AI Search
HubSpot has launched a new Answer Engine Optimisation tool and a set of AI product updates for marketing, sales and customer service teams as part of more than 100 product announcements at its Spring 2026 Spotlight.
The rollout centres on what HubSpot calls “Growth Context”, its approach to using customer, company and workflow data inside AI tools. The new releases include HubSpot AEO, updates to Breeze Assistant, an expanded Prospecting Agent, a new Smart Deal Progression tool and broader use of Customer Agent in support email.
The clearest commercial push is in search and discovery. HubSpot said organic traffic for its customers has fallen 27% year on year, while AI referral traffic has tripled, citing industry reporting. It argues that marketers now need to track how brands appear in answer engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, rather than focus only on conventional search rankings.
HubSpot AEO is available in Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise plans, or as a standalone product priced at USD $50 a month. The tool includes competitor benchmarking, citation analysis and recommended actions. For customers on higher-tier marketing plans, it also uses their own data to suggest prompts prospective customers are likely to use in large language model interfaces.
The move reflects a wider debate in digital marketing over whether traffic from AI assistants will become a meaningful replacement for declining search visits. HubSpot said traffic from large language models converts at a higher rate than traditional channels, though it did not provide a comparative figure in the announcement.
Breeze Assistant has also been updated and trained on what HubSpot calls Loop Marketing, the company's internal framework for using AI in campaign planning. The changes are intended to help marketers define ideal customer profiles, set brand guides and prepare campaign briefs using data already held in HubSpot.
According to HubSpot, the assistant now has broader access to website analytics, campaign data, customer records and HubSpot Academy material. It can also adapt responses based on the user's role and the page they are viewing in the software, so a marketer sees campaign guidance while a salesperson receives deal-related prompts.
Sales focus
On the sales side, HubSpot is expanding automation around prospecting and pipeline management. Its Prospecting Agent now covers a wider range of tasks, from identifying buying signals such as job postings, funding rounds and technology adoption to identifying contacts and drafting outreach emails.
Based on HubSpot's own data, early users of Prospecting Agent have achieved outreach response rates at twice the industry benchmark. The product is offered with a 28-day free trial, then priced at USD $1 per recommended lead.
Smart Deal Progression, a new addition, analyses call transcripts alongside CRM history to suggest deal updates, follow-up emails and action items. HubSpot said the system takes into account pipeline definitions, deal stages, forecasting logic and prior account interactions when recommending changes to records.
The aim is to reduce the administrative work that often follows sales calls, particularly for teams where reps must update CRM systems manually after meetings. In practice, HubSpot is trying to deepen the link between conversational AI and the structured data in its customer platform, an area where software groups are competing to show that AI tools can do more than summarise meetings.
Support push
Customer service is the third area targeted in the update. Customer Agent can now operate across email, which HubSpot described as the highest-volume support channel for many teams. According to the company's internal figures, customers using Customer Agent alongside Help Desk are seeing 25% more tickets resolved and 15% faster resolution rates.
On average, the tool resolves 65% of conversations, HubSpot said, with the highest-performing teams reaching 90%. The product is priced at USD $0.50 per resolution after a 28-day free trial.
New controls let support teams set tone and style rules, apply channel-specific settings, review suggested replies before sending, manage multiple brands, define working hours and limit rollouts by percentage or workflow. The additions suggest HubSpot is trying to address a common concern among support teams: that AI systems need tighter oversight before they can be trusted in customer-facing channels.
Duncan Lennox, Chief Product and Technology Officer at HubSpot, said: “Most AI tools have access to data. What they don't have is context. Context is much more complex. If data is what happened, context is why. It's deep knowledge of your customers, your market, and how your team works. That knowledge grows with every interaction, delivered with precision at the moment it's needed. Without it, AI gives you generic output. With it, you get real outcomes. And that's what we're building at HubSpot.”
