Can I do this on HubSpot Starter?

Partially. Starter limits dashboards to 10 widgets total across the portal and lacks single-object Deal reports. Most teams need at least Marketing Hub Professional for the deal-side widgets (4, 5, 6).

How often should this dashboard be reviewed?

CMO + Head of Growth: weekly 15-minute review. RevOps: weekly health check. CFO: monthly export. Don't make it a real-time obsession — AEO data has weekly cadence noise that gets misread as signal at daily resolution.

What's the most common 'red flag' to watch for?

Widget 1 trending up but Widget 2 flat = traffic is increasing but contacts aren't. Usually means your AEO-cited pages don't have form CTAs, or your forms have too much friction. Widget 4 flat but Widget 5 up = great (deals closing) but pipeline isn't backfilling — your top-of-funnel needs new content.

Should this dashboard be public to the team?

Yes — make it visible to demand gen, content, and product marketing. AEO works best when content writers can see which prompts drove deals last month and write toward those queries this month.

How to build an AEO dashboard in HubSpot (2026)

AEO dashboards either tell you something you can act on or they're decoration. After watching 40+ teams stand these up, the pattern that survives is six widgets — three citation widgets, three pipeline widgets — refreshed weekly. Here's the build.

Required tools

HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional (custom dashboards, single-object Deal reports)
The seven AI source properties from the source-properties guide
Your monthly AEO spend number, from finance
A weekly 15-minute calendar block for the CMO to actually look at it

The steps

Create a new HubSpot dashboard called 'AEO — monthly view'

Dashboards > Create dashboard > Blank. Permissions: shared to CMO, Head of Growth, RevOps. Don't put it in the default 'Marketing' dashboard set — AEO is the new spotlight metric and deserves its own surface.

Widget 1: Total AI-referred sessions, last 30 days, line chart

Source: Web Analytics > Sessions. Filter: utm_medium = ai-referral. Group by: utm_source (chatgpt, perplexity, claude, gemini). This is the top-of-funnel pulse. If it goes flat or down, your AEO content needs a refresh.

Widget 2: AI-referred contacts created, last 30 days, bar chart by engine

Source: Contacts. Filter: ai_source != 'none'. Group by: ai_source. Date range: last 30 days. This tells you which engine is converting traffic to known contacts at what rate.

Widget 3: Top 10 prompts by AEO-attributed contacts created

Source: Contacts. Filter: ai_first_prompt is known. Group by: ai_first_prompt. Sort: descending by count. Limit: 10. This is the most actionable widget — the 10 prompts you should be optimizing content around right now.

Widget 4: AEO pipeline created (sum of Amount), last 90 days

Source: Deals. Filter: deal_ai_source != 'none' AND createdate within last 90 days AND deal stage progressed past 'qualified'. Display: single number with sparkline. Compare: previous 90 days. This is the metric the CFO wants.

Widget 5: AEO-attributed closed-won (sum of Amount), last 90 days

Source: Deals. Filter: deal_ai_source != 'none' AND deal stage = Closed Won AND closedate within last 90 days. Display: single number with sparkline. Add: ratio = (this number / total closed-won) to show AEO's share of total revenue.

Widget 6: AEO ROI ratio (closed-won / spend), updated monthly

HubSpot can't compute this natively because it doesn't know your AEO spend. Either (a) hardcode spend as a calculated property and divide, or (b) update a static text widget monthly with the ROI number. Lantern automates this widget and ships it pre-built.

Common mistakes

Putting too many widgets on it — six is the cap. More than that and no one looks. Move the rest to a 'detail' tab.
Using vanity metrics (impressions, share of voice) instead of pipeline metrics — looks impressive in screenshots, doesn't survive a CFO question.
Not date-syncing the widgets — if Widget 4 is 'last 90 days' and Widget 5 is 'last 30 days', they don't compare cleanly. Pick one window and lock all widgets to it.
Forgetting the 'previous period' comparison — a $80K AEO closed-won number means nothing without 'vs $40K last quarter'.

Where this fits in the AEO pipeline attribution stack

The steps above are one link in a longer chain. In order: you pick prompts to monitor, you track AI-referred sessions, you tag contacts in your CRM, you roll attribution up to the Deal object, you report pipeline dollars to the CFO. If you skip any link, the chain breaks and the number you quote to finance can't be defended in an audit.

If you're still evaluating which tool to run this workflow on, Lantern's AEO tool comparison hub has honest head-to-head pages for Profound, Scrunch, Peec AI, AthenaHQ, and HubSpot's own AEO product — scored on the dimensions that matter for a CMO buyer (CRM integration depth, reporting quality, prompt-scaling economics).

If you're about to walk this work into a budget review, the CFO's Guide to AEO Budget Defense has the memo template, the five-slide deck structure, the attribution-math cheat sheet, and the three most-common CFO objections with counter-arguments. It's the long-form companion to this how-to and was written for the renewal conversation specifically.

The operational rhythm that works: run the steps above once to set up, then review the output monthly in a 15-minute standing meeting with your Head of Growth and RevOps lead. Quarterly, re-audit your prompt list, your content backlog, and your attribution lookback window. Annual: present the full-year AEO ROI trend to the board. That cadence is what separates teams who ship an AEO dashboard once from teams who run AEO as an ongoing budget-defensible channel.

How to build an AEO dashboard in HubSpot