GEO for B2B: How Buyers Now Research Vendors Through AI

Generative engine optimization for business-to-business companies (GEO for B2B) is the foundation for where your buyers now begin their research. In G2’s March 2026 survey, 51% of B2B software buyers said they start research in an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot more often than in Google.

Much GEO advice focuses on formatting your own pages so AI can read them. We think B2B teams should treat GEO as a reputation problem first and a formatting problem second. Assistants largely build vendor answers based on what other sites say about you. Buyers then act on those answers before your sales team hears from them.

Buying groups at B2B companies work through long sales cycles. They often have a shortlist and a favorite before the first sales call. In our view, the goal of GEO for a B2B company is a place on that shortlist. In other words, the measure is pipeline, not traffic.

What Is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) for B2B Companies?

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of improving how often AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews mention your company, and how accurately they describe it. For a B2B company, that means being named and described correctly when a buyer asks an assistant which vendors to consider.

The term comes from a 2024 study by researchers at Princeton University and the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. It tested how changes to a web page affect its visibility in AI-generated answers. Pages that added citations, quotations, and statistics became up to 40% more visible. Keyword stuffing, a familiar search engine optimization (SEO) tactic, performed poorly.

Google’s own guidance treats GEO as part of SEO, and so do we. We run GEO inside SEO, content strategy, and brand work rather than as a separate channel, because the work overlaps heavily. Most B2B SEO best practices still apply.

When you compare generative engine optimization vs. traditional SEO, the two work as one program but measure success differently. SEO aims for a page position and a click. GEO aims for your company’s name and an accurate description of it, inside an answer that may never send a click. A side-by-side SEO vs GEO comparison shows how GEO measurement adds prompt presence and citation counts to keyword positions.

How Do B2B Buyers Use AI Assistants to Research Vendors?

AI assistants now shape the shortlist itself, not just the early research. In G2’s survey, AI chatbots were the most common influence on B2B software buyers’ shortlists, at 54%. Vendor websites accounted for 36%. And 69% of buyers said they chose a different vendor than they had planned because of AI chatbot guidance.

Shortlists also form early. A 2025 6sense study of nearly 4,000 buyers found that 95% of the time, the winning vendor was already on the buyer’s day-one shortlist.

We think B2B marketers underestimate this shift. Much of the vendor comparison that used to happen on your website and in your sales deck now happens inside an answer you never see. Your sales team still has the conversations that close deals, but GEO affects whether your company is in the comparison that leads to those conversations in the first place.

What AI Assistants Cite When Buyers Ask for Vendor Recommendations

AI assistants cite independent sources far more than vendor websites. In a 2025 preprint from University of Toronto researchers, an OpenAI GPT model with web search drew 72.7% of its sources from earned media for U.S. software ranking queries. Earned media means third-party sites rather than the brand’s own. Google’s results for the same queries drew 45.4% of their sources from earned media.

TrustRadius’s 2026 research reached a similar finding. AI recommendations are heavily influenced by customer reviews, independent publications, and peer experiences. That is why we call GEO for B2B reputation work.

Accuracy matters as much as presence. G2 found that 64% of buyers often see inaccuracies in AI answers. If a review profile or directory listing describes an old version of your product, an assistant may repeat that description to a buyer.

At Esko, a packaging software company, Head of SEO & Digital Experience Frederik Drost tracks “whether AI platforms present the brand within the right narrative.”

A presence on review sites and other third-party pages has to be earned through real customer reviews, independent coverage, and partner listings. Step 3 below covers how. Google says that seeking inauthentic mentions across the web “isn’t as helpful as it might seem.” Google explains that its core ranking systems reward high-quality content while other systems block spam, and its AI features depend on both. Mentions that are bought or faked tend to be filtered out rather than repeated.

How Can a B2B Brand Show Up When Buyers Ask AI for Vendor Recommendations?

We recommend working through these five steps in order as part of your broader B2B SEO strategy.

1. Map the prompts your buyers use. In G2’s survey, nearly two-thirds of buyers opened with a prompt about a product category or a named competitor. List the category, competitor, and comparison prompts your buyers are likely to use. Run them each month in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews, and note which vendors get named. Drost plans content around the exact questions buyers ask, even high-intent ones that keyword tools show little or no volume for. In Drost’s experience, highly specific content can win niche search results and also become a source for AI tools that search the web.
2. Publish the content buyers ask AI to compare. Give the assistants honest comparisons with alternatives, pricing logic, implementation details, and original data to work from. We build this content from interviews with your own experts. Original insight is what separates your pages from AI-generated copy that repeats what everyone else says. Google’s guidance asks for the same thing, which it calls non-commodity content. For page-level formatting, our guide to structured content covers how to write web copy that an engine can parse and quote.
3. Earn a presence on the sites AI cites. Keep your review profiles complete and current, and ask satisfied customers to review you. Pursue analyst coverage, trade press, partner directory listings, and customer stories published on other sites.
4. Describe your company the same way everywhere. B2B buyers meet your brand at many points over a long sales cycle, and an AI answer is now one of them. Your website, review profiles, and partner listings should use the same category, core claims, and proof points. If your public descriptions disagree, an assistant may repeat whichever version it finds. A clear positioning and messaging guide gives every team and every listing one description to work from.
5. Measure citations, not only rankings. Rankings alone can mislead. Elliot Sterling, Web Content Writer at Opus Virtual Offices, compared the top 30 pages on the Opus site with the AI summaries Google showed for the same queries. Those pages ranked well, but the summaries drew from comparable companies’ pages instead. In our experience, most organizations have no visibility into this yet. Track how often each assistant names you for your core prompts, how it describes you, and your citation share against competitors. We track mention frequency and competitor citation share monthly in our AI content strategy work.

How Expensify and Pritchard Industries Turned Search Into Growth

Two of our clients, Expensify and Pritchard Industries, show how this work turns search into growth for a software platform and a services firm.

Expensify Grows Signups and AI Visibility

Expensify, an expense management platform, wanted organic search to drive growth. The company also needed to move its blog from WordPress to Squarespace without losing search equity. And it wanted a GEO strategy that could keep pace with AI-generated answers.

Our team audited every subdomain and set up Google Analytics 4 with full conversion tracking. We migrated the blog and built a resource hub with calls to action for each persona and funnel stage. An AI search program tracked Expensify’s presence in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews.

In under six months, product signups from organic traffic rose 50%. Expensify’s presence in AI Overviews grew fourfold, and referral traffic from generative AI sources doubled.

The number we point B2B teams to is conversion. Visitors from generative AI sources now convert at up to 5%, compared with 1% to 2% from standard search. The gap between those rates is a good reason to track AI referrals as their own source in your analytics.

Pritchard Industries Builds Pipeline From Zero

Pritchard Industries, a commercial cleaning and facility services firm, had more than a century of offline reputation, but its outdated website wasn’t built to generate leads. The company had no inbound marketing team and no SEO or GEO strategy.

Our team rebuilt the technical foundation first, auditing legacy landing pages and the site architecture. Keyword and competitor research showed where Pritchard could realistically gain ground. An editorial roadmap then covered both top-of-funnel traffic and conversion.

In six months, the program generated $2.2 million in new pipeline. Pritchard’s VP of Marketing described the outcome.