The last few years at HubSpot’s annual INBOUND conference have been “all about AI.” This year? Inbound 2025 was less hype and more real-life applications of AI.
Marketers today swim against a current of plummeting website traffic, AI is rewriting the rules for search, and the ability to evolve at the speed of AI is a matter of survival. And just in time, HubSpot dropped lifelines to help businesses get found in the age of AI.
Introducing HubSpot’s new marketing playbook: The Loop.
(Side note: HubSpot’s own evolution appears to have shifted away from the flywheel narrative in favor of the Loop. Yamini’s keynote told a story about the journey from the Funnel → Loop without mentioning the flywheel. Interesting choice for a brand that once declared itself “never a funnel.”)
The Loop is HubSpot’s brand-new 4-step marketing playbook for the AI era.
The Express stage is about expressing your real voice.
Don’t pull a Little Mermaid and hand yours over to the sea witch (or to AI) without a plan.
Whether you start with AI in your content creation process or wrestle with writing first (digital marketing pioneer Ann Handley is in the second camp), you need to build your authenticity into the foundation of your content.
HubSpot is making improvements to its new Brand Identity and Brand Voice features (in beta) to help marketers refine their brand within the platform and across website content; they’re still a little clunky (here’s my hot take on the branded landing pages using the Clean Pro theme), but at the end of the day, context is key.
Beyond voice and tone, your digital presence needs consistent colors, fonts, and other visual assets that make your brand recognizable (like that signature leather jacket you wear when you’re going out with your friends). Want your site to feel genuinely you? Marketers can define brand elements with Clean Pro’s style guide template to lay the groundwork for quick, easy, and on-brand website edits.
The Tailor stage of the Loop is all about personalization at scale. With AI, marketers can personalize landing pages and add a level of detail that dives deeper than “Hi [first_name]”.
HubSpot made a small but significant change that threw me for a loop (pun intended): lists are now called “segments”. HubSpot’s new segments help marketers identify targeted micro audiences with high purchase intent. As website traffic declines, marketers are also seeing higher conversions, since today’s website visitors are more informed and primed for purchase. Add a touch of hyper-personalization to your marketing campaign, and you could have another lifelong loyalist for your business.
So how can marketers invite these new segments into their world and deliver a website experience that feels personalized?
Meet Web Segments (private beta), one of the latest HubSpot features that helps marketers personalize landing pages and CTAs for both known contacts and anonymous visitors. This means that if a human lands on your website without filling out a form or offering their email, your marketing team can still serve up content just for them.
And paired with consistent brand styling from a theme like Clean Pro, you can be confident that you’re creating engaging website experiences at scale for high-intent audiences (pure marketing gold).
Beyond your website, workflows are a cornerstone of the Tailor stage because they help marketers and operators automate and scale personalized experiences. Here are some real-world examples of workflows in the Tailor stage (thanks to Simple Strat’s session at INBOUND 2025).
The Amplify stage focuses on how to get found in LLM search. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, humans used to search Google to find pretty blue links that might direct them to answers. Today, people increasingly get answers without clicking any links thanks to AI overviews, or they ask ChatGPT or other LLM models without even visiting a web browser.
Marketers have coined this new age, “AEO” or Answer Engine Optimization. The foundations of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) aren’t dead, but are evolving. And, like the dinosaurs, we don’t want the AEO meteor to wipe us out.
Amplify is the AEO strategy that helps brands show up as answers everywhere (LLM, social, website, you name it).
AI parses content and returns answers by retrieving content chunks that are “semantically complete”. That means marketers should include a clear subject, predicate, and object in written content (grammar nerds, rejoice!).
For example [semantic triples in brackets for reference]:
"[HubSpot] [offers] an [email marketing tool] that supports drag-and-drop campaign creation."
If you aren’t super excited about painstakingly editing your copy for semantics, try this custom GPT, built just for marketers to optimize content for AI search.
In addition to semantically complete copy, HubSpot blog and growth strategists Amanda Sellers and Amanda Huffman (aka the Amandas! They should start a band...) had other golden AEO tips to share at INBOUND 25 to help marketers appear easily in LLM answers:
The Evolve stage is about iteration and speed. Never stop optimizing. And, the more control you have over your website, the faster you can pivot when AI shifts.
This is where Clean Pro really pays off: marketers can edit landing pages on the fly, test new content formats, and keep evolving at the speed of AI, no dev bottlenecks required.
HubSpot also recommends email campaign features for iterative improvements, like AI Email Creation and Messaging Insights (beta). I haven’t tried the new email tools yet, but I’ll be sure to report back on how they help marketers boost email campaigns.
Another must-try tool is HubSpot’s ChatGPT Deep Research Connector for marketers who want to superpower their CRM and audience data. Read how to find hidden opportunities with the GPT Connector for HubSpot here.
In addition to the new Loop framework, HubSpot rolled out 200+ updates at INBOUND 2025 (phew!). But here are the ones that matter most for marketers, operators, and sales leaders trying to adapt to the AI era:
The new HubSpot Project Object means project managers can finally manage work in HubSpot, complete with Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and calendars. Less ClickUp or Asana hopping, more visibility in one platform.
This small-but-mighty change gives marketers dynamic segmentation to target high-intent micro-audiences. Pair it with Web Segments (beta) for personalized landing pages, even for anonymous visitors, or the new AI-powered email that increased HubSpot’s own email conversion rate by 82%.
AEO Strategy (currently in private beta) and the new(ish) AEO Grader will grade how AI-friendly your content is. Meanwhile, AI referrals now tell you when a contact came from ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity.
Configure-Price-Quote tools finally land in HubSpot. For service-based businesses, this could unclog one of the biggest sales bottlenecks.
HubSpot introduced the Breeze Marketplace (where you can “hire” AI help) and Breeze Studio (where you can customize new AI team members) for a new age of hybrid human and AI work.
HubSpot’s own AEO tech stack includes some of these hidden gems for marketers to try:
Loom videos can also make valuable training data for custom AI agents. Other AI-building tools, such as Cursor, Replit, and Lindy, are worth exploring, but for AEO, start with these three.
Don’t overuse JavaScript, especially in content that you want to appear in LLM search results. If you want a strong base to build from, the Clean Pro theme is AEO-friendly out of the box.
AI has made marketers less reliant on the development team. As a marketer, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be making website edits and building cool tools with AI. Get in there and play around, see what you can do.
The new CPQ quoting tool in HubSpot’s Commerce Hub may be worth the spend if quotes are slowing you down.
Get good at workflows. Even simple automations for segment hygiene can save money.
The temptation to run after the next shiny object is great, but don’t lose your end goal: to help humans before you “hustle”.
To show up in AI-generated answers, structure your content in small, clear, and retrievable chunks. Use FAQ blocks, semantic triples, and Clean Pro’s lightweight modules to make sure LLMs can parse and cite your site correctly.
Nope. Many foundations of SEO (clear site structure, relevant content, keyword research) still matter. But SEO has evolved into AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization. Instead of optimizing just for search engines like Google, you now need to optimize for answer engines like AI Overviews and ChatGPT, which pull directly from structured content.
AI has shifted the power back to marketers. From editing your website to building workflows, you no longer need to wait for dev teams or extra tools to stay competitive.
Ready to stop drowning in disruption and start surfing the Loop with confidence? Give your marketing team the control they need to evolve at the speed of AI. Start with Clean Pro today.