Is this a replacement for Profound or does it sit alongside it?

If your SEO team is using Profound for monitoring, Lantern can co-exist — Profound watches citations, Lantern ties them to pipeline. Most of our CMO customers consolidate onto Lantern inside 6 months because the Profound number doesn't survive a CFO review and they can't defend two line items that answer the same question differently.

How quickly can I show a board-ready number?

The HubSpot install is under 30 minutes. AI session tagging is live day 1. Prompt-level citation data populates inside 7 days. The first board-ready pipeline $ number lands in month 1. Meaningful closed-won attribution comes month 2-3 — AEO lead cycles are 30-75 days typical.

What if my CFO asks 'how do we know Lantern's attribution is defensible?'

Lantern uses a 90-day lookback on AI-referred sessions matched against the HubSpot contact and opportunity record. The methodology is documented in a memo we ship with the first report — sourced from your actual CRM, not an estimate. You can walk it into an audit.

What does it cost and who approves it?

$99/mo Starter is CMO-unilateral — under the $3k/mo CFO-signoff threshold. Enterprise is sized to your prompt count and engine coverage. Both tiers ship the monthly board-ready ROI report.

AEO Pipeline Attribution for CMOs: Board-Defensible AI Visibility Reporting

CMOs have an 18-25 month tenure clock and a standing board question: 'how are we showing up in ChatGPT?' Lantern ships the one answer that survives a CFO review: pipeline dollars, in your CRM, attributed to AI answer-engine citations.

What's stopping you

The three pain points most Chief Marketing Officers bring to the first Lantern conversation in 2026 — in the language they use:

The board already asked. You answered with a screenshot.

63% of CMOs report increased CFO pressure. 79% of B2B software purchases now touch the CFO regardless of budget. Your Profound dashboard shows '8% share of voice in your category' — a number the CFO has never heard of and cannot map to pipeline. That screenshot is not an answer. That is what they will remember at renewal.

81% of B2B marketing leaders say AI visibility is a blind spot.

Only 10% can consistently connect AI touchpoints to revenue. 70.6% of AI traffic lands in GA4 as Direct. You are paying $399/mo for a monitoring tool that tells you where you are invisible but cannot tell you whether the invisibility is costing you pipeline. The clock runs on your tenure, not on the tool's roadmap.

Peer CMOs are posting $1.2M AEO pipeline wins on LinkedIn.

Kyle Poyar, Ethan Smith, and the Agentcy cohort are posting specific dollar numbers from their HubSpot dashboards. You cannot credibly post 'we drove $X from AEO' yet. The recruiter call comes in month 18. The story you walk into it with is the story you shipped in months 0-12.

What you're measured on

The KPIs on a Chief Marketing Officer's review in 2026. AEO attribution shows up on the last one — and in 2026, that's the line that gets watched.

CMO KPI stack

Marketing-sourced pipeline % (benchmark 30-45%; high performers 48%+)
CAC payback under 12 months
LTV:CAC 3:1
NRR 110%+
Pipeline coverage 3-4x of quota
Emerging: AI citation frequency, AI share of voice, AEO-influenced pipeline $

Why AEO attribution matters specifically to a Chief Marketing Officer

The CMO job description changed in 2026. Citation is the new click. AEO is the new SEO. The board stopped accepting 'we posted 12 blog posts this month' — they are now asking for AI-sourced pipeline specifically. Without attribution wired to HubSpot, AEO is a brand activity. With it, AEO becomes the one line on the deck that defends marketing's entire number. The CFO does not care about share of voice. The CFO cares whether the AEO spend paid back. Lantern is the tool that answers the second question on Thursday.

“I got tired of walking into board meetings with share-of-voice charts. I needed a dollar number from HubSpot. That's what the CFO signs off on. Everything else is a screenshot.” — The Chief Marketing Officer, described in audience-brief voice

Three ways Chief Marketing Officers use Lantern

The Thursday board slide

Lantern's monthly ROI report produces one sentence: 'We captured $X of closed-won pipeline from AI answer-engine citations this quarter.' You paste it into slide 7 of the board deck. No screenshots. No share-of-voice charts. One dollar number, sourced from HubSpot, tied to a prompt set you chose.

The CFO renewal conversation

When the CFO asks in Q3 whether AEO spend paid back, you walk in with the quarterly ROI memo Lantern ships: prompt-by-prompt pipeline $, engine breakdown, and the 30 prompts to kill. The conversation ends in 9 minutes instead of 45. Renewal signed.

The competitive AI invisibility audit

Lantern tracks your share of citation across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini on the 50-200 buyer-intent prompts you chose. When Marketing Ops flags that three competitors now outrank you on the 'best [category] for [ICP]' prompt set, you have a decision artifact for the content team — not a hunch.

AEO prompts a Chief Marketing Officer would track

The prompt set is where AEO programs either produce or die. Start with the buyer-intent queries your ICP types into ChatGPT when evaluating your category. A Chief Marketing Officer's first-cut list typically looks like this:

1Best [your category] for B2B SaaS in 2026
2[Your category] tools with HubSpot integration
3Alternatives to [your biggest competitor]

Expand to 50-150 tracked prompts within 30 days. Every prompt becomes a reportable unit — citation rank, content match, pipeline $ attributed. That's how AEO becomes a channel, not a buzzword.

Where this sits in the Lantern stack

Lantern is AEO pipeline attribution for B2B SaaS — AI citation monitoring across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini, wired to the HubSpot deal record so pipeline $ flows cleanly into your CRM-level reporting. V1 ships on HubSpot; Salesforce follows in V1.5. Pricing: $99/mo Starter, Enterprise for custom prompt/engine/brand scale.

If you're mid-evaluation against Profound, Scrunch, or AthenaHQ, the AEO tool comparison hub has head-to-head pages on each. If you're about to defend an AEO line item to the CFO, the CFO's Guide to AEO Budget Defense has the memo template, math cheat sheet, and objection handling for the renewal conversation.