Answer engine optimization trends in 2026: How AEO is transforming the landscape

Emerging trends in answer engine optimization are reshaping how brands earn visibility, trust, and demand in AI-powered search. Answer engines like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Gemini now deliver fully synthesized answers directly to users, compressing the traditional customer journey. According to HubSpot's Consumer Trends Report, 72% of consumers plan to use AI-powered search for shopping more frequently.

If your content isn’t structured for or easily parsed by answer engines, your brand won’t appear. Competitors will. Or worse, inaccurate narratives about your company, pulled from sources you don’t associate with, may surface prominently in AI-driven results. That’s a visibility risk no business can afford.

In this post, I break down the emerging trends in answer engine optimization, why they matter for revenue, and how to integrate AEO with traditional SEO strategies to drive full-funnel growth.

Table of Contents

• Why Emerging Trends in Answer Engine Optimization Matter Now
• 6 Emerging Trends in Answer Engine Optimization You Should Act On
• How to Integrate AEO Strategies With SEO for Full-Funnel Growth
• How to Measure AEO Beyond Rankings and Clicks
• Frequently Asked Questions About Emerging Trends in Answer Engine Optimization

Why Emerging Trends in Answer Engine Optimization Matter Now

Answer engine optimization matters because search behavior is fundamentally changing: AI Overviews reduce organic clicks but increase the value of citations, and conversational assistants are becoming preferred search options for consumers. HubSpot's Consumer Trends Report reveals that the most significant emotions consumers feel while shopping using generative AI are positive — appreciation, satisfaction, optimism, and joy.

The brands that will win in the future of search are those whose content can be cited, summarized, and reused by AI engines. While traditional search remains important and shouldn't be abandoned, neglecting AEO creates significant risks for brand visibility and control.

Here’s why it matters.

Brand perception is now shaped before the click.

AEO efforts can influence perception depending on how well the content appears in AI tools. If the facts about your product, pricing, or differentiators are inconsistent across pages, answer engines are less likely to trust or cite you.

What’s worse is that if your brand doesn’t provide the content, someone else will — an unhappy customer on Reddit, for example.

Marketing departments must control their product, service, or brand narrative; they must ensure their content is available for AI tools to summarize and deliver to relevant user queries.

Here’s an example of how third-party sources drive the narrative for HubSpot CRM in AI Overviews:

I searched for “best free CRM for small business,” and the AI Overviews recommended HubSpot as the top option. The source cited is Zapier. Directly below AI Overviews, HubSpot appears again, first, in “Sources across the web.” Brand trust has been built significantly before the opportunity to click on HubSpot’s traditional SEO listing.

Discovery in answer engines is intent-driven and contextual.

Users ask highly specific, high-commercial-intent questions to AI engines — for example, “best ERP for manufacturing under 200 seats”— and answer engines return summarized insights. When content clearly addresses these micro-intents, brands are more likely to appear in answer surfaces.

Understanding micro-intent requires deep audience research. Glimpse's gen AI-enabled research platform supports this approach, recommending that brands address “the concerns and desires of shoppers based on the responses of real consumers.” When marketing teams truly understand their buyers, they can tailor content strategies to support specific needs at precise moments in the decision journey.

The “best CRM example” above is also a good example for intent-driven search.

Glimpse’s gen AI-enabled research platform supports the concept of micro-intent. Glimpse recommended addressing “the concerns and desires of shoppers — based on the responses of real consumers.” When marketing really knows its buyers, they can tailor marketing and content strategies to support them.

Tip: For more guidance on audience research and understanding buyers, see Step 1 How to integrate AEO strategies with SEO for full-funnel growth

Lead quality improves when AI cites your content.

Unlike traditional SEO, where impressions can be broad and unfocused, AEO visibility aligns with precise problem statements. When your insights appear in an AI answer, the user has likely asked a very specific question or typed a particular query, as in the example above.

For the searches looking for solutions to a problem, you’re more likely to bring a highly relevant prospect to your website if they do go ahead and click.

This has been my experience with AI. Recently, I received an email from a client asking for a Power Hour. I asked where they found me, and it was ChatGPT. This prospect closed after two emails. They gathered all the information they needed from a conversation with ChatGPT and a review of my website. Trust had already been established, and the lead quality was so high that it was easy to close.

AEO directly impacts revenue attribution.

AEO can directly impact revenue. Although many queries typed into AI tools are informational, many are looking for comparisons during the buyer journey phase, when someone wants to make a purchase or even push “buy” on a product.

While these searches might be few and far between, they’re not to be ignored.

Here’s a screenshot from my client's Looker Studio dashboard where we track conversions from AI:

Conversions from ChatGPT have been increasing since around June, with a notable surge in October, the month we launched additional local pages (more on that next). On this dashboard, we can see exactly which pages ChatGPT has sent the user to and where they converted.

Note: The URLs are redacted for this article screenshot.

6 Emerging Trends in Answer Engine Optimization You Should Act On

The most important answer engine optimization trends in 2026 focus on six strategic areas: leveraging local pages for geographic visibility, implementing answer-first content formats, maintaining entity consistency, tracking AI visibility metrics, unifying AEO with SEO strategies, and optimizing multi-format content, including video and audio. These trends revolve around audience needs, entity clarity, structured answers, and creating content that AI can easily parse, cite, and trust.

1. Use local pages to your advantage.

Local intent is particularly useful for service-based businesses or those with stores, venues, or locations in specific geographic areas. A local search in AI can generate clicks to your website.

As mentioned above, people who search using AI are getting specific about what they want and where they need the service. Additionally, AI assistants are increasingly personalizing answers by region, drawing from pages that clearly communicate location, service availability, and entity-level details. Entity clarity supports consistent answers across AI engines.

Local pages help AEO because they give answer engines precise, structured information they can extract: what your business does, where the company operates, what it offers, and why you’re relevant for users in that geographic area.

This makes local pages strong candidates for citations in AI Overviews, ChatGPT answers, and map-based AI queries.

Actionable steps to optimise local pages for AEO:

• Create a dedicated, structured page for each location. Include NAP details (name, address, phone), service descriptions, hours, FAQs, and unique value propositions to give answer engines rich, location-specific facts to pull from.
• Use schema markup for local business entities. Adding LocalBusiness, PostalAddress, and Service schema helps AI systems understand your geographic relevance and increases the likelihood of selecting localised AI answers.
• Include hyper-local content that answers specific questions. Add content about service options, local availability, or regional variations.
• Ensure consistency across all local listings. Mismatched addresses, hours, or service offerings reduce your entity trust score, which directly impacts your likelihood of being cited.
• Add clear, short-form answers that ChatGPT and Google can summarise. Use punchy definitions, lists, and concise explanations—formats AI systems prefer.
• Add a contact form high up the page. And make sure there’s feedback on where the form was filled out. For example, you can create an invisible field on the page, or track conversions from local pages in Google Analytics (more on that later).

Important note: Do not create false local pages or try to game the algorithm. Less is more when it comes to local pages. Choose locations where your business can actually offer a solid service. Think about office locations or locations that the company regularly serves. Adding things like case studies will increase your expertise, experience, authority, and trust (E-E-A-T) signals.

Here’s an example of Chipotle’s local page for Kansas City:

Source

In my experience, local searches are creating demand for my clients. For example, one client has multiple venues in different locations where they provide services. We’ve built out structured venue pages to capture that demand — and it works. These pages now appear directly in ChatGPT, and more importantly, they convert. We track all conversions through Looker Studio, and the data is clear: well-structured local pages drive both AI visibility and bottom-line results.

Want more on local? Read my complete guide to local SEO here.

2. Answer-first content formats become mandatory.

AI engines prioritise content that surfaces the core answer at the very top of the page. In other words: get to the point as quickly as you can, then elaborate.

AI systems look for extractable content. When your key message is placed directly under a heading and formatted cleanly, it becomes significantly easier for answer engines to summarise, cite, and reuse it.

Answer-first content isn’t exactly new. SEO specialists have been writing in this format for years, probably as early as the featured snippet began dominating the top of Google; nevertheless, it’s worth noting here as an action point because it is perhaps more important than ever to implement this format in content.

Actionable steps to writing answer-first content formats:

• Get to the point in your writing. Make the most important point first, then elaborate.
• Use clear headers, lists, bolding, and tight paragraphs that AI can easily parse.
• Add a “What this means” or “Why it matters” summary under key sections.

Pro Tip: Read about the inverted triangle technique that journalists have used for years; implement it into your writing.

I have always used this answer-first content method in my content. It’s how I was snagging featured snippets almost a decade ago, and it’s how I make content skimmable for human readers. The answer-first format is almost definitely how I achieved visibility in AI Overviews for my clients. Although this is a format I’ve used for many years, I am still finding ways of doing it more consistently in my writing. It feels more important to do so now.

3. Entity consistency is critical.

The consistency with which your brand’s entities appear across the web is an emerging trend in AEO.

Honestly, this always mattered. But it’s worth paying extra attention to brand consistency now. For example, name, services, pricing, product categories, industries served, and differentiators.

If these facts are inconsistent across your site, directory listings, or third-party mentions, your authority is questionable, and citation likelihood may decrease.

Or worse, the AI will pull incorrect information as if it were fact.

If you’re moving address, for example, then marketing becomes responsible for updating the details everywhere.

Actionable steps for maintaining entity consistency:

• Use consistent naming conventions, product descriptions, and claims across every page.
• Use schema types like Organization, Product, Service, and FAQ to reinforce factual accuracy. Schema markup improves content extraction and voice search visibility
• Keep a centralised “Source of Truth” document so all teams publish the same facts.
• If entities or facts are changed, update them everywhere, not just on your own site.

4. AI visibility becomes as important as organic clicks.

As zero-click results surge, traditional KPIs like impressions and rankings tell only half the story. Brands are now shifting toward measurement models that focus on AI visibility metrics — how often a brand is cited, mentioned, or included in an AI-generated answer.

This is a major shift in the industry, and it requires a complete search mindset shift. Even if traffic declines, your content can still influence pipeline, authority, and demand if it appears inside AI answers. Measuring AI citations gives marketing teams a clearer view of organic influence in a zero-click world.

Actionable steps:

• Track citations, mentions, and placement inside AI answers.
• Measure assisted conversions
• Use tools like HubSpot’s AI Search Grader to benchmark your AEO/GEO performance.
• Build dashboards that combine page performance + AI visibility + conversion impact.

Here’s what HubSpot’s AI Search Grader looks like:

The AI Search Grader shows how HubSpot performs in three Large Language Models (LLMs), OpenAI, Perplexity, and Gemini, and across a range of metrics, including:

• Brand recognition
• Market Score
• Presence Quality
• Brand Sentiment
• Share of Voice

Pro Tip: SEO teams now report on metrics that show the impact of AI on a business's bottom line. For more information on SEO reporting, read: How to create an SEO report [+ benefits, best practices, and examples]. This article covers everything on SEO reporting, including what metrics to track.

5. AEO and SEO unify into a single growth strategy.

AEO and SEO indeed have some different strategies, but for now, the emerging trend is that AEO is the natural evolution of SEO.

Traditional SEO, including rankings, traffic, long-tail keywords, backlinks, etc., remains essential, but AEO adds another layer: visibility matters, answer-first optimisation, mentions in AI Overviews, and further onus on structured content, schema, entity clarity, and citation-readiness.

Winning brands blend both approaches to capture full-funnel visibility across:

• Traditional blue links
• AI Overviews
• Conversational engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini)

Actionable steps for unifying AEO and SEO:

• Align SEO keyword research with answer-intent research for AEO.
• Standardise schema across all priority pages.
• Add answer-first summaries to existing SEO pages.
• Use HubSpot Marketing Hub and Content Hub to merge SEO + AEO workflows.
• Use Breeze to enforce answer-first formatting and factual consistency.

6. Multi-format answers (audio, video, and short-form summaries) are used by AI.

AI engines increasingly pull from multimedia content, not just text. Video transcripts, short video explainers, and even podcasts are now sources that AI systems use to build answers.

More notably, Google’s AI Overviews and YouTube AI search features can surface a video and start playback at the exact moment the answer occurs.

Here’s an example:

If someone types into Google, “how to conduct a competitive audit,” the video will be cited, and the play will take place exactly at that section, skipping the intro and other irrelevant chapters.

