Namebeam vs HubSpot AI Search Grader
Why this page exists, stated plainly. We ran our own buyer question through Perplexity on two dates, 2026-08-02 and 2026-08-04, and logged what came back. HubSpot AI Search Grader was the tool it named FIRST, both times. We would rather write the comparison than pretend the engine said something else.
What HubSpot AI Search Grader does better
Printing this first, because a comparison that only flatters the author is an advertisement.
- It is free, needs no account, and finishes in under two minutes. That is a genuinely low barrier and it is lower than ours in one respect: we ask for an email to send the transcript.
- It measures sentiment, weighted at 40 of its 100 points. Whether the engines describe you positively, negatively or neutrally. Namebeam does not measure sentiment at all. If that is the question you have, they answer it and we do not.
- It measures share of voice, weighted at 10 points, estimating where you rank against competitors in AI answers. Namebeam does not compute a share-of-voice percentage.
- It is HubSpot. A large, established company with a support organisation behind it. We are one person in Sheridan, Wyoming.
What Namebeam does that it does not
| HubSpot AI Search Grader | Namebeam | |
|---|---|---|
| Engines checked | 3: GPT-5.4 mini, Perplexity, Gemini | 4 AI engines plus Google result pages: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini |
| Google AI Overview | Not listed on their page | Yes |
| Claude | Not listed on their page | Yes |
| What you get back | A composite score out of 100, a five-dimension breakdown, and a written interpretation | The dated raw transcript of what each engine actually said |
| Sentiment scoring | Yes, 40 of 100 points | No |
| Share of voice | Yes, 10 of 100 points | No |
| Price | Free | Free check; agency evidence pack $397 one time |
The distinction that actually matters
HubSpot's page says the tool "reveals what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini say about you based on their training data." That is a real and useful thing to know, and it is not the same thing as running the query.
Namebeam asks the question live, on the day, and hands back what came back. Those two methods can disagree, and when they do, neither is lying. They are answering different questions. Ours is: if a customer asked right now, what would they be told.
The second distinction is the score. A score out of 100 is a vendor's interpretation of evidence. A dated transcript is the evidence. You can forward a transcript to a client or a boss without asking anyone to trust our arithmetic. We think that matters more in a category this new, where no scoring rubric has been validated by anyone yet, including ours.
Which one you should use
Use HubSpot AI Search Grader if you want a fast free read on tone and rough competitive standing across three engines, with no email and no cost, from a company you already know.
Use Namebeam if you need Google AI Overview covered, you want the actual words rather than a number, or you need something you can hand to someone else as evidence.
Use both. They measure different things and they cost nothing to compare. If they disagree about you, that disagreement is itself information, and it is the reason we publish four AI engines plus Google result pages instead of one number.
Our own receipts
Our own record is public at proof.namebeam.ai and in the AI Citation Study, where we logged 192 citations and printed the method and the weaknesses alongside the findings.
We would rather you audit us than believe us.