What is B2B GEO?
B2B GEO, or generative engine optimization for B2B, is the practice of getting your company named when a buying committee asks an AI engine for a vendor shortlist. A B2B purchase is settled by five to eleven stakeholders who each research independently, and increasingly they open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask for the best vendors in your category before sales is ever contacted. B2B GEO makes you the answer those engines return. In practice that means fixing the source pages and schema the models lift citations from, earning the analyst, peer-review, and community references B2B credibility rests on, and covering the distinct prompt each role on the committee types, so you appear whether the economic buyer asks about ROI, the technical evaluator asks about your API, or procurement asks who clears their security review.
How is B2B GEO different from B2B SEO?
B2B SEO optimizes pages to rank in Google for the stakeholders who still search. B2B GEO optimizes for the answer an AI engine assembles when a stakeholder asks instead of searches. The pages overlap, because a model builds a vendor shortlist from the same comparison pages, category explainers, review grids, and community threads that bottom-funnel B2B SEO already targets. But the work diverges in three ways. A ranking is one blue link you control; a citation is your brand selected out of dozens of sources across five different engines, each with its own retrieval logic. SEO measures position and clicks; GEO measures citation share, the percentage of priority committee prompts where your brand is named in the answer. And GEO has to win surfaces you do not own, because models trust third parties, so the lever is the citation graph around your category, not just your own domain.
How does AI change B2B vendor selection?
It moves the shortlist into a chat window no one can see. The committee used to build its list of vendors from Google, peer Slack groups, the Gartner Magic Quadrant, the Forrester Wave, and G2 and Capterra grids. Now a member opens ChatGPT or Perplexity, asks for the best vendors for their specific constraint, and the model returns a curated three-to-five-name shortlist drawn from those same sources. This is the dark funnel made worse: research that already lived where intent platforms like 6sense and Bombora try to detect it has now moved inside a prompt that leaves no trace in your analytics. If the model does not name you, you are cut from deals you never see and never get a chance to win. The committee never tells you the shortlist existed.
How do you measure B2B GEO to pipeline?
To influenced pipeline, not a citation count for its own sake. The leading indicator is citation share: the percentage of your priority committee prompts where the brand is named in the AI answer across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews, scored by role so you can see whether you show up for the economic buyer but vanish for the security reviewer. We tie that to the revenue line where your CRM and ABM platform can attribute it: branded and AI-referred demo requests, target-account engagement against your 6sense or Bombora intent signals, deal velocity, and influenced pipeline. Citation share is the input; influenced pipeline is the number the board reads.
Do you run a fixed playbook or custom research?
Custom research, every time. We are a research-first GEO agency, which means a B2B engagement starts with a research sprint, not a template. We map your category's actual AI prompts across all five engines, interview-mine your buying committee's real questions from sales calls, RFPs, and won-and-lost notes, and reverse-engineer the citation graph the models already use to assemble shortlists around your competitors. Only then do we build the program, and it is bespoke to what that research surfaces. We do not run the same checklist on every client, because a developer-tool committee and a procurement-heavy enterprise committee ask different questions, cite different sources, and weight the five engines differently. The playbook is the thing we refuse to reuse.
How much does B2B GEO cost?
It depends on how wide the committee is and how much of the program you run in-house. The research sprint is scoped first and stands on its own; from there a focused engagement on the source pages and schema the engines lift, plus citation tracking, sits lower, while a full program covering content for every committee role, off-site and analyst-adjacent citations, community work, and weekly measurement across all five engines sits higher. We scope to the gap the research and the audit surface rather than sell a fixed retainer, and after the sprint we tell you honestly whether you need the full program or a single track. A long enterprise sales cycle with a large committee needs more coverage than a self-serve B2B motion, so pricing is custom.