When creating video content, structure explanations clearly and include timestamped chapters to help AI identify the “best answer moment” in your video.

Actionable steps for earning AEO citations with videos:

• Add clean transcripts to every video and podcast.
• Add chapter markers with answer-oriented titles (“What is X?”, “How does Y work?”).
• Keep core explanations within the first minute of the video.
• Upload to YouTube even if the channel is small — YouTube feeds both Google AI and Gemini.
• Turn transcripts into answer-first written content to increase citation reach.

How to Integrate AEO Strategies With SEO for Full-Funnel Growth

Integrating AEO with SEO requires aligning five key activities: audience research, answer-first content creation, technical optimization with schema implementation, unified analysis, and continuous measurement. While AEO is more of a search evolution, the two are interconnected disciplines that together drive discovery, evaluation, and conversion across both traditional blue links and AI-generated answer surfaces.

By aligning research, content creation, technical optimization, analysis, and measurement, teams can build a unified strategy that attracts high-intent prospects whether or not they click. The steps below outline how to integrate AEO with traditional SEO strategies.

Step 1: Research

AEO isn’t about keywords. Contrary to popular belief, ranking in top traditional search spots is not a prerequisite for appearing in AI Overviews or answer engines. AI systems surface the clearest, most contextually relevant answers regardless of traditional search rankings — I've seen websites on page two or three of Google, or even outside the first five pages, appear prominently in AI-generated answers.

Marketing teams need deep insight into three areas:

• What problems audiences have and what solutions they need
• How audiences search and which tools they prefer
• Specific terminology audiences use

Understanding these areas shapes an effective AEO content strategy.

Instead of relying solely on keyword research, develop detailed buyer personas that reveal decision-making patterns, problem statements, and informational needs. HubSpot Make My Persona helps marketing teams build personas based on real behaviors, goals, and challenges, creating the foundation for highly targeted content.

Specificity drives results. I run SEM marketing agency forank with Co-Founder Leigh Buttrey, our in-house PPC specialist. We create holistic campaigns spanning SEO, AEO, and PPC. For one client, we created a landing page targeted at a single buyer type with one specific pain point. The page aligned so closely with audience needs and search intent that it generated a £10k lead from a single visit. That level of precision doesn't happen with generic SEO targeting — it happens when teams build content deliberately for the exact person they want to attract.

Pro tip: Don’t neglect traditional SEO when creating these landing pages. We did, of course, also optimize the page with keywords so it ranked in Google, too. Buttrey also pointed her PPC ads at the page. The page becomes a multi-purpose business asset, not just a page to gain visibility in AI.

Step 2: Content Creation

Content is the backbone of AEO. Answer engines can only cite what already exists — AI models do not invent your expertise; they summarise and reorganise it. If your content isn’t present, isn’t structured for extraction, or doesn’t directly address intent, your brand simply won’t appear in AI Overviews or conversational answers. That’s why content creation must be strategic, answer-first, and supported by the right tools.

HubSpot’s ecosystem makes content creation significantly easier.

Here’s how:

HubSpot Marketing Hub is a marketing suite that helps teams optimise content for both SEO and AEO. It’s a complete marketing platform with built-in SEO tools, optimiz checklists, and performance dashboards. When SEO specialists or writers are writing content, they can rely on Marketing Hub to provide:

• Detailed SEO recommendations
• On-page insights
• Technical improvements
• And, coming soon, AI Search Optimiz capabilities.

These alerts ensure your content is structured, findable, and answer-engine ready—bringing SEO and AEO workflows together in one place.

Combine all the benefits of Marketing Hub with an AI enhancement from Breeze Content Assistant, and the content is going to have the best chance of ranking on Google and AI engines. Breeze already generates answer-first content aligned with AEO best practices.

Marketing teams are using Breeze to create content faster and more consistently, and to generate summaries, definitions, FAQs, and scannable insights that AI engines can easily parse and cite. It reduces manual editing and enforces a clear, extraction-friendly structure.

Remember: When a page ranks number one and also appears in AI Overviews, it occupies multiple placements above the fold — often dominating more than half of the visible SERP. This is the fastest way to capture high-intent visibility.

I had a client secure both a rank-one placement and an AI Overview placement. Within the AI Overview, they were cited multiple times. As a result, the brand appeared five or six times at the top of Google. When AEO and SEO work together, a single high-performing page can effectively take over the entire first page of Google.

Step 3: Technical Optimization and Schema Implementation

Even the most brilliant content won’t appear in AI answers if models can’t parse it.

Technical optimization ensures your site can be crawled, understood, and trusted by answer engines. The most important elements are structured data/schema markup, entity clarity, and clean technical signals.

Structured data and schema markup enable answer engines to verify facts, map relationships between entities, and extract accurate answers. Schema markup and entity consistency strengthen your authority inside the AI knowledge graph.

Entity clarity ensures consistency in messaging across the web, making it more likely that citations will be accurate.

Clean technical signals ensure that bots for traditional search tools, like Google, can crawl the site and index content.

Step 4: AEO and SEO Analysis

AEO must be included in all SEO audits and reports. Typically, AEO measurement focuses on AI citations, mention quality, and assisted conversions

Just as SEO teams evaluate rankings, backlinks, Core Web Vitals, and keyword performance, AEO teams need to assess how your brand appears — or doesn’t appear — within AI-generated results.

Pro tip: Add AEO to your standard SEO reporting cadence. Treat AI visibility as seriously as rankings.

I added AI to my client’s Looker Studio report some time ago. As shown in the pictures below, we track:

AI Performance overall, including pages viewed, sessions, and AI tools sending traffic:

Conversions showing exactly how many conversions were made and how (form, phone, or email):

Step 5: Measuring Success and Content Iteration

AEO success cannot rely on clicks alone — because many of the most valuable interactions are zero-click. Instead, measure AI visibility, the quality of your citations, and the conversions influenced by AI exposure. 

How to Measure AEO Beyond Rankings and Clicks

Traditional SEO metrics don’t tell the whole story in a zero-click world. AI-generated answers influence decisions long before a user ever lands on your site, so AEO success must be measured through visibility, influence, and revenue impact.

The most accurate AEO measurement models focus on how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers, how those exposures influence behaviour, and whether the content being cited drives high-quality demand.

Below are the core AI visibility metrics every team should track.

Pages Viewed (Quantity & Type)

AI tools change their answers regularly, so no one can know exactly what page is being cited and when. However, marketing teams can track sessions to specific pages. Tracking which pages are being viewed—and how often—helps marketing teams understand where AI is pulling information from and how often. The pages that get clicked the most from an AI source are likely to be frequently cited.

What to measure:

• Increases in page views from AI sources
• The specific types of pages being viewed (service pages, product pages, local pages, blog posts, FAQ pages)
• Pages that users jump to after interacting with AI-led results

Pages that are frequently viewed—especially those not ranking one are often the ones surfacing heavily in AI models. Identifying these pages helps marketing strategists strengthen AEO-focused content clusters.

Pro tip: Kyle Rushton McGregor has a fantastic guide and free Looker Studio dashboard to help track AI visits.

Conversions

Although visibility is important, especially in an AI search era, conversions and revenue will always matter the most.

Marketing teams must measure conversions from AI traffic and revenue generated. Conversions are measured by tracking where people came from and what happened during that session. For example, if someone came from ChatGPT and filled out a contact form, then that’s a conversion attributable, either entirely or in part, to AEO.

Tip: Read How to Understand Attribution Reporting

When I measure conversions, I take steps to make attribution and impact measurable. For example, I add a “budget” question on forms so I can see what the prospect has to spend. In the example of the 10k lead from ChatGPT, I knew what the budget was because the form they filled out asked for it.

There is something else to consider, but it is harder to measure precisely: even when users don’t click through from an AI Overview or conversational answer, those citations still influence their decision-making. That’s why conversion analysis remains one of the most critical AEO metrics.

In your reporting, consider:

• Assisted conversions influenced by AI exposure
• Conversions on pages known to appear in AI answers
• Conversion rate changes after implementing AEO updates
• Multi-touch attribution where AI surfaces are part of the path to lead

Pro tip: Track conversion paths in HubSpot to identify where AEO visibility accelerates pipeline velocity.

Pages That Generate Conversions

Tracking which pages convert — and whether those pages also appear in AI answers — gives a complete view of AEO’s role in revenue generation. Pages with high conversion rates and AI visibility are your strongest assets.

What to measure:

• Pages that consistently drive form fills, demo requests, or sign-ups
• Correlation between AI Overview visibility and conversion surges
• Specific high-converting pages that appear across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews
• Pages that generate both last-touch and assisted conversions

The combination of AEO visibility and conversion performance tells which content is actually driving results. These pages should be prioritized for updates, schema enhancements, link building, and ongoing AEO optimization.

Lead Quality

AEO doesn’t just increase visibility; it enhances the type of visibility received. When your content appears in hyper-relevant AI answers, the leads that follow are often warmer and better aligned to your ICP.

What to measure:

• Fit score of leads generated from AEO-influenced pages
• Sales-qualified lead (SQL) rate from AI sources
• Lead velocity and time-to-first-action
• Content topics that repeatedly produce high-quality conversions

AI-driven discovery tends to attract more qualified prospects because the answer engine has already filtered for intent. High-quality leads are a signal that your answer-first content and entity clarity are working.

Pro tip: Use HubSpot lead scoring to compare AI-influenced leads with standard organic leads.

Frequently Asked Questions About Emerging Trends in Answer Engine Optimization

How quickly can we see the impact of AEO updates?

The impact of AEO updates typically appears within 2-6 weeks, with brands that have invested in SEO often seeing results even faster. Many brands are already cited in AI Overviews, or within Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Perplexity, thanks to their previous SEO efforts. There are a lot of crossovers between what works for SEO and what works for the latest AI trends.

For brands starting from scratch, early signals, like a citation for a niche search term, may be visible within two to six weeks. This has been my experience with a client who hadn’t previously invested in SEO. Two weeks after publishing a long-form, informational article, the client appeared in AI Overviews.

Do we need separate AEO content, or can we adapt existing pages?

Separate AEO content is usually unnecessary — most AEO work involves restructuring and strengthening existing website content. Effective AEO optimization includes adding answer-first summaries at the top of pages, standardizing facts and product descriptions for consistency, improving schema markup for better extraction, adding FAQs based on real user intent, and ensuring headings match how people phrase questions in conversational search.

This approach maximizes existing content investments while improving visibility across both traditional search and AI answer engines.

How do we choose the most effective answer engine optimization strategies for AI visibility?

Choose answer engine optimization strategies that improve websites for both users and AI by focusing on extractability, consistency, and authority. Effective strategies include building answer-first formatting that surfaces key information early, strengthening entity clarity across all pages, adding schema markup to priority content, creating content that directly addresses user questions, and prioritizing topics tied to revenue, conversion intent, and ideal customer profile pain points.

AEO isn’t about chasing every query — it’s about identifying the topics where your brand must appear because they influence pipeline, positioning, and perception.

What's the best way to integrate AEO with our existing SEO roadmap?

Integrate AEO with existing SEO roadmaps by updating processes rather than replacing them. Add answer-first sections to existing SEO pages, include schema as a standard part of content production, audit entity consistency during technical SEO checks, and evaluate both traditional rankings and AI citations in reporting. Treat AEO as the “zero-click layer” of SEO strategy.

Think of AEO as the evolution of SEO: one unified strategy where content ranks and gets cited.

Which tools should we start with to optimize content for answer engines?

Start with tools that support creation, optimiz, and monitoring:

• HubSpot Marketing Hub provides SEO recommendations, technical insights, and AI Search Optimization (beta).
• Breeze AI Suite accelerates AEO drafting, QA, and monitoring
• HubSpot Content Hub enables answer-first content creation and governance
• HubSpot Search Grader – for measuring your AEO/GEO performance and identifying gaps.

Together, these tools help you create structured, answer-ready content and track how well you’re surfacing across both traditional SERPs and AI engines.

The future of visibility belongs to brands optimized for answers.

Answer engine optimization is reshaping how customers discover, evaluate, and choose solutions in 2026. The brands investing in AEO now will earn disproportionate attention, trust, and demand as AI-powered search continues to grow.

