General Salesforce vs. HubSpot: Who's Dominating CRM AI Search? (AthenaHQ Breakdown)

Large language models summarize vendor capabilities within seconds. If Salesforce or HubSpot is missing from those generated answers, they instantly lose consideration. 2024 data shows that more than 38% of enterprise buyers now rely on AI copilots to shortlist SaaS vendors, so the battle moved from website SEO to AI prompt dominance.

Our AthenaHQ panels tracked 120 generic and branded prompts across GPT-4, Gemini, and Claude. Salesforce still leads in enterprise prompts, but HubSpot overtook them in the SMB and RevOps clusters because of fresher documentation and clearer pricing guidance surfaced in the models.

HubSpot’s shift from blog-first到product-first content is finally paying off. Their new solution playbooks are tagged with intent-specific metadata that makes it easier for LLMs to identify relevant snippets. They also seed case studies on Reddit, Stack Overflow, and Product Hunt, giving AI models more third-party references to cite.

Salesforce, meanwhile, still relies heavily on long PDF decks that are harder for crawlers to parse. Unless they restructure documentation into smaller, API-readable blocks, HubSpot will keep winning the “explain it like I’m a founder” prompts.

Zoho and newer CRMs like Attio can still carve out visibility by owning specialized prompts (for example, “privacy-first CRM for healthcare” or “CRMs with native AI summarization”). The key is consolidating proof points: short demo videos, annotated API docs, and customer stories that AI models can easily quote.

If you want AthenaHQ to monitor your brand’s AI footprint side by side with competitors, configure a workflow inside Geovia → Brand Presence → Prompt Library. You will receive a weekly snapshot of which prompts you win, lose, or share.