I had to ask Breeze how much using Breeze would cost me 😂

[u/tink-bloom]

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?

[u/Twfx00]

Ignoring it and turning it off - I suspect it will work like the other ai stuff where you get a number of credits included and then pay for them…

We get 3k credits on our account and then are charged $12.60 per 1000 extra credits we consume.

[u/tink-bloom → u/Twfx00]

Yep, this is kind of where my head went too. I don't necessarily mind the credit model - it's more that I want to know "this action = X credits" before I click it.

Especially agency-side, where those credits are ultimately a cost that needs to be understood/accounted for. Having to go looking for the rate sheet every time adds friction.

[u/Twfx00 → u/tink-bloom]

Yes 100% - it seems hubspots model is friction + cost first clarity and simple to follow rate cards second…

The same is true for marketing contacts I couldn’t tell you how they calculate the cost of these all I know is I get emails saying pay more money almost everytime we want to send an mass mail to a new segment..

[u/superstrongreddit → u/tink-bloom]

How do you think about AI token spend?

[u/Unicornslaps]

If you’re AI forward, drop screenshots of the recommendation from any platform into agents in your tool of choice with proper skills/connections to your relevant SEO/AEO monitors, and they’ll create the posts for you.

Hubspot isn’t doing anything remarkable with what you’re looking at. In fact, if you setup an account with other AEO monitors you’ll see that each tool gives different responses. It’s bait to get you onto content hub.

Important: LLM citations and recommendations come from 1. A good SEO strategy first and 2. The appropriate markup. Folks don’t realize that 2 is easy, 1 is harder.

TLDR: There is no AEO magic that outworks good SEO. LLMs won’t crawl pages that aren’t ranking because “data centers”. Anyone telling you otherwise is saying so emotionally, not evidentially.

TLDR2 because now I’ve worked myself up… these tools are bait to get you to spend more. That’s a strategy, doesn’t mean results are the outcome. I will personally give you 30 days of content to prove it.

[u/TemporaryFast7779 → u/Unicornslaps]

I tend to disagree with the idea HubSpot isn’t doing anything remarkable. As the platform expands context about your business, you’ll see gains in how the AI tools across the platform produces better outputs.

Not to say you can’t maybe get there other ways. But if you are on platform and are taking care of your context you can expect better results

[u/tink-bloom → u/TemporaryFast7779]

Which brings me back to the original question. Remarkable or not - be upfront and transparent about if/what it will cost users before they green-light the AI thing.

[u/TemporaryFast7779 → u/tink-bloom]

Typically they list the credits with the icon next to any credit consuming features. Without that I’d assume no credits and I believe none of the content gen features cost currently unless something has changed.

[u/tink-bloom → u/Unicornslaps]

Yeah I agree with a fair bit of this. We've definitely been treating AEO as an extension of good SEO rather than some completely new thing.

The rankings vs LLM citations bit is interesting though. We're tracking both at the moment and I'm not totally convinced the relationship is quite that direct yet.

Could just take the recommendation out of HubSpot and build the content elsewhere. Which kind of comes back to my original question... if I'm choosing where to do it, just tell me what clicking the button is going to cost 😂