Track leads & customers from AI in HubSpot
Learn how to track how many leads & customers AI tools like ChatGPT are generating in HubSpot CRM
Use Attributer to capture AI referral data (like the fact a lead arrived from ChatGPT) with every form submission, pass it into HubSpot, and run reports showing how many leads and customers AI is actually generating.
Do you know how many of the leads and customers in HubSpot came from AI tools like ChatGPT?
Tracking ‘citations’ and ‘mentions’ in AI is all the rage right now, but nobody seems to be talking about how to track real metrics like visitors, leads and customers. Your analytics might tell you a visitor arrived from ChatGPT or Perplexity, but that's where the trail goes cold. Working out how many of those visitors became leads, how many turned into paying customers, and how much revenue they brought in requires something more.
Fortunately, there is a solution.
In this article, we'll show you how to use a tool called Attributer to capture AI referral data with each new lead in HubSpot, and share a set of reports you can run to see exactly how many leads and customers your business is getting from AI tools.
4 steps to track leads & customers from AI in HubSpot
Pairing Attributer with HubSpot makes it easy to see how many leads are coming from AI tools. Here's how it works:
1. Install Attributer and add hidden fields
When you start your 14-day free trial of Attributer, you'll be given a small snippet of code to install on your website. Instructions for adding it can be found here.
With the code in place, the next thing you need to do is add a set of hidden fields to the lead capture forms on your site. Those fields are:
- Channel
- Channel Drilldown 1
- Channel Drilldown 2
- Channel Drilldown 3
Most form builders make this really easy. Depending on the tool, you can either drag a 'Hidden' field type into the form, or add a standard field and hide it through the settings. Instructions for doing it in tools like HubSpot Forms, Gravity Forms, Wix Forms, Webflow Forms, and others can be seen here.
2. Attributer writes AI attribution data into the hidden fields
When somebody lands on your site, Attributer looks at a bunch of signals to work out where they came from (much the same signals a tool like Google Analytics looks).
It then sorts that visitor into a channel, such as AI Referral, Organic Search, Paid Search or Paid Social, and stores the result in their browser.
Then, when that visitor eventually fills out a form on your site (like your 'Contact Us' or 'Request a Quote' form), Attributer writes the details of where they came from into the hidden fields, including the fact that they arrived from an AI tool and which one it was.
3. AI data is captured with each lead
When the form is submitted, the AI referral data Attributer wrote into those hidden fields is captured by your form tool alongside the lead's name, email and everything else they entered into the form.
Attributer works with more than 50 form builders, scheduling tools and chat products, including HubSpot Forms, Gravity Forms, Calendly, Contact Form 7, Wix Forms, Webflow Forms, Typeform, Jotform and more, so there's a good chance it already works with whatever you're using.
4. AI data is sent to HubSpot
If you're using HubSpot's own Forms tool, there's no integration to set up at all as submitting the form creates or updates the contact record automatically. If your forms live on a different builder, you can use its native HubSpot integration, or a third-party tool like Zapier, to push the lead data across to HubSpot.
Once it lands on the contact record, you can use it to start building reports showing how many leads and customers came from AI, which AI tools they came from, what content brought them in, and how much revenue followed.
You can build those in HubSpot's own Custom Report Builder, or connect an analytics tool like Tableau, Looker Studio or Microsoft Power BI and run them there. Or if you'd rather ask than build, connect Claude or ChatGPT to your HubSpot account and just ask it "How many leads did I get from AI this month?"
What data gets captured
Attributer passes through two types of information about each lead: How they got to your site (the channel) and what content brought them there (the landing page).
To illustrate this, let's imagine you are on the marketing team at a financial advisory firm. If somebody asked ChatGPT to recommend a retirement planner, clicked through to your site and became a lead, you would get the following data:
- Channel = AI Referral
- Channel Drilldown 1 = ChatGPT (or whichever AI tool sent them)
- Channel Drilldown 2 = chatgpt.com (the domain they arrived from)
- Channel Drilldown 3 = None (there is no deeper level of detail to capture for an AI referral, so this comes through as None)
You would also get information on the page they landed on. Continuing that example, it might look like this.
- Landing Page = pinnaclewealth.com/blog/best-retirement-planners
- Landing Page Group = /blog
That landing page data is what tells you which of your content AI tools are actually reading and citing, and therefore what is worth creating more of.
4 example reports you can run when you capture AI data in HubSpot
Over my 15-year career in marketing, I have built more reports than I can remember to try to figure out which channels were working and which ones weren't. Here are 4 of my favorites:
1. Leads by Channel
This report shows how many leads you get each month, broken down by the channel they came from (AI Referral, Organic Search, Paid Search, Paid Social and so on).
It's a great report for understanding, at a top-level, where your leads are coming from. It can help you understand how much AI is really contributing compared to some of your traditional channels. If AI referrals are still a thin slice, that tells you that maybe you need to do more work in this area.
2. Customers by AI tool
This report shows you how many new customers you got from each AI tool, so you can see how ChatGPT stacks up against others like Claude and Gemini.
This is an interesting one because the tools don't behave the same way. One might surface your content far more often than the others, or send visitors who convert at a noticeably better rate.
Knowing which tools actually produce paying customers, rather than just mentions or citations, tells you where to concentrate your effort. If most of your customers arrive via ChatGPT, that's probably where it's worth investing more time.
3. Close rate by channel
This report shows the lead-to-customer conversion rate, broken down by the channel they came from.
It's often the most revealing report of the lot, because lead volume on its own can be misleading. You might find that 35% of your leads from AI Referral go on to become customers, versus 10% of those from Organic Search and 7% from Paid Search.
If that's the pattern in your data, a lead from an AI tool is worth several times one from paid search, which should change how you think about where your ad budget goes.
4. Revenue from AI by landing page
This report shows how many customers (and how much revenue) each piece of content on your site has generated from AI referrals.
It makes it easy to see which blog posts and pages AI tools are sending actual buyers to, and can be a practical guide for what to write next (if a handful of posts are responsible for most of your AI-driven revenue, producing more of that kind of content is a sensible bet).
Wrap Up
If you've been trying to work out how many leads and customers AI tools are genuinely sending your way, using Attributer alongside HubSpot is a great way to do it.
Best of all, it's free to get started with Attributer and setup usually takes less than 10 minutes. So start your 14-day free trial today!
Get Started For Free
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About the Author
Aaron Beashel is the founder of Attributer and has over 15 years of experience in marketing & analytics. He is a recognized expert in the subject and has written articles for leading websites such as Hubspot, Zapier, Search Engine Journal, Buffer, Unbounce & more. Learn more about Aaron here.