Tools like HubSpot's AI Search Grader benchmark current performance across answer engines, while HubSpot Marketing Hub and Content Hub with Breeze Content Assistant help teams build, optimize, and measure answer-first content at scale. From my experience, AEO delivers impactful wins despite zero-click growth — the key is focusing efforts on the right pages and tracking AI-influenced conversions alongside traditional metrics. 

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/answer-engine-optimization-trends

Emerging trends in answer engine optimization are reshaping how brands earn visibility, trust, and demand in AI-powered search. Answer engines like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Gemini now deliver fully synthesized answers directly to users, compressing the traditional customer journey. According to HubSpot's Consumer Trends Report, 72% of consumers plan to use AI-powered search for shopping more frequently.

If your content isn’t structured for or easily parsed by answer engines, your brand won’t appear. Competitors will. Or worse, inaccurate narratives about your company, pulled from sources you don’t associate with, may surface prominently in AI-driven results. That’s a visibility risk no business can afford.

In this post, I break down the emerging trends in answer engine optimization, why they matter for revenue, and how to integrate AEO with traditional SEO strategies to drive full-funnel growth.

Table of Contents

• Why Emerging Trends in Answer Engine Optimization Matter Now
• 6 Emerging Trends in Answer Engine Optimization You Should Act On
• How to Integrate AEO Strategies With SEO for Full-Funnel Growth
• How to Measure AEO Beyond Rankings and Clicks
• Frequently Asked Questions About Emerging Trends in Answer Engine Optimization

Why Emerging Trends in Answer Engine Optimization Matter Now

Answer engine optimization matters because search behavior is fundamentally changing: AI Overviews reduce organic clicks but increase the value of citations, and conversational assistants are becoming preferred search options for consumers. HubSpot's Consumer Trends Report reveals that the most significant emotions consumers feel while shopping using generative AI are positive — appreciation, satisfaction, optimism, and joy.

The brands that will win in the future of search are those whose content can be cited, summarized, and reused by AI engines. While traditional search remains important and shouldn't be abandoned, neglecting AEO creates significant risks for brand visibility and control.

Here’s why it matters.

Brand perception is now shaped before the click.

AEO efforts can influence perception depending on how well the content appears in AI tools. If the facts about your product, pricing, or differentiators are inconsistent across pages, answer engines are less likely to trust or cite you.

What’s worse is that if your brand doesn’t provide the content, someone else will — an unhappy customer on Reddit, for example.

Marketing departments must control their product, service, or brand narrative; they must ensure their content is available for AI tools to summarize and deliver to relevant user queries.

Here’s an example of how third-party sources drive the narrative for HubSpot CRM in AI Overviews:

I searched for “best free CRM for small business,” and the AI Overviews recommended HubSpot as the top option. The source cited is Zapier. Directly below AI Overviews, HubSpot appears again, first, in “Sources across the web.” Brand trust has been built significantly before the opportunity to click on HubSpot’s traditional SEO listing.

Discovery in answer engines is intent-driven and contextual.

Users ask highly specific, high-commercial-intent questions to AI engines — for example, “best ERP for manufacturing under 200 seats”— and answer engines return summarized insights. When content clearly addresses these micro-intents, brands are more likely to appear in answer surfaces.

Understanding micro-intent requires deep audience research. Glimpse's gen AI-enabled research platform supports this approach, recommending that brands address “the concerns and desires of shoppers based on the responses of real consumers.” When marketing teams truly understand their buyers, they can tailor content strategies to support specific needs at precise moments in the decision journey.

The “best CRM example” above is also a good example for intent-driven search.

Glimpse’s gen AI-enabled research platform supports the concept of micro-intent. Glimpse recommended addressing “the concerns and desires of shoppers — based on the responses of real consumers.” When marketing really knows its buyers, they can tailor marketing and content strategies to support them.

Tip: For more guidance on audience research and understanding buyers, see Step 1 How to integrate AEO strategies with SEO for full-funnel growth

Lead quality improves when AI cites your content.

Unlike traditional SEO, where impressions can be broad and unfocused, AEO visibility aligns with precise problem statements. When your insights appear in an AI answer, the user has likely asked a very specific question or typed a particular query, as in the example above.

For the searches looking for solutions to a problem, you’re more likely to bring a highly relevant prospect to your website if they do go ahead and click.

This has been my experience with AI. Recently, I received an email from a client asking for a Power Hour. I asked where they found me, and it was ChatGPT. This prospect closed after two emails. They gathered all the information they needed from a conversation with ChatGPT and a review of my website. Trust had already been established, and the lead quality was so high that it was easy to close.

AEO directly impacts revenue attribution.

AEO can directly impact revenue. Although many queries typed into AI tools are informational, many are looking for comparisons during the buyer journey phase, when someone wants to make a purchase or even push “buy” on a product.

While these searches might be few and far between, they’re not to be ignored.

Here’s a screenshot from my client's Looker Studio dashboard where we track conversions from AI:

Conversions from ChatGPT have been increasing since around June, with a notable surge in October, the month we launched additional local pages (more on that next). On this dashboard, we can see exactly which pages ChatGPT has sent the user to and where they converted.

Note: The URLs are redacted for this article screenshot.

6 Emerging Trends in Answer Engine Optimization You Should Act On

The most important answer engine optimization trends in 2026 focus on six strategic areas: leveraging local pages for geographic visibility, implementing answer-first content formats, maintaining entity consistency, tracking AI visibility metrics, unifying AEO with SEO strategies, and optimizing multi-format content, including video and audio. These trends revolve around audience needs, entity clarity, structured answers, and creating content that AI can easily parse, cite, and trust.

1. Use local pages to your advantage.

Local intent is particularly useful for service-based businesses or those with stores, venues, or locations in specific geographic areas. A local search in AI can generate clicks to your website.

As mentioned above, people who search using AI are getting specific about what they want and where they need the service. Additionally, AI assistants are increasingly personalizing answers by region, drawing from pages that clearly communicate location, service availability, and entity-level details. Entity clarity supports consistent answers across AI engines.

Local pages help AEO because they give answer engines precise, structured information they can extract: what your business does, where the company operates, what it offers, and why you’re relevant for users in that geographic area.

This makes local pages strong candidates for citations in AI Overviews, ChatGPT answers, and map-based AI queries.

Actionable steps to optimise local pages for AEO:

• Create a dedicated, structured page for each location. Include NAP details (name, address, phone), service descriptions, hours, FAQs, and unique value propositions to give answer engines rich, location-specific facts to pull from.
• Use schema markup for local business entities. Adding LocalBusiness, PostalAddress, and Service schema helps AI systems understand your geographic relevance and increases the likelihood of selecting localised AI answers.
• Include hyper-local content that answers specific questions. Add content about service options, local availability, or regional variations.
• Ensure consistency across all local listings. Mismatched addresses, hours, or service offerings reduce your entity trust score, which directly impacts your likelihood of being cited.
• Add clear, short-form answers that ChatGPT and Google can summarise. Use punchy definitions, lists, and concise explanations—formats AI systems prefer.
• Add a contact form high up the page. And make sure there’s feedback on where the form was filled out. For example, you can create an invisible field on the page, or track conversions from local pages in Google Analytics (more on that later).

Important note: Do not create false local pages or try to game the algorithm. Less is more when it comes to local pages. Choose locations where your business can actually offer a solid service. Think about office locations or locations that the company regularly serves. Adding things like case studies will increase your expertise, experience, authority, and trust (E-E-A-T) signals.

Here’s an example of Chipotle’s local page for Kansas City:

Source

In my experience, local searches are creating demand for my clients. For example, one client has multiple venues in different locations where they provide services. We’ve built out structured venue pages to capture that demand — and it works. These pages now appear directly in ChatGPT, and more importantly, they convert. We track all conversions through Looker Studio, and the data is clear: well-structured local pages drive both AI visibility and bottom-line results.

Want more on local? Read my complete guide to local SEO here.

2. Answer-first content formats become mandatory.

AI engines prioritise content that surfaces the core answer at the very top of the page. In other words: get to the point as quickly as you can, then elaborate.

AI systems look for extractable content. When your key message is placed directly under a heading and formatted cleanly, it becomes significantly easier for answer engines to summarise, cite, and reuse it.

Answer-first content isn’t exactly new. SEO specialists have been writing in this format for years, probably as early as the featured snippet began dominating the top of Google; nevertheless, it’s worth noting here as an action point because it is perhaps more important than ever to implement this format in content.

Actionable steps to writing answer-first content formats:

• Get to the point in your writing. Make the most important point first, then elaborate.
• Use clear headers, lists, bolding, and tight paragraphs that AI can easily parse.
• Add a “What this means” or “Why it matters” summary under key sections.

Pro Tip: Read about the inverted triangle technique that journalists have used for years; implement it into your writing.

I have always used this answer-first content method in my content. It’s how I was snagging featured snippets almost a decade ago, and it’s how I make content skimmable for human readers. The answer-first format is almost definitely how I achieved visibility in AI Overviews for my clients. Although this is a format I’ve used for many years, I am still finding ways of doing it more consistently in my writing. It feels more important to do so now.

3. Entity consistency is critical.

The consistency with which your brand’s entities appear across the web is an emerging trend in AEO.

Honestly, this always mattered. But it’s worth paying extra attention to brand consistency now. For example, name, services, pricing, product categories, industries served, and differentiators.

If these facts are inconsistent across your site, directory listings, or third-party mentions, your authority is questionable, and citation likelihood may decrease.

Or worse, the AI will pull incorrect information as if it were fact.

If you’re moving address, for example, then marketing becomes responsible for updating the details everywhere.

Actionable steps for maintaining entity consistency:

• Use consistent naming conventions, product descriptions, and claims across every page.
• Use schema types like Organization, Product, Service, and FAQ to reinforce factual accuracy. Schema markup improves content extraction and voice search visibility
• Keep a centralised “Source of Truth” document so all teams publish the same facts.
• If entities or facts are changed, update them everywhere, not just on your own site.

4. AI visibility becomes as important as organic clicks.

As zero-click results surge, traditional KPIs like impressions and rankings tell only half the story. Brands are now shifting toward measurement models that focus on AI visibility metrics — how often a brand is cited, mentioned, or included in an AI-generated answer.

This is a major shift in the industry, and it requires a complete search mindset shift. Even if traffic declines, your content can still influence pipeline, authority, and demand if it appears inside AI answers. Measuring AI citations gives marketing teams a clearer view of organic influence in a zero-click world.

Actionable steps:

• Track citations, mentions, and placement inside AI answers.
• Measure assisted conversions
• Use tools like HubSpot’s AI Search Grader to benchmark your AEO/GEO performance.
• Build dashboards that combine page performance + AI visibility + conversion impact.

Here’s what HubSpot’s AI Search Grader looks like:

The AI Search Grader shows how HubSpot performs in three Large Language Models (LLMs), OpenAI, Perplexity, and Gemini, and across a range of metrics, including:

• Brand recognition
• Market Score
• Presence Quality
• Brand Sentiment
• Share of Voice

Pro Tip: SEO teams now report on metrics that show the impact of AI on a business's bottom line. For more information on SEO reporting, read: How to create an SEO report [+ benefits, best practices, and examples]. This article covers everything on SEO reporting, including what metrics to track.

5. AEO and SEO unify into a single growth strategy.

AEO and SEO indeed have some different strategies, but for now, the emerging trend is that AEO is the natural evolution of SEO.

Traditional SEO, including rankings, traffic, long-tail keywords, backlinks, etc., remains essential, but AEO adds another layer: visibility matters, answer-first optimisation, mentions in AI Overviews, and further onus on structured content, schema, entity clarity, and citation-readiness.

Winning brands blend both approaches to capture full-funnel visibility across:

• Traditional blue links
• AI Overviews
• Conversational engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini)

Actionable steps for unifying AEO and SEO:

• Align SEO keyword research with answer-intent research for AEO.
• Standardise schema across all priority pages.
• Add answer-first summaries to existing SEO pages.
• Use HubSpot Marketing Hub and Content Hub to merge SEO + AEO workflows.
• Use Breeze to enforce answer-first formatting and factual consistency.

