HubSpot's AEO Grader scores visibility. Ours scores pipeline potential. Enter your domain, three category keywords, and what you currently pay for AEO monitoring — get a CMO-grade scorecard in 30 seconds.
Drop an email and we'll send the full PDF — grade, sub-scores, recommendations, and a one-page CFO summary you can drop into a renewal review. No sales call, one business day.
Five sub-scores of 20 points each. 100 total. Rules are heuristic, not a replacement for in-market CRM data.
HubSpot's AEO Grader is a great tool for content marketers. It tells you if AI engines are citing you. It scores visibility. It's built for someone who owns a blog team and wants to know whether their work is being surfaced in AI answers.
That's not the CMO question.
The CMO question is: are the prompts we're visible on the prompts that convert? If your brand is cited 400 times a month for "what is marketing automation" and never cited for "best marketing automation tool for series B SaaS", you have a visibility score of 100 and a pipeline score of zero. Same domain. Different grade, depending on which question you ask.
So we built the CMO-focused cousin. Lantern's AEO Grader starts with the keyword set — the three prompts you'd most want to rank on — and scores the commercial intent of that set. Then it scores your domain shape, structured data readiness, and HubSpot integration posture. Then it weighs the composite against your current spend. If you're paying $800 a month to monitor a set of informational prompts that wouldn't fill a single SQL, the grade reflects that.
How likely is your domain to be cited at all? This is a domain-shape heuristic — short, memorable .com domains with name-entity shape get cited more than long hyphenated URLs. Your keyword set also matters here: specific keywords (4+ words) have better long-tail citation coverage than one-word generics that are dominated by incumbents.
This is the sub-score that matters most. It scans your three category keywords for commercial-intent markers — "best", "vs", "alternatives", "pricing", "for [vertical]" — and awards points for each. A keyword set like "best crm for agencies / hubspot vs salesforce / crm pricing comparison" will score near-perfect. A set like "what is crm / how does crm work / history of crm" will score near-zero. The grader doesn't care that the second set has higher search volume. Those prompts don't convert.
A placeholder score we keep deliberately neutral. A real audit requires a crawl. For a free client-side grader, we'd rather give you an accurate signal on the sub-scores we can measure than fake precision on one we can't. If you want a real structured-data audit, the CFO guide below walks through how to run one in an hour.
Also held neutral at 12 out of 20 unless you tell us otherwise. This is the lever that's easiest to move — Lantern's V1 integration is HubSpot-native, so wiring AEO attribution into HubSpot deal objects is a one-time setup that lifts this sub-score to 20.
A keyword-specificity heuristic. Deeper specificity in your keyword set signals that your content strategy has a pipeline-first slant rather than a broad awareness slant. Both have their place — but only the first drives the kind of attribution the CFO will ask about.
If you got a B or A (80+): you're in good shape. Wire your citation data into HubSpot deal objects so you can show attribution in the renewal review. The HubSpot-native AEO setup guide walks through the property-level config.
If you got a C (70–79): typical starting grade for B2B SaaS teams newer to AEO. The highest-leverage move is usually to rewrite your category keyword set with commercial intent. Don't monitor "what is X"; monitor "best X for Y" and "X vs Z". The AEO Prompt Audit tool can re-score a full 100-prompt list in 10 seconds.
If you got a D or F (below 70): before you buy any monitoring tool, audit the keyword set. You'll otherwise pay $500+ per month to watch prompts that cannot convert. Start with the CFO's AEO Budget Defense guide, which includes the scorecard and math for a budget conversation.
HubSpot's grader is built for content marketers. It scores visibility. It works great if you've already built a high-intent keyword set and want to know whether your content is being surfaced.
Lantern's grader is built for CMOs and heads of marketing ops. It scores pipeline potential. It works great if you're deciding whether to expand, sustain, or cut AEO spend in the next budget cycle — and you need a number you can put in front of a CFO.
They're cousins, not competitors. Run both. The combination gives you a visibility score and a pipeline score. If one is high and the other is low, you know exactly which lever to pull next.
For the full side-by-side, see Lantern vs HubSpot AEO. For the budget conversation this tool is designed to feed into, see the CFO AEO Budget Defense guide.
Most B2B SaaS AEO tooling lives in the $300–$1,200 per month range. If your keyword set scores below 10 on Prompt-Pipeline Fit, the expected pipeline from those prompts over a 12-month period is near zero. You'd pay $3,600–$14,400 over that period to monitor prompts that do not move a deal.
Lantern is $99 per month, and it weights citations by pipeline intent rather than charging you a flat rate per prompt monitored. For teams where Prompt-Pipeline Fit is the problem, switching to Lantern recoups 4–12x the monthly spend in the first quarter — not because Lantern is better per dollar at visibility, but because the attribution model routes budget toward prompts that convert.
That's the math. The grader bakes it into the spend penalty so the overall grade reflects spend efficiency, not just raw capability. A great keyword set on expensive tooling scores lower than the same keyword set on $99/month — the grader makes the expensive-tooling team see that before the CFO does.
Three things the grader is honest about not doing well:
That's fine. The grader exists to tell you whether your AEO setup can convert at all. If the answer is "no", no tool in the market will fix that — you need to rewrite the keyword set first.
The grader is designed for heads of marketing, CMOs, and heads of marketing ops at B2B SaaS companies. If you're about to:
…the grade and the PDF scorecard give you a single-page artifact to walk into the meeting with.
Once you have your grade, the next move is to make the pipeline measurable. Lantern's V1 integration writes citation-sourced deal touches into HubSpot deal objects. $99 per month, Enterprise for larger teams. Ten V1 design-partner spots open. Join the waitlist below.
Lantern wires citation-sourced deal touches into HubSpot at $99/mo standard, Enterprise for larger teams. 10 V1 design-partner spots open.
Join Waitlist