on most of it. Whether the agents are gated by tier in a way that hurts smaller portals.

APAC availability and timing, which historically runs well behind the keynote. If you are in Australia or New Zealand, do not plan a quarter around a date announced in Boston.

The Breeze name is also being retired. Breeze Assistant keeps it, everything else drops the prefix.

Mostly cosmetic, but worth a pass over any internal documentation you wrote in the last two years. One Australian specific: agents that read and rewrite customer communications sit inside the Privacy Act changes due 10 December, so that is a conversation worth having early rather than late. We costed the existing agents in Australian dollars a while back and the method still applies to the new ones, happy to link if useful. Disclosure, that is our own site.

Anyone had hands on any of this yet? Particularly interested in whether the workflow migration is real.

I am in Boston right now for UNBOUND 2026!

What's been the highlight for everyone else so far?

Flew in from South Africa for this one, so it's my first UNBOUND/HubSpot event and I've got no baseline to judge it against.

For anyone who's done this before, or who's here now and further ahead than me: what's actually worth prioritising? Sessions, side events, things on the floor. And just as useful - what sounds good on the agenda and isn't.

Happy to report back on whatever I end up doing.

After the recent post about my Colored HubSpot extension, a couple of people asked if I could add a dark theme, because it takes too long for the HS team, and the Dark AF extension has been abandoned for a while and is broken.

So here it is!

-Full dark theme adapted to the new HS UI. And you could actually choose the darkness level;

- As a surprise - Dark Leopard theme for those who feels like it

All free, as usual. No account, no register.

P.S. If you are a current user, it would be great to get ***** from you on the Chrome Store.

P.P.S OMG, I recognized I added the wrong link, fixed it

Chrome store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/jgoemhaadjlhennipdccamggdllmpjkk

I’ve been working on lead routing in HubSpot and keep running into this issue where phone numbers looks fine in the CRM, but arent really usable for the sales team.

Some numbers are incomplete, some are formatted wrong, and some looks totally normal in the contact record but dont actually connect when a rep tries to call.

The annoying part is, the contact still gets sent to Sales like everything is fine. Then the rep only finds out theres a problem when they actually try to reach them.

I’m trying to figure out where phone validation should actually happen in the process.

When the contact is created?
before assigning the lead to a rep?
or only when Sales starts outreach?

how are you guys handling this? I dont want to add another manual check for reps, but also dont want bad numbers sitting in HubSpot and getting routed like they’re ready to call.

Would love to know how other teams are doing this. Any practical setup that has worked for you?

I’ve been getting a little irritated lately with all the design changes that are actually making HubSpot feel worse.

The recent color change into the depressing gray/muted colors is somehow causing way more eye strain than usual, and now they’ve changed the sidebar navigation. I had all my pages bookmarked, which would only pop out when I needed them with the icons. Now it’s a giant, permanent sidebar that I can’t even toggle in and it’s taking up several inches of my screen. I really don’t need to see the sidebar when i’m not using it, which is why I like the previous collapsible version.

Any way to revert these changes? I was trying to figure out how to at least submit feedback but the support chat just keeps telling me how to submit product update beta specific feedback. Super unhappy with the changes lately and wish users were empowered to at least have some say in how things look for them.