6. Multi-format answers (audio, video, and short-form summaries) are used by AI.

AI engines increasingly pull from multimedia content, not just text. Video transcripts, short video explainers, and even podcasts are now sources that AI systems use to build answers.

More notably, Google’s AI Overviews and YouTube AI search features can surface a video and start playback at the exact moment the answer occurs.

Here’s an example:

If someone types into Google, “how to conduct a competitive audit,” the video will be cited, and the play will take place exactly at that section, skipping the intro and other irrelevant chapters.

When creating video content, structure explanations clearly and include timestamped chapters to help AI identify the “best answer moment” in your video.

Actionable steps for earning AEO citations with videos:

• Add clean transcripts to every video and podcast.
• Add chapter markers with answer-oriented titles (“What is X?”, “How does Y work?”).
• Keep core explanations within the first minute of the video.
• Upload to YouTube even if the channel is small — YouTube feeds both Google AI and Gemini.
• Turn transcripts into answer-first written content to increase citation reach.

How to Integrate AEO Strategies With SEO for Full-Funnel Growth

Integrating AEO with SEO requires aligning five key activities: audience research, answer-first content creation, technical optimization with schema implementation, unified analysis, and continuous measurement. While AEO is more of a search evolution, the two are interconnected disciplines that together drive discovery, evaluation, and conversion across both traditional blue links and AI-generated answer surfaces.

By aligning research, content creation, technical optimization, analysis, and measurement, teams can build a unified strategy that attracts high-intent prospects whether or not they click. The steps below outline how to integrate AEO with traditional SEO strategies.

Step 1: Research

AEO isn’t about keywords. Contrary to popular belief, ranking in top traditional search spots is not a prerequisite for appearing in AI Overviews or answer engines. AI systems surface the clearest, most contextually relevant answers regardless of traditional search rankings — I've seen websites on page two or three of Google, or even outside the first five pages, appear prominently in AI-generated answers.

Marketing teams need deep insight into three areas:

• What problems audiences have and what solutions they need
• How audiences search and which tools they prefer
• Specific terminology audiences use

Understanding these areas shapes an effective AEO content strategy.

Instead of relying solely on keyword research, develop detailed buyer personas that reveal decision-making patterns, problem statements, and informational needs. HubSpot Make My Persona helps marketing teams build personas based on real behaviors, goals, and challenges, creating the foundation for highly targeted content.

Specificity drives results. I run SEM marketing agency forank with Co-Founder Leigh Buttrey, our in-house PPC specialist. We create holistic campaigns spanning SEO, AEO, and PPC. For one client, we created a landing page targeted at a single buyer type with one specific pain point. The page aligned so closely with audience needs and search intent that it generated a £10k lead from a single visit. That level of precision doesn't happen with generic SEO targeting — it happens when teams build content deliberately for the exact person they want to attract.

Pro tip: Don’t neglect traditional SEO when creating these landing pages. We did, of course, also optimize the page with keywords so it ranked in Google, too. Buttrey also pointed her PPC ads at the page. The page becomes a multi-purpose business asset, not just a page to gain visibility in AI.

Step 2: Content Creation

Content is the backbone of AEO. Answer engines can only cite what already exists — AI models do not invent your expertise; they summarise and reorganise it. If your content isn’t present, isn’t structured for extraction, or doesn’t directly address intent, your brand simply won’t appear in AI Overviews or conversational answers. That’s why content creation must be strategic, answer-first, and supported by the right tools.

HubSpot’s ecosystem makes content creation significantly easier.

Here’s how:

HubSpot Marketing Hub is a marketing suite that helps teams optimise content for both SEO and AEO. It’s a complete marketing platform with built-in SEO tools, optimiz checklists, and performance dashboards. When SEO specialists or writers are writing content, they can rely on Marketing Hub to provide:

• Detailed SEO recommendations
• On-page insights
• Technical improvements
• And, coming soon, AI Search Optimiz capabilities.

These alerts ensure your content is structured, findable, and answer-engine ready—bringing SEO and AEO workflows together in one place.

Combine all the benefits of Marketing Hub with an AI enhancement from Breeze Content Assistant, and the content is going to have the best chance of ranking on Google and AI engines. Breeze already generates answer-first content aligned with AEO best practices.

Marketing teams are using Breeze to create content faster and more consistently, and to generate summaries, definitions, FAQs, and scannable insights that AI engines can easily parse and cite. It reduces manual editing and enforces a clear, extraction-friendly structure.

Remember: When a page ranks number one and also appears in AI Overviews, it occupies multiple placements above the fold — often dominating more than half of the visible SERP. This is the fastest way to capture high-intent visibility.

I had a client secure both a rank-one placement and an AI Overview placement. Within the AI Overview, they were cited multiple times. As a result, the brand appeared five or six times at the top of Google. When AEO and SEO work together, a single high-performing page can effectively take over the entire first page of Google.

Step 3: Technical Optimization and Schema Implementation

Even the most brilliant content won’t appear in AI answers if models can’t parse it.

Technical optimization ensures your site can be crawled, understood, and trusted by answer engines. The most important elements are structured data/schema markup, entity clarity, and clean technical signals.

Structured data and schema markup enable answer engines to verify facts, map relationships between entities, and extract accurate answers. Schema markup and entity consistency strengthen your authority inside the AI knowledge graph.

Entity clarity ensures consistency in messaging across the web, making it more likely that citations will be accurate.

Clean technical signals ensure that bots for traditional search tools, like Google, can crawl the site and index content.

Step 4: AEO and SEO Analysis

AEO must be included in all SEO audits and reports. Typically, AEO measurement focuses on AI citations, mention quality, and assisted conversions

Just as SEO teams evaluate rankings, backlinks, Core Web Vitals, and keyword performance, AEO teams need to assess how your brand appears — or doesn’t appear — within AI-generated results.

Pro tip: Add AEO to your standard SEO reporting cadence. Treat AI visibility as seriously as rankings.

I added AI to my client’s Looker Studio report some time ago. As shown in the pictures below, we track:

AI Performance overall, including pages viewed, sessions, and AI tools sending traffic:

Conversions showing exactly how many conversions were made and how (form, phone, or email):

Step 5: Measuring Success and Content Iteration

AEO success cannot rely on clicks alone — because many of the most valuable interactions are zero-click. Instead, measure AI visibility, the quality of your citations, and the conversions influenced by AI exposure. 

How to Measure AEO Beyond Rankings and Clicks

Traditional SEO metrics don’t tell the whole story in a zero-click world. AI-generated answers influence decisions long before a user ever lands on your site, so AEO success must be measured through visibility, influence, and revenue impact.

The most accurate AEO measurement models focus on how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers, how those exposures influence behaviour, and whether the content being cited drives high-quality demand.

Below are the core AI visibility metrics every team should track.

Pages Viewed (Quantity & Type)

AI tools change their answers regularly, so no one can know exactly what page is being cited and when. However, marketing teams can track sessions to specific pages. Tracking which pages are being viewed—and how often—helps marketing teams understand where AI is pulling information from and how often. The pages that get clicked the most from an AI source are likely to be frequently cited.

What to measure:

• Increases in page views from AI sources
• The specific types of pages being viewed (service pages, product pages, local pages, blog posts, FAQ pages)
• Pages that users jump to after interacting with AI-led results

Pages that are frequently viewed—especially those not ranking one are often the ones surfacing heavily in AI models. Identifying these pages helps marketing strategists strengthen AEO-focused content clusters.

Pro tip: Kyle Rushton McGregor has a fantastic guide and free Looker Studio dashboard to help track AI visits.

Conversions

Although visibility is important, especially in an AI search era, conversions and revenue will always matter the most.

Marketing teams must measure conversions from AI traffic and revenue generated. Conversions are measured by tracking where people came from and what happened during that session. For example, if someone came from ChatGPT and filled out a contact form, then that’s a conversion attributable, either entirely or in part, to AEO.

Tip: Read How to Understand Attribution Reporting

When I measure conversions, I take steps to make attribution and impact measurable. For example, I add a “budget” question on forms so I can see what the prospect has to spend. In the example of the 10k lead from ChatGPT, I knew what the budget was because the form they filled out asked for it.

There is something else to consider, but it is harder to measure precisely: even when users don’t click through from an AI Overview or conversational answer, those citations still influence their decision-making. That’s why conversion analysis remains one of the most critical AEO metrics.

In your reporting, consider:

• Assisted conversions influenced by AI exposure
• Conversions on pages known to appear in AI answers
• Conversion rate changes after implementing AEO updates
• Multi-touch attribution where AI surfaces are part of the path to lead

Pro tip: Track conversion paths in HubSpot to identify where AEO visibility accelerates pipeline velocity.

Pages That Generate Conversions

Tracking which pages convert — and whether those pages also appear in AI answers — gives a complete view of AEO’s role in revenue generation. Pages with high conversion rates and AI visibility are your strongest assets.

What to measure:

• Pages that consistently drive form fills, demo requests, or sign-ups
• Correlation between AI Overview visibility and conversion surges
• Specific high-converting pages that appear across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews
• Pages that generate both last-touch and assisted conversions

The combination of AEO visibility and conversion performance tells which content is actually driving results. These pages should be prioritized for updates, schema enhancements, link building, and ongoing AEO optimization.

Lead Quality

AEO doesn’t just increase visibility; it enhances the type of visibility received. When your content appears in hyper-relevant AI answers, the leads that follow are often warmer and better aligned to your ICP.

What to measure:

• Fit score of leads generated from AEO-influenced pages
• Sales-qualified lead (SQL) rate from AI sources
• Lead velocity and time-to-first-action
• Content topics that repeatedly produce high-quality conversions

AI-driven discovery tends to attract more qualified prospects because the answer engine has already filtered for intent. High-quality leads are a signal that your answer-first content and entity clarity are working.

Pro tip: Use HubSpot lead scoring to compare AI-influenced leads with standard organic leads.

Frequently Asked Questions About Emerging Trends in Answer Engine Optimization

How quickly can we see the impact of AEO updates?

The impact of AEO updates typically appears within 2-6 weeks, with brands that have invested in SEO often seeing results even faster. Many brands are already cited in AI Overviews, or within Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Perplexity, thanks to their previous SEO efforts. There are a lot of crossovers between what works for SEO and what works for the latest AI trends.

For brands starting from scratch, early signals, like a citation for a niche search term, may be visible within two to six weeks. This has been my experience with a client who hadn’t previously invested in SEO. Two weeks after publishing a long-form, informational article, the client appeared in AI Overviews.

Do we need separate AEO content, or can we adapt existing pages?

Separate AEO content is usually unnecessary — most AEO work involves restructuring and strengthening existing website content. Effective AEO optimization includes adding answer-first summaries at the top of pages, standardizing facts and product descriptions for consistency, improving schema markup for better extraction, adding FAQs based on real user intent, and ensuring headings match how people phrase questions in conversational search.

This approach maximizes existing content investments while improving visibility across both traditional search and AI answer engines.

How do we choose the most effective answer engine optimization strategies for AI visibility?

Choose answer engine optimization strategies that improve websites for both users and AI by focusing on extractability, consistency, and authority. Effective strategies include building answer-first formatting that surfaces key information early, strengthening entity clarity across all pages, adding schema markup to priority content, creating content that directly addresses user questions, and prioritizing topics tied to revenue, conversion intent, and ideal customer profile pain points.

AEO isn’t about chasing every query — it’s about identifying the topics where your brand must appear because they influence pipeline, positioning, and perception.

What's the best way to integrate AEO with our existing SEO roadmap?

Integrate AEO with existing SEO roadmaps by updating processes rather than replacing them. Add answer-first sections to existing SEO pages, include schema as a standard part of content production, audit entity consistency during technical SEO checks, and evaluate both traditional rankings and AI citations in reporting. Treat AEO as the “zero-click layer” of SEO strategy.

Think of AEO as the evolution of SEO: one unified strategy where content ranks and gets cited.

Which tools should we start with to optimize content for answer engines?

Start with tools that support creation, optimiz, and monitoring:

• HubSpot Marketing Hub provides SEO recommendations, technical insights, and AI Search Optimization (beta).
• Breeze AI Suite accelerates AEO drafting, QA, and monitoring
• HubSpot Content Hub enables answer-first content creation and governance
• HubSpot Search Grader – for measuring your AEO/GEO performance and identifying gaps.

