The weekly edit
Ideas, insights and practical advice. Articles about CRM, marketing technology, customer experience and the platforms that connect them. Welcome to the very first issue of The Connected Stack! I'm excited to get started with this newsletter, something new to help my own journey of learning and discovery, and hopefully useful to others out there working with HubSpot, marketing and technology. If you know of anyone writing great content, please let me know so I can be sure to watch out for their content in the future!
Articles related to HubSpot from bloggers, community content and partners.
Catch up on HubSpot’s September 2026 product updates, with a roundup of the latest features, improvements and changes across the platform. A useful overview of what’s new and what might be worth exploring in your portal.
If you’ve not being using Microsoft Clarity, it’s definitely a tool worth using. It’s totally free, and is a user behaviour analytics tool that helps you understand how users interact with your website. You can watch recordings, view heatmaps, understand the ‘share of authority’ your content has, compare against competitors and understand where your site might have JavaScript errors or create a less than intuitive journey for visitors. It also has a bunch of integrations you can use. Along with tools like Google Analytics and Google Ads, you can also connect to HubSpot. In this post we’ll take a look at what the setup entails, and then what to expect to see in the activities timeline on a Contact record.
Analytics, content, email and the wider marketing technology stack.
I was looking through the acquisition reports for my website when I noticed a channel I hadn’t seen before: AI Assistant (released in May 2026). GA4 was now separating visits from tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini rather than leaving them mixed in with my other referral traffic. Seeing the number was interesting, but it immediately raised several more useful questions. Which AI tools were sending people? Which articles were they finding? And, most importantly, what did those visitors do when they arrived?
Creating reports in GA4 is useful for monitoring AI traffic, but Explorations let you dig deeper into what is actually happening. You can bring together dimensions and metrics that normally sit across different reports, then filter, compare and visualise the data in more flexible ways. In this article, I’ll show you how to create an AI Traffic Content Exploration to see which AI assistants are sending visitors, which content they are finding and how those visitors behave when they arrive.
AI-generated answers add another question for B2B marketing teams: when a buyer asks for guidance, does the response cite a page your team created? A citation is a link to a source supporting an answer; a brand mention may appear without a link to your site. Huble Digital helps B2B teams align content strategy with technical website work. This guide sets out six practical steps to improve your chances of earning AI search citations, while recognizing that no publisher can guarantee selection.
A post from August from Google, with information on their AI and agentic experiences across Google Ads and Google Analytics to simplify workflows and expedite the path to business growth.
Webinars, events and conversations worth joining.
For the first issue, I think highlighting HubSpot User Groups (HUGS) makes sense! HUGs are free, community-led groups that host regular virtual and in-person events, gathering HubSpot customers and users to learn best practices from your peers. HUGs serve to educate, inspire, and are here to help you connect with other HubSpot users to grow better, together. With over 100 virtual and local communities to choose from based on location, industry, skill, interest, or identity, we're confident there is a community for you!
A two-day event bringing marketing and technology leaders together to explore the evolving MarTech landscape. Sessions cover areas including AI, customer experience, personalisation, marketing automation and how organisations are getting more from their technology stacks.
HubSpot’s flagship European event brings marketing, sales and customer experience professionals together in London for a day of ideas, product innovation and practical insights. Expect sessions exploring AI, business growth and the latest developments across the HubSpot platform.
A hand-picked video, idea or resource worth a few minutes of your time.
Alex Cattoni looks at some of the less obvious changes happening in marketing right now: why highly polished brands aren't necessarily winning, the rise of personality and opinion-led content, "vibe-coded" websites, the move away from endless how-to content, and changes to email marketing.
That's it for the first issue. Thanks for reading, and I'll be back with another selection of things worth knowing about soon.
The Connected Stack
Get the next edition of The Connected Stack delivered directly to your inbox.