Together, these tools help you create structured, answer-ready content and track how well you’re surfacing across both traditional SERPs and AI engines.

The future of visibility belongs to brands optimized for answers.

Answer engine optimization is reshaping how customers discover, evaluate, and choose solutions in 2026. The brands investing in AEO now will earn disproportionate attention, trust, and demand as AI-powered search continues to grow.

Tools like HubSpot's AI Search Grader benchmark current performance across answer engines, while HubSpot Marketing Hub and Content Hub with Breeze Content Assistant help teams build, optimize, and measure answer-first content at scale. From my experience, AEO delivers impactful wins despite zero-click growth — the key is focusing efforts on the right pages and tracking AI-influenced conversions alongside traditional metrics. 

via Perfecte news Non connection

Forget Follower Count: What Actually Drives Sales, According to a TikTok Marketing Expert

If you're starting off the year with a bunch of execs demanding explosive growth in 2026, you'll like this creator's refreshing take: "Your brand doesn't need to be loved by everyone. Even if you've captured just 3% of the market, your brand can stay alive." 

While I'm aware "staying alive" is more disco anthem than marketing goal, her point holds: Trying to appeal to everyone in 2026 isn't going to work… and it also doesn't need to.

Crafting strong marketing that resonates with a loyal group of enthusiasts is better than Hail Marying your brand on a billboard in Times Square. 

Jemma Wu

Integrated Marketing & Partnerships Strategist

• Fun fact: Joined the founding team of the instant beauty brand Never Have I Ever with a group of friends from the creative industry. In just two years, fully bootstrapped and built from scratch, they scaled the brand into retailers like Urban Outfitters, PacSun, and World Market, while reaching $1.5M in total DTC and wholesale sales.
  
  
• Claim to fame: Helped brands including The Ordinary, CeraVe, TikTok Shop, and Crocs achieve an average 51% sales increase within six months through authentic audience connection and fully integrated marketing campaigns.

Lesson 1: Great marketing lives at the intersection of seeing the forest and examining the trees.

Wu approaches TikTok videos and fashion through the same lens. 

"Coming from a designer background back in the day, I was a doer. Now, whenever I see something, [whether it's] marketing content or a garment, my first reaction is: 'How did they make this? What tools did they use? How did they cut it? What’s the angle they used?'"

Those questions have served her well in marketing. She's very detail-oriented, and cares as much about the practical execution of marketing as she does the high-level vision. 

It's a lesson we can all lean into in 2026: Sure, the slide decks and Zoom meetings filled with buzzwords like omni-channel growth have a time and place, but both leaders and ICs need to take responsibility for understanding the nitty-gritty that goes into marketing. 

Once you've ironed out the big-picture vision, it's worth taking some time to ask the second-, third-, and fourth-level questions that help create strong marketing content. Whether you're leading the campaign or in-the-weeds, you should care just as much about the tone, copy, and visuals as you do about the high-level messaging.

Lesson 2: Authentic community trumps follower count.

Audience size doesn't matter nearly as much as audience interest does.

During her time as marketing director at a TikTok Shop partner agency, Wu once generated $350k in revenue on an eight-hour livestream with creator Avery Mills (a 90 Day Fiancé alum). 

Mills has roughly 500k TikTok followers. Nothing to sneeze at, but only half the audience size of another influencer Wu worked with who had 1m+ followers — and only generated $5K in six hours. 

Mills may have looked like a less optimal investment on paper, but she delivered 70X more revenue compared to the higher-profile creator.

Mills was tasked with selling a perfume bundle… to a TikTok following who'd never had a chance to smell the perfume in real life. Talk about a tough sell. 

And yet she was able to rack up $350k in sales by appealing to her audience's interests and making genuine connections with them. 

As Wu describes it: "She knew what her audience wanted. Not everyone loves vanilla — like I personally would not use that. But [Mills knew] her audience is crazy about it. She's a good salesperson." 

The lesson here is twofold: 1) Trust smaller-scale creators who have engaged audiences rather than simply chasing vanity metrics, and 2) once you've hired that creator, let them lead the show. They know their audience better than you do.

Lesson 3: Got a small budget? Flyers in Washington Square Park work, too.

"I know what it's like to work with a $1 million budget. You can ask helicopters to show up, cars, like it's a fashion show. But when you don't have that budget, there are plenty of free tactics." 

Wu once asked people to put flyers around New York City, telling people about a free contest in Washington Square Park. People showed up, someone hosted the contest, and they got tons of free content from it. 

If you're not as interested in in-person marketing events, consider these low-budget digital marketing activities that are largely free:

• Newsletters (ahem, ahem) 
• UGC campaigns
• TikTok vids
• Guest-starring on industry podcasts

"For small brands, it's more about generating buzz within your community. There are so many things they can do that are free for marketing."

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/jemma-wu-forget-follower-count

If you're starting off the year with a bunch of execs demanding explosive growth in 2026, you'll like this creator's refreshing take: "Your brand doesn't need to be loved by everyone. Even if you've captured just 3% of the market, your brand can stay alive." 

While I'm aware "staying alive" is more disco anthem than marketing goal, her point holds: Trying to appeal to everyone in 2026 isn't going to work… and it also doesn't need to.

Crafting strong marketing that resonates with a loyal group of enthusiasts is better than Hail Marying your brand on a billboard in Times Square. 

Jemma Wu

Integrated Marketing & Partnerships Strategist

• Fun fact: Joined the founding team of the instant beauty brand Never Have I Ever with a group of friends from the creative industry. In just two years, fully bootstrapped and built from scratch, they scaled the brand into retailers like Urban Outfitters, PacSun, and World Market, while reaching $1.5M in total DTC and wholesale sales.
  
  
• Claim to fame: Helped brands including The Ordinary, CeraVe, TikTok Shop, and Crocs achieve an average 51% sales increase within six months through authentic audience connection and fully integrated marketing campaigns.

Lesson 1: Great marketing lives at the intersection of seeing the forest and examining the trees.

Wu approaches TikTok videos and fashion through the same lens. 

"Coming from a designer background back in the day, I was a doer. Now, whenever I see something, [whether it's] marketing content or a garment, my first reaction is: 'How did they make this? What tools did they use? How did they cut it? What’s the angle they used?'"

Those questions have served her well in marketing. She's very detail-oriented, and cares as much about the practical execution of marketing as she does the high-level vision. 

It's a lesson we can all lean into in 2026: Sure, the slide decks and Zoom meetings filled with buzzwords like omni-channel growth have a time and place, but both leaders and ICs need to take responsibility for understanding the nitty-gritty that goes into marketing. 

Once you've ironed out the big-picture vision, it's worth taking some time to ask the second-, third-, and fourth-level questions that help create strong marketing content. Whether you're leading the campaign or in-the-weeds, you should care just as much about the tone, copy, and visuals as you do about the high-level messaging.

Lesson 2: Authentic community trumps follower count.

Audience size doesn't matter nearly as much as audience interest does.

During her time as marketing director at a TikTok Shop partner agency, Wu once generated $350k in revenue on an eight-hour livestream with creator Avery Mills (a 90 Day Fiancé alum). 

Mills has roughly 500k TikTok followers. Nothing to sneeze at, but only half the audience size of another influencer Wu worked with who had 1m+ followers — and only generated $5K in six hours. 

Mills may have looked like a less optimal investment on paper, but she delivered 70X more revenue compared to the higher-profile creator.

Mills was tasked with selling a perfume bundle… to a TikTok following who'd never had a chance to smell the perfume in real life. Talk about a tough sell. 

And yet she was able to rack up $350k in sales by appealing to her audience's interests and making genuine connections with them. 

As Wu describes it: "She knew what her audience wanted. Not everyone loves vanilla — like I personally would not use that. But [Mills knew] her audience is crazy about it. She's a good salesperson." 

The lesson here is twofold: 1) Trust smaller-scale creators who have engaged audiences rather than simply chasing vanity metrics, and 2) once you've hired that creator, let them lead the show. They know their audience better than you do.

Lesson 3: Got a small budget? Flyers in Washington Square Park work, too.

"I know what it's like to work with a $1 million budget. You can ask helicopters to show up, cars, like it's a fashion show. But when you don't have that budget, there are plenty of free tactics." 

Wu once asked people to put flyers around New York City, telling people about a free contest in Washington Square Park. People showed up, someone hosted the contest, and they got tons of free content from it. 

If you're not as interested in in-person marketing events, consider these low-budget digital marketing activities that are largely free:

• Newsletters (ahem, ahem) 
• UGC campaigns
• TikTok vids
• Guest-starring on industry podcasts

"For small brands, it's more about generating buzz within your community. There are so many things they can do that are free for marketing."

via Perfecte news Non connection

Marketing efficiency ratio: How to calculate and improve yours

The marketing efficiency ratio (MER) measures how much revenue marketing generates for every dollar spent. MER is calculated by dividing total revenue by total marketing spend for a defined period. Unlike ROAS, which focuses on the return of specific ad campaigns, MER gives a blended, executive-level view of overall marketing effectiveness across all channels. A higher MER indicates more efficient marketing performance, although what counts as “good” depends on margins, customer behavior, and business model.

As search, analytics, and attribution evolve, marketing efficiency and MER have become headline metrics for marketers, revenue leaders, and finance teams. MER captures the holistic performance of marketing investments and highlights whether the organization is generating sustainable returns.

This guide explains what MER means, how to calculate it, when to use it, how to improve it, and which complementary metrics matter most.

Want to track and optimize MER with unified data? Start free with HubSpot.

Table of Contents

• What is the marketing efficiency ratio?
• How to Calculate Marketing Efficiency Ratio
• Marketing Efficiency Ratio vs ROAS
• What is a good marketing efficiency ratio?
• How to Improve Your Marketing Efficiency Ratio
• Marketing Efficiency Metrics to Track Alongside MER
• Marketing Efficiency Ratio Pitfalls to Avoid
• Frequently Asked Questions About Marketing Efficiency Ratio

What is the marketing efficiency ratio?

The marketing efficiency ratio (MER) is the total revenue generated divided by the total marketing spend for a specific period, giving a blended view of how efficiently marketing contributes to overall revenue.

What is MER?

MER measures overall marketing effectiveness across all channels and reflects the combined impact of paid, organic, referral, partner, and brand-led activity. Because it compares all revenue to all marketing spend, it reflects how the entire marketing ecosystem is performing — campaigns, organic traffic, referral channels, brand building, partnerships, and everything in between. This makes the marketing efficiency ratio one of the simplest ways to evaluate full-funnel performance.

MER should include all revenue generated during the reporting period — paid, organic, referral, partner, and direct — as long as the revenue definition stays consistent across reporting windows. This ensures MER accurately reflects the full commercial impact of marketing activity.

HubSpot’s Smart CRM enables unified tracking and reporting of MER across channels by connecting revenue, spend, and attribution data in one place.

What does MER measure?

MER measures overall marketing effectiveness, while ROAS (return on ad spend) measures channel-level return on ad spend, making MER especially valuable for cross-functional decisions. By capturing the entire revenue picture, MER cuts through attribution noise and helps executives understand whether marketing investments support sustainable growth. This broader view is particularly helpful for ecommerce brands, omnichannel marketers, revenue leaders, and B2B teams who report blended performance across long sales cycles. For this reason, the marketing efficiency ratio is now used widely in executive dashboards and board-level reporting.

HubSpot’s Marketing Hub strengthens MER analysis by unifying revenue, spend, and attribution data in one connected system. When all marketing activity runs through a single platform, MER becomes more accurate and easier to interpret across channels.

Even though MER provides an essential top-down view of efficiency, it cannot diagnose which individual campaigns or channels are driving performance. Instead, MER becomes most actionable when paired with metrics like ROAS, CAC, LTV, and channel-level revenue.

At its core, the marketing efficiency ratio highlights whether marketing activity is generating sustainable, profitable revenue.

What MER Measures:

• The full revenue impact of all marketing activity.
• Blended performance across paid, organic, and referral channels.
• Business-level efficiency and profitability.
• High-level effectiveness for budgeting, forecasting, and board reporting.

What MER Does Not Measure

• Individual channel performance.
• The contribution of specific campaigns or creatives.
• Attribution patterns between marketing touchpoints.

How to Calculate Marketing Efficiency Ratio

The marketing efficiency ratio is calculated by dividing total revenue by total marketing spend for a specific period, producing a single blended metric that shows how efficiently marketing generates revenue. MER equals total revenue divided by total marketing spend, and this structure makes MER simple to calculate, compare, and standardize.

The Marketing Efficiency Ratio Formula

MER relies on two consistent inputs: the total revenue generated during the period (gross or net, as long as it’s defined the same way each time) and the total marketing spend associated with that same period. Because MER covers all revenue — not only attributed revenue — it provides a holistic signal that reflects the entire marketing ecosystem.

Teams often revisit the marketing efficiency ratio weekly or monthly to monitor efficiency trends.

Example: MER Calculation

A business generates $500,000 in total revenue in a quarter and invests $100,000 in marketing during that same quarter.

$500,000 ÷ $100,000 = MER of 5.0

An MER of 5.0 means the business generated $5 in revenue for every $1 spent on marketing. This example illustrates that MER measures overall marketing effectiveness, not channel-level performance.

A consistent marketing efficiency ratio allows organizations to compare efficiency across channels, seasons, or growth stages.

Platforms like HubSpot’s Marketing Hub simplify this calculation by centralizing campaign data, revenue attribution, and spend tracking inside the Smart CRM. With unified reporting, MER can be calculated consistently without pulling spreadsheets from multiple tools.

Why Period Consistency Matters

MER becomes unreliable if revenue and spend periods aren’t aligned. Monthly MER helps teams identify short-term efficiency swings, while quarterly or annual MER works better for long-cycle B2B models. Keeping inputs consistent each time ensures MER remains stable and comparable across reporting periods.

Pro tip: Compare MER periods consistently: month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter, or year-over-year.

How to Track the Marketing Efficiency Ratio in HubSpot

Marketers can track the marketing efficiency ratio in HubSpot by combining the total revenue and total marketing spend inside a unified dashboard. HubSpot’s Smart CRM connects revenue, attribution, and spend data across channels, allowing teams to calculate MER using standard or custom reports. Teams typically create a single dashboard tile that divides total revenue by marketing spend for a selected period, then layer it with ROAS, CAC, and channel-level data for deeper analysis.

Marketing Efficiency Ratio vs ROAS

MER differs from ROAS, which measures return on ad spend at the channel or campaign level. Because the marketing efficiency ratio measures overall marketing effectiveness across all channels, the two metrics are complementary rather than interchangeable. MER measures overall efficiency, ROAS measures channel-level performance, and together they help allocate budgets more effectively. Understanding the difference between MER and ROAS is essential for comparing both metrics across channels and business models.

What ROAS Measures

ROAS (return on ad spend) evaluates the efficiency of individual advertising channels or campaigns.

ROAS = Revenue Attributed to Ads / Ad Spend

ROAS helps media buyers optimize budgets, bids, audiences, and creative assets. It offers granular insight into how specific tactics perform, but it cannot show whether the entire marketing function is generating sustainable returns.

What MER Measures

The MER calculator reflects the aggregate performance of all marketing activities by comparing total revenue to total marketing spend.

MER = Total Revenue / Total Marketing Spend

This broader view helps executives understand whether total marketing investment is producing efficient top-line results, even when attribution is noisy or incomplete.

How MER and ROAS Work Together

Because MER measures overall marketing effectiveness while ROAS measures channel-level return on ad spend, teams get the most insight when using both metrics together. ROAS shows where spend should be allocated; MER shows whether total marketing spending is generating profitable revenue.

High ROAS with declining MER may indicate overspending on upper-funnel channels, while steady MER with falling ROAS may signal channel saturation or diminishing returns.

When to Use Each Metric

• Use ROAS for media planning, channel optimization, creative testing, and performance marketing decisions.
• Use MER for budget planning, forecasting, executive reporting, and evaluating whether marketing as a whole is contributing efficiently to revenue.

Marketing Hub’s attribution dashboards make it easier to compare ROAS at the channel level with MER at the business level. Because both metrics sit inside the same reporting environment, teams can see which channels contribute meaningfully to total revenue and which only appear efficient in isolation.

What is a good marketing efficiency ratio?

A “good” marketing efficiency ratio depends entirely on the business model, margin profile, and growth strategy. There is no universal MER target because companies generate and deploy marketing spend differently, and those differences meaningfully change what efficiency looks like.

A strong marketing efficiency ratio typically reflects aligned spend, healthy margins, and predictable customer behavior.

Businesses with higher contribution margins can often sustain a higher MER threshold, while businesses with thinner margins typically need a more conservative efficiency baseline. This reinforces the principle that a good MER depends on business model, gross margin, and growth goals, not on a single benchmark.

How to Assess MER by Business Model

DTC and Ecommerce

MER typically varies based on contribution margin, customer repeat behavior, and promotional intensity. Brands built on high-margin products or strong LTVs often operate with more room to scale spend while maintaining an efficient MER.

Retail and Low-Margin CPG

Lower margins usually require stricter efficiency targets. In these models, MER is often paired with contribution margin or cost-of-goods analysis to determine whether marketing spend supports profitable growth.

B2B SaaS

Long sales cycles can make closed-revenue MER misleading. Many companies use Pipeline MER — pipeline generated divided by marketing spend — to understand early-stage efficiency before deals close.

Enterprise and High-Ticket B2B

Deal velocity and deal size cause MER to fluctuate significantly. For these organizations, the CAC payback period or LTV-to-CAC ratio often provides a more reliable efficiency signal than MER alone.

Some organizations also track a sales and marketing efficiency ratio to evaluate combined commercial performance. For deeper context on commercial performance, see our guide to revenue performance management.

What Influences a “Good” MER

• Contribution margin and COGS
• Customer lifetime value (LTV)
• Refund and return rates
• Sales cycle length
• Channel mix and acquisition model
• Stage of growth (scaling vs efficiency-focused)

Tracking changes in the marketing efficiency ratio over time helps leaders understand whether efficiency is improving, declining, or stabilizing. In most cases, organizations establish a “good” MER by looking at their own historical performance, not by comparing themselves to other industries.

Pro tip: Pair MER with contribution margin to ensure marketing is generating profitable growth.

How to Improve Your Marketing Efficiency Ratio

Improving MER requires better conversion, cleaner data, and more efficient channel allocation. Moreover, improving MER requires increasing revenue per visitor, reducing wasted spend, and maintaining accurate, unified data across channels. As a result, the most effective tactics focus on strengthening inputs rather than manipulating the metric itself.

Many of the most effective ways to improve marketing efficiency — better data, better attribution, better conversion, and better automation — are significantly easier with HubSpot Marketing Hub. Because Marketing Hub connects campaigns, leads, revenue, and reporting inside the Smart CRM, teams can optimize efficiency without juggling multiple tools.

Each tactic below directly affects the marketing efficiency ratio by improving revenue quality or reducing unnecessary spend.

Consolidate marketing data in a Smart CRM.

Unifying marketing, sales, and customer data ensures MER is calculated on consistent, reliable inputs. HubSpot’s Smart CRM connects revenue, attribution, and contact behavior across channels, creating a single source of truth for tracking efficiency. Better yet, it makes it easier to automate your processes end-to-end.

Pro tip: MER becomes far more stable when revenue and spend data flow through a single system rather than multiple disconnected platforms.

Optimize your media mix using attribution insights.

Attribution models reveal which channels contribute meaningfully to revenue. HubSpot’s Marketing Hub includes first-touch, last-touch, linear, and data-driven attribution, helping teams compare channel-level ROAS with organization-level MER.

Pro tip: If a channel has strong ROAS but MER doesn’t improve, it’s likely shifting revenue from other sources rather than adding net-new growth.

Improve on-site conversion rates.

Higher conversion rates increase revenue without increasing spend, which directly lifts MER. Improvements to messaging clarity, page speed, CTAs, and user experience create compounding efficiency gains. Teams that focus on high-traffic, high-intent pages first find that small conversion lifts on these pages deliver disproportionate MER impact.

Pro tip: HubSpot’s forms, CTAs, and chatflows provide built-in A/B testing and conversion analytics.

Automate nurture workflows to increase revenue per lead.

Automated workflows keep leads moving through the funnel and encourage more prospects to convert without additional spend. Lead scoring, lifecycle automation, and behavior-based nurturing deepen engagement over time.

Teams exploring automation at scale may benefit from centralized workflow management, branching logic, and multi-step nurturing tools. HubSpot’s automation features overview explains how these capabilities support more efficient revenue generation.

Automation often has one of the biggest impacts on the marketing efficiency ratio because it increases revenue without increasing spend.

Pro tip: Identify drop-off points in the buyer journey and build targeted automation to address those specific gaps.

Reduce spend on underperforming channels.

Channels that consume budget without contributing to revenue drag down MER. Using ROAS and MER together helps identify where spend isn’t pulling its weight. With channel performance, ROAS, and MER visible in one place, Marketing Hub makes it easy to identify and cut inefficient spend quickly.

For broader strategies on optimizing marketing investments, explore our guide to marketing spend optimization.

Pro tip: Review MER at the same cadence as budget pacing — weekly or monthly — to flag inefficient spend early.

Prioritize high-intent campaigns and content.

Content and campaigns aligned to purchase-ready behavior drive more efficient revenue. Pricing pages, comparison content, and solution-specific assets typically generate the strongest MER lift. Search data can help teams identify queries associated with late-stage buying intent and prioritize expanded content in those areas.

Pro tip: HubSpot’s SEO and content tools reveal which topics drive revenue, allowing teams to prioritize the content that improves MER most efficiently.

Marketing Efficiency Metrics to Track Alongside MER

Marketing efficiency ratio becomes more actionable when paired with supporting metrics that reveal profitability, channel contribution, customer value, and performance quality. Because MER is a blended measure, teams get deeper insight when they compare it with metrics that expose underlying drivers such as cost, lifetime value, and conversion efficiency.

These supporting indicators help explain movement in the marketing efficiency ratio and make it easier to identify the drivers behind efficiency gains or losses.

Reporting inside HubSpot Marketing Hub makes it easy to track these metrics alongside MER in a single dashboard, simplifying efficiency analysis. For more ways to evaluate content and channel performance, see our breakdown of easy ways to measure content effectiveness.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Customer acquisition cost measures the average cost of acquiring a new customer. When paired with MER, CAC helps determine whether revenue efficiency aligns with sustainable profitability. High MER and rising CAC may signal inefficient scaling, while steady CAC with increasing MER indicates healthy growth. When CAC rises faster than the marketing efficiency ratio, efficiency is usually deteriorating.

Pro tip: Compare CAC trends with MER trends. Divergence between the two often reveals hidden channel inefficiencies.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

ROAS evaluates the revenue generated from specific ad campaigns. Because ROAS measures channel-level efficiency while MER measures overall effectiveness, the two metrics work best together. ROAS identifies which channels perform well; MER determines whether that performance contributes to total revenue growth.

ROAS works best when evaluated alongside the marketing efficiency ratio to balance channel-level and business-level decision-making.

Pro tip: Prioritize channels where ROAS improves MER, not just channels with high ROAS in isolation.

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

Customer lifetime value measures the projected long-term value of a customer. Pairing LTV with MER helps teams understand whether efficient acquisition leads to profitable retention. High MER with low LTV can indicate short-term efficiency but weak long-term revenue health.

Pro tip: Evaluate LTV-to-CAC ratio alongside MER to confirm that efficient revenue today contributes to profitable growth tomorrow.

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)

Pipeline quality has a direct effect on revenue and, therefore, on MER. Tracking MQL and SQL volume — and their conversion rates — shows whether marketing investments generate meaningful demand that ultimately contributes to revenue.

Pro tip: When MER declines but MQL/SQL quality drops simultaneously, the issue is likely upstream in targeting or messaging.

Revenue per Visitor (RPV)

Revenue per visitor measures how much value each site visitor generates. RPV directly influences MER by increasing total revenue without increasing spend. This makes RPV a strong indicator of conversion strength and content effectiveness.

Pro tip: Improving RPV often requires optimizing both site experience and content intent — start with your highest-traffic pages for maximum impact.

Marketing Efficiency Ratio Pitfalls to Avoid

Marketing efficiency ratio becomes misleading when revenue and spend inputs are inconsistent, attribution is incomplete, or calculation windows aren’t aligned. Avoiding these pitfalls ensures MER remains accurate and useful for decision-making.

Mixing revenue sources or definitions inconsistently.

MER depends on clean, consistent revenue inputs. If one period uses gross revenue and another uses net revenue — or if returns, discounts, or partner revenue are treated differently across periods — MER trends become unreliable. Because MER compares total revenue to total spend, inconsistent definitions can distort the metric.

Pro tip: Document the exact revenue definition used for MER and apply it identically every time.

Measuring MER too infrequently or irregularly.

Long reporting windows hide efficiency swings. Quarterly MER may mask short-term volatility, while ad-heavy periods often require more frequent monitoring. Regular intervals keep MER comparable and ensure early signals aren’t missed.

Pro tip: Track MER monthly (and weekly during heavy spend cycles) to detect changes before they compound.

Ignoring refunds, returns, or attribution gaps.

Refunds and returns reduce actual revenue, and excluding them from MER artificially inflates performance. Attribution gaps — such as offline conversions or missing UTM parameters — also lead to incomplete revenue data.

Pro tip: Subtract returns from total revenue and ensure all channels consistently pass tracking parameters into your CRM.

Frequently Asked Questions About Marketing Efficiency Ratio

Should organic and referral revenue be included in MER?

Yes. MER includes all revenue generated during the reporting period — paid, organic, referral, partner-driven, or otherwise — as long as the revenue definition remains consistent across reporting windows. This approach supports the core principle that MER measures overall marketing effectiveness across all channels.

How often should MER be calculated?

Most organizations calculate MER monthly to keep the metric stable, comparable, and sensitive to meaningful changes in spend or revenue. Teams that run heavy ad cycles or large campaign launches often evaluate MER weekly to detect efficiency shifts earlier. Many teams use Marketing Hub dashboards to monitor MER automatically at weekly or monthly intervals.

How do returns and refunds affect MER?

Returns and refunds reduce actual revenue and should be subtracted before calculating MER. Excluding them inflates total revenue and leads to inaccuracies because MER is defined as total revenue divided by total marketing spend.

How does MER apply to B2B SaaS with long sales cycles?

For B2B SaaS, closed-won revenue may take months to materialize, making traditional MER less reliable. Many teams instead calculate Pipeline MER, comparing pipeline value created to marketing spend, which more accurately reflects efficiency within long, multi-stage buying cycles.

Is there a difference between the media efficiency ratio and the marketing efficiency ratio?

In most cases, the media efficiency ratio and the marketing efficiency ratio are used interchangeably. Marketing efficiency ratio is the broader term because it encompasses all marketing spend, not only media or advertising costs.

Using MER to Build a More Efficient Marketing Engine

The marketing efficiency ratio offers a simple way to evaluate how effectively marketing investments generate revenue by comparing total revenue to total marketing spend. The marketing efficiency ratio cuts through channel-level noise, clarifies the impact of the entire marketing ecosystem, and supports better forecasting and budget planning.

Because MER differs from ROAS — measuring overall effectiveness rather than campaign-level efficiency — it becomes most useful when paired with supporting metrics like CAC, LTV, ROAS, RPV, and lead quality. Improving MER requires increasing revenue per visitor, reducing wasted spend, and maintaining clean, unified data across channels, all of which become easier with connected reporting inside HubSpot’s Smart CRM and the Marketing Hub.

From my perspective, having worked across marketing orgs that are constantly asked to prove ROI, MER is often the metric that finally broadens the conversation. It shifts the focus away from isolated channel performance and toward whether the entire marketing engine is aligned with commercial goals and driving growth.

MER becomes most valuable once teams stop treating it as a score and start treating it as a signal. It’s the moment when leaders realize MER isn’t a judgment on the marketing team, but a lens for making smarter decisions. The organizations that use MER well tend to revisit it consistently, layer it with complementary metrics, and build workflows that turn data into action. Those are the teams that improve efficiency without sacrificing momentum — and the ones that build growth engines capable of scaling predictably.

The latest State of Marketing Report highlights exactly why this matters: Teams that use unified data, blended efficiency metrics, and cross-channel measurement are outperforming peers that rely on siloed reporting alone. For a deeper look at how top marketers are improving efficiency and driving measurable ROI, explore the full report.

Get the latest insights in the State of Marketing Report.

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/marketing-efficiency-ratio

The marketing efficiency ratio (MER) measures how much revenue marketing generates for every dollar spent. MER is calculated by dividing total revenue by total marketing spend for a defined period. Unlike ROAS, which focuses on the return of specific ad campaigns, MER gives a blended, executive-level view of overall marketing effectiveness across all channels. A higher MER indicates more efficient marketing performance, although what counts as “good” depends on margins, customer behavior, and business model.

As search, analytics, and attribution evolve, marketing efficiency and MER have become headline metrics for marketers, revenue leaders, and finance teams. MER captures the holistic performance of marketing investments and highlights whether the organization is generating sustainable returns.

This guide explains what MER means, how to calculate it, when to use it, how to improve it, and which complementary metrics matter most.

Want to track and optimize MER with unified data? Start free with HubSpot.

Table of Contents

• What is the marketing efficiency ratio?
• How to Calculate Marketing Efficiency Ratio
• Marketing Efficiency Ratio vs ROAS
• What is a good marketing efficiency ratio?
• How to Improve Your Marketing Efficiency Ratio
• Marketing Efficiency Metrics to Track Alongside MER
• Marketing Efficiency Ratio Pitfalls to Avoid
• Frequently Asked Questions About Marketing Efficiency Ratio

What is the marketing efficiency ratio?

The marketing efficiency ratio (MER) is the total revenue generated divided by the total marketing spend for a specific period, giving a blended view of how efficiently marketing contributes to overall revenue.

What is MER?

MER measures overall marketing effectiveness across all channels and reflects the combined impact of paid, organic, referral, partner, and brand-led activity. Because it compares all revenue to all marketing spend, it reflects how the entire marketing ecosystem is performing — campaigns, organic traffic, referral channels, brand building, partnerships, and everything in between. This makes the marketing efficiency ratio one of the simplest ways to evaluate full-funnel performance.

MER should include all revenue generated during the reporting period — paid, organic, referral, partner, and direct — as long as the revenue definition stays consistent across reporting windows. This ensures MER accurately reflects the full commercial impact of marketing activity.

HubSpot’s Smart CRM enables unified tracking and reporting of MER across channels by connecting revenue, spend, and attribution data in one place.

What does MER measure?

MER measures overall marketing effectiveness, while ROAS (return on ad spend) measures channel-level return on ad spend, making MER especially valuable for cross-functional decisions. By capturing the entire revenue picture, MER cuts through attribution noise and helps executives understand whether marketing investments support sustainable growth. This broader view is particularly helpful for ecommerce brands, omnichannel marketers, revenue leaders, and B2B teams who report blended performance across long sales cycles. For this reason, the marketing efficiency ratio is now used widely in executive dashboards and board-level reporting.

HubSpot’s Marketing Hub strengthens MER analysis by unifying revenue, spend, and attribution data in one connected system. When all marketing activity runs through a single platform, MER becomes more accurate and easier to interpret across channels.

Even though MER provides an essential top-down view of efficiency, it cannot diagnose which individual campaigns or channels are driving performance. Instead, MER becomes most actionable when paired with metrics like ROAS, CAC, LTV, and channel-level revenue.

At its core, the marketing efficiency ratio highlights whether marketing activity is generating sustainable, profitable revenue.

What MER Measures:

• The full revenue impact of all marketing activity.
• Blended performance across paid, organic, and referral channels.
• Business-level efficiency and profitability.
• High-level effectiveness for budgeting, forecasting, and board reporting.

What MER Does Not Measure

• Individual channel performance.
• The contribution of specific campaigns or creatives.
• Attribution patterns between marketing touchpoints.

How to Calculate Marketing Efficiency Ratio

The marketing efficiency ratio is calculated by dividing total revenue by total marketing spend for a specific period, producing a single blended metric that shows how efficiently marketing generates revenue. MER equals total revenue divided by total marketing spend, and this structure makes MER simple to calculate, compare, and standardize.

The Marketing Efficiency Ratio Formula

MER relies on two consistent inputs: the total revenue generated during the period (gross or net, as long as it’s defined the same way each time) and the total marketing spend associated with that same period. Because MER covers all revenue — not only attributed revenue — it provides a holistic signal that reflects the entire marketing ecosystem.

Teams often revisit the marketing efficiency ratio weekly or monthly to monitor efficiency trends.

Example: MER Calculation

A business generates $500,000 in total revenue in a quarter and invests $100,000 in marketing during that same quarter.

$500,000 ÷ $100,000 = MER of 5.0

An MER of 5.0 means the business generated $5 in revenue for every $1 spent on marketing. This example illustrates that MER measures overall marketing effectiveness, not channel-level performance.

A consistent marketing efficiency ratio allows organizations to compare efficiency across channels, seasons, or growth stages.

Platforms like HubSpot’s Marketing Hub simplify this calculation by centralizing campaign data, revenue attribution, and spend tracking inside the Smart CRM. With unified reporting, MER can be calculated consistently without pulling spreadsheets from multiple tools.

Why Period Consistency Matters

MER becomes unreliable if revenue and spend periods aren’t aligned. Monthly MER helps teams identify short-term efficiency swings, while quarterly or annual MER works better for long-cycle B2B models. Keeping inputs consistent each time ensures MER remains stable and comparable across reporting periods.

Pro tip: Compare MER periods consistently: month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter, or year-over-year.

How to Track the Marketing Efficiency Ratio in HubSpot

Marketers can track the marketing efficiency ratio in HubSpot by combining the total revenue and total marketing spend inside a unified dashboard. HubSpot’s Smart CRM connects revenue, attribution, and spend data across channels, allowing teams to calculate MER using standard or custom reports. Teams typically create a single dashboard tile that divides total revenue by marketing spend for a selected period, then layer it with ROAS, CAC, and channel-level data for deeper analysis.

Marketing Efficiency Ratio vs ROAS

MER differs from ROAS, which measures return on ad spend at the channel or campaign level. Because the marketing efficiency ratio measures overall marketing effectiveness across all channels, the two metrics are complementary rather than interchangeable. MER measures overall efficiency, ROAS measures channel-level performance, and together they help allocate budgets more effectively. Understanding the difference between MER and ROAS is essential for comparing both metrics across channels and business models.

What ROAS Measures

ROAS (return on ad spend) evaluates the efficiency of individual advertising channels or campaigns.

ROAS = Revenue Attributed to Ads / Ad Spend

ROAS helps media buyers optimize budgets, bids, audiences, and creative assets. It offers granular insight into how specific tactics perform, but it cannot show whether the entire marketing function is generating sustainable returns.

What MER Measures

The MER calculator reflects the aggregate performance of all marketing activities by comparing total revenue to total marketing spend.

MER = Total Revenue / Total Marketing Spend

This broader view helps executives understand whether total marketing investment is producing efficient top-line results, even when attribution is noisy or incomplete.

How MER and ROAS Work Together

Because MER measures overall marketing effectiveness while ROAS measures channel-level return on ad spend, teams get the most insight when using both metrics together. ROAS shows where spend should be allocated; MER shows whether total marketing spending is generating profitable revenue.

High ROAS with declining MER may indicate overspending on upper-funnel channels, while steady MER with falling ROAS may signal channel saturation or diminishing returns.

When to Use Each Metric

• Use ROAS for media planning, channel optimization, creative testing, and performance marketing decisions.
• Use MER for budget planning, forecasting, executive reporting, and evaluating whether marketing as a whole is contributing efficiently to revenue.

Marketing Hub’s attribution dashboards make it easier to compare ROAS at the channel level with MER at the business level. Because both metrics sit inside the same reporting environment, teams can see which channels contribute meaningfully to total revenue and which only appear efficient in isolation.

What is a good marketing efficiency ratio?

A “good” marketing efficiency ratio depends entirely on the business model, margin profile, and growth strategy. There is no universal MER target because companies generate and deploy marketing spend differently, and those differences meaningfully change what efficiency looks like.

A strong marketing efficiency ratio typically reflects aligned spend, healthy margins, and predictable customer behavior.

Businesses with higher contribution margins can often sustain a higher MER threshold, while businesses with thinner margins typically need a more conservative efficiency baseline. This reinforces the principle that a good MER depends on business model, gross margin, and growth goals, not on a single benchmark.

How to Assess MER by Business Model

DTC and Ecommerce

MER typically varies based on contribution margin, customer repeat behavior, and promotional intensity. Brands built on high-margin products or strong LTVs often operate with more room to scale spend while maintaining an efficient MER.

Retail and Low-Margin CPG

Lower margins usually require stricter efficiency targets. In these models, MER is often paired with contribution margin or cost-of-goods analysis to determine whether marketing spend supports profitable growth.

B2B SaaS

Long sales cycles can make closed-revenue MER misleading. Many companies use Pipeline MER — pipeline generated divided by marketing spend — to understand early-stage efficiency before deals close.

Enterprise and High-Ticket B2B

Deal velocity and deal size cause MER to fluctuate significantly. For these organizations, the CAC payback period or LTV-to-CAC ratio often provides a more reliable efficiency signal than MER alone.

Some organizations also track a sales and marketing efficiency ratio to evaluate combined commercial performance. For deeper context on commercial performance, see our guide to revenue performance management.

What Influences a “Good” MER

• Contribution margin and COGS
• Customer lifetime value (LTV)
• Refund and return rates
• Sales cycle length
• Channel mix and acquisition model
• Stage of growth (scaling vs efficiency-focused)

Tracking changes in the marketing efficiency ratio over time helps leaders understand whether efficiency is improving, declining, or stabilizing. In most cases, organizations establish a “good” MER by looking at their own historical performance, not by comparing themselves to other industries.

Pro tip: Pair MER with contribution margin to ensure marketing is generating profitable growth.

How to Improve Your Marketing Efficiency Ratio

Improving MER requires better conversion, cleaner data, and more efficient channel allocation. Moreover, improving MER requires increasing revenue per visitor, reducing wasted spend, and maintaining accurate, unified data across channels. As a result, the most effective tactics focus on strengthening inputs rather than manipulating the metric itself.

Many of the most effective ways to improve marketing efficiency — better data, better attribution, better conversion, and better automation — are significantly easier with HubSpot Marketing Hub. Because Marketing Hub connects campaigns, leads, revenue, and reporting inside the Smart CRM, teams can optimize efficiency without juggling multiple tools.

Each tactic below directly affects the marketing efficiency ratio by improving revenue quality or reducing unnecessary spend.

Consolidate marketing data in a Smart CRM.

Unifying marketing, sales, and customer data ensures MER is calculated on consistent, reliable inputs. HubSpot’s Smart CRM connects revenue, attribution, and contact behavior across channels, creating a single source of truth for tracking efficiency. Better yet, it makes it easier to automate your processes end-to-end.

Pro tip: MER becomes far more stable when revenue and spend data flow through a single system rather than multiple disconnected platforms.

Optimize your media mix using attribution insights.

Attribution models reveal which channels contribute meaningfully to revenue. HubSpot’s Marketing Hub includes first-touch, last-touch, linear, and data-driven attribution, helping teams compare channel-level ROAS with organization-level MER.

Pro tip: If a channel has strong ROAS but MER doesn’t improve, it’s likely shifting revenue from other sources rather than adding net-new growth.

Improve on-site conversion rates.

Higher conversion rates increase revenue without increasing spend, which directly lifts MER. Improvements to messaging clarity, page speed, CTAs, and user experience create compounding efficiency gains. Teams that focus on high-traffic, high-intent pages first find that small conversion lifts on these pages deliver disproportionate MER impact.

Pro tip: HubSpot’s forms, CTAs, and chatflows provide built-in A/B testing and conversion analytics.

Automate nurture workflows to increase revenue per lead.

Automated workflows keep leads moving through the funnel and encourage more prospects to convert without additional spend. Lead scoring, lifecycle automation, and behavior-based nurturing deepen engagement over time.

Teams exploring automation at scale may benefit from centralized workflow management, branching logic, and multi-step nurturing tools. HubSpot’s automation features overview explains how these capabilities support more efficient revenue generation.

Automation often has one of the biggest impacts on the marketing efficiency ratio because it increases revenue without increasing spend.

Pro tip: Identify drop-off points in the buyer journey and build targeted automation to address those specific gaps.

Reduce spend on underperforming channels.

Channels that consume budget without contributing to revenue drag down MER. Using ROAS and MER together helps identify where spend isn’t pulling its weight. With channel performance, ROAS, and MER visible in one place, Marketing Hub makes it easy to identify and cut inefficient spend quickly.

For broader strategies on optimizing marketing investments, explore our guide to marketing spend optimization.

Pro tip: Review MER at the same cadence as budget pacing — weekly or monthly — to flag inefficient spend early.

Prioritize high-intent campaigns and content.

Content and campaigns aligned to purchase-ready behavior drive more efficient revenue. Pricing pages, comparison content, and solution-specific assets typically generate the strongest MER lift. Search data can help teams identify queries associated with late-stage buying intent and prioritize expanded content in those areas.

Pro tip: HubSpot’s SEO and content tools reveal which topics drive revenue, allowing teams to prioritize the content that improves MER most efficiently.

Marketing Efficiency Metrics to Track Alongside MER

Marketing efficiency ratio becomes more actionable when paired with supporting metrics that reveal profitability, channel contribution, customer value, and performance quality. Because MER is a blended measure, teams get deeper insight when they compare it with metrics that expose underlying drivers such as cost, lifetime value, and conversion efficiency.

These supporting indicators help explain movement in the marketing efficiency ratio and make it easier to identify the drivers behind efficiency gains or losses.

Reporting inside HubSpot Marketing Hub makes it easy to track these metrics alongside MER in a single dashboard, simplifying efficiency analysis. For more ways to evaluate content and channel performance, see our breakdown of easy ways to measure content effectiveness.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Customer acquisition cost measures the average cost of acquiring a new customer. When paired with MER, CAC helps determine whether revenue efficiency aligns with sustainable profitability. High MER and rising CAC may signal inefficient scaling, while steady CAC with increasing MER indicates healthy growth. When CAC rises faster than the marketing efficiency ratio, efficiency is usually deteriorating.

Pro tip: Compare CAC trends with MER trends. Divergence between the two often reveals hidden channel inefficiencies.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

ROAS evaluates the revenue generated from specific ad campaigns. Because ROAS measures channel-level efficiency while MER measures overall effectiveness, the two metrics work best together. ROAS identifies which channels perform well; MER determines whether that performance contributes to total revenue growth.

ROAS works best when evaluated alongside the marketing efficiency ratio to balance channel-level and business-level decision-making.

Pro tip: Prioritize channels where ROAS improves MER, not just channels with high ROAS in isolation.

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

Customer lifetime value measures the projected long-term value of a customer. Pairing LTV with MER helps teams understand whether efficient acquisition leads to profitable retention. High MER with low LTV can indicate short-term efficiency but weak long-term revenue health.

Pro tip: Evaluate LTV-to-CAC ratio alongside MER to confirm that efficient revenue today contributes to profitable growth tomorrow.

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)

Pipeline quality has a direct effect on revenue and, therefore, on MER. Tracking MQL and SQL volume — and their conversion rates — shows whether marketing investments generate meaningful demand that ultimately contributes to revenue.

Pro tip: When MER declines but MQL/SQL quality drops simultaneously, the issue is likely upstream in targeting or messaging.

Revenue per Visitor (RPV)

Revenue per visitor measures how much value each site visitor generates. RPV directly influences MER by increasing total revenue without increasing spend. This makes RPV a strong indicator of conversion strength and content effectiveness.

Pro tip: Improving RPV often requires optimizing both site experience and content intent — start with your highest-traffic pages for maximum impact.

Marketing Efficiency Ratio Pitfalls to Avoid

Marketing efficiency ratio becomes misleading when revenue and spend inputs are inconsistent, attribution is incomplete, or calculation windows aren’t aligned. Avoiding these pitfalls ensures MER remains accurate and useful for decision-making.

Mixing revenue sources or definitions inconsistently.

MER depends on clean, consistent revenue inputs. If one period uses gross revenue and another uses net revenue — or if returns, discounts, or partner revenue are treated differently across periods — MER trends become unreliable. Because MER compares total revenue to total spend, inconsistent definitions can distort the metric.

Pro tip: Document the exact revenue definition used for MER and apply it identically every time.

Measuring MER too infrequently or irregularly.

Long reporting windows hide efficiency swings. Quarterly MER may mask short-term volatility, while ad-heavy periods often require more frequent monitoring. Regular intervals keep MER comparable and ensure early signals aren’t missed.

Pro tip: Track MER monthly (and weekly during heavy spend cycles) to detect changes before they compound.

Ignoring refunds, returns, or attribution gaps.

Refunds and returns reduce actual revenue, and excluding them from MER artificially inflates performance. Attribution gaps — such as offline conversions or missing UTM parameters — also lead to incomplete revenue data.

Pro tip: Subtract returns from total revenue and ensure all channels consistently pass tracking parameters into your CRM.

Frequently Asked Questions About Marketing Efficiency Ratio

Should organic and referral revenue be included in MER?

Yes. MER includes all revenue generated during the reporting period — paid, organic, referral, partner-driven, or otherwise — as long as the revenue definition remains consistent across reporting windows. This approach supports the core principle that MER measures overall marketing effectiveness across all channels.

How often should MER be calculated?

Most organizations calculate MER monthly to keep the metric stable, comparable, and sensitive to meaningful changes in spend or revenue. Teams that run heavy ad cycles or large campaign launches often evaluate MER weekly to detect efficiency shifts earlier. Many teams use Marketing Hub dashboards to monitor MER automatically at weekly or monthly intervals.

How do returns and refunds affect MER?

Returns and refunds reduce actual revenue and should be subtracted before calculating MER. Excluding them inflates total revenue and leads to inaccuracies because MER is defined as total revenue divided by total marketing spend.

How does MER apply to B2B SaaS with long sales cycles?

For B2B SaaS, closed-won revenue may take months to materialize, making traditional MER less reliable. Many teams instead calculate Pipeline MER, comparing pipeline value created to marketing spend, which more accurately reflects efficiency within long, multi-stage buying cycles.

Is there a difference between the media efficiency ratio and the marketing efficiency ratio?

In most cases, the media efficiency ratio and the marketing efficiency ratio are used interchangeably. Marketing efficiency ratio is the broader term because it encompasses all marketing spend, not only media or advertising costs.

Using MER to Build a More Efficient Marketing Engine

The marketing efficiency ratio offers a simple way to evaluate how effectively marketing investments generate revenue by comparing total revenue to total marketing spend. The marketing efficiency ratio cuts through channel-level noise, clarifies the impact of the entire marketing ecosystem, and supports better forecasting and budget planning.

Because MER differs from ROAS — measuring overall effectiveness rather than campaign-level efficiency — it becomes most useful when paired with supporting metrics like CAC, LTV, ROAS, RPV, and lead quality. Improving MER requires increasing revenue per visitor, reducing wasted spend, and maintaining clean, unified data across channels, all of which become easier with connected reporting inside HubSpot’s Smart CRM and the Marketing Hub.

From my perspective, having worked across marketing orgs that are constantly asked to prove ROI, MER is often the metric that finally broadens the conversation. It shifts the focus away from isolated channel performance and toward whether the entire marketing engine is aligned with commercial goals and driving growth.

MER becomes most valuable once teams stop treating it as a score and start treating it as a signal. It’s the moment when leaders realize MER isn’t a judgment on the marketing team, but a lens for making smarter decisions. The organizations that use MER well tend to revisit it consistently, layer it with complementary metrics, and build workflows that turn data into action. Those are the teams that improve efficiency without sacrificing momentum — and the ones that build growth engines capable of scaling predictably.

The latest State of Marketing Report highlights exactly why this matters: Teams that use unified data, blended efficiency metrics, and cross-channel measurement are outperforming peers that rely on siloed reporting alone. For a deeper look at how top marketers are improving efficiency and driving measurable ROI, explore the full report.

Get the latest insights in the State of Marketing Report.

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