GEO for B2B companies: a practical guide

For a B2B company, GEO (generative engine optimization, the work of being found and cited by AI assistants) comes down to one question: when a buyer asks an assistant to shortlist or compare vendors in your category, is there clear, current, specific information about you for it to find? That depends mostly on pages you already own, such as product, pricing, comparison and documentation pages, and on what independent sites say about you.

B2B buying is slow and involves several people, so an AI answer rarely closes a deal. What it can do is decide whether you are on the list a buyer brings to the first meeting. Nobody can guarantee a place on that list. You can make sure the facts an assistant would need are public, consistent and easy to read.

This guide covers the prompts B2B buyers use, the pages that matter most, how to handle review sites within the rules, and how to measure the effect on pipeline.

Why B2B needs its own approach

A consumer asking for a nearby electrician wants one name and a phone number. A B2B buyer is doing research: defining requirements, building a shortlist, comparing options and justifying a choice to colleagues. Three things follow from that.

• The questions are long and conditional. Buyers ask for tools or suppliers that fit a company size, an industry, a compliance requirement or an existing system.
• The answer is a comparison, not a pick. A shortlist question invites an answer with several options and a short description of each. Your goal is to be included and described accurately.
• The click may never come. A buyer can read about you in an answer and arrive weeks later by typing your name.

The foundations don't change. Google's position is that optimizing for its generative AI features is "still SEO."

The prompts B2B buyers use

Most B2B prompts fall into a handful of patterns. Write down real examples of each for your category before you change anything on your site.

One prompt becomes many searches. Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI features defines query fan-out as a "set of concurrent, related queries generated by the model," and OpenAI's help page on ChatGPT search says ChatGPT typically rewrites your query into one or more targeted queries and may send more specific ones after reviewing the first results. A buyer's question about the best platform for a mid-sized manufacturer can turn into separate lookups about features, pricing, integrations and reviews. We explain the mechanism in query fan-out explained.

The wrong response is to publish a page for every possible variation. Google says doing that primarily to manipulate rankings or AI responses violates its scaled content abuse spam policy. The right response is fewer, better pages that each cover their topic completely.

Product and solution pages

Many B2B product pages are written as positioning: a headline, three abstract benefits and a demo button. That gives a buyer, or an assistant summarizing for one, little to use. Each product or solution page should state:

• What the product is, in one sentence, using the category name buyers use.
• Who it is for: company size, industries, roles and the situations where it fits.
• Who it is not for. This helps you get described accurately.
• What it does, as concrete capabilities instead of adjectives.
• What it works with: integrations, standards, platforms and deployment options.
• Proof you can stand behind: certifications you hold, named customers who have given permission, published documentation.

Put the important facts in text on the page. Microsoft's guidance for AI search answers says to avoid "relying on PDFs for core information." If your specifications, security details or implementation steps exist only in a downloadable PDF or behind a lead form, consider publishing an ungated summary.

For software companies, our article on how a SaaS company gets cited by AI tools goes into more detail.

Pricing pages

Every buyer asks what it costs, and "contact sales" doesn't answer the question. If you say nothing, an assistant has only what other sites say about your pricing, and that may be old or wrong.

You don't have to publish a full rate card. Any of these is better than silence:

• Published plans with prices, the billing period and what each includes.
• A starting price with a clear statement of what it covers.
• The pricing model without numbers: per seat, per usage, per location or fixed project, plus what drives the total.
• What is always extra, such as implementation, training or support tiers.

Date the page and keep it current. Page structure is covered in how to structure pricing pages for AI extraction.

Comparison content that stays fair

Buyers will compare you with competitors whether or not you take part. Publishing your own comparison pages lets you put accurate facts about your side on the record.

• Compare on criteria buyers care about, including ones where you lose.
• Describe the competitor accurately and date the comparison.
• Say who should choose the other option. This is the part readers trust.
• Don't publish a "best tools" ranking that puts you first without making clear it's your own site. The FTC's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (16 CFR Part 465) addresses businesses that misrepresent a site they control as providing independent reviews of a category that includes their own products.

Formatting advice is in how to create comparison sections AI pulls from.

Third-party review sites and mentions

B2B buyers read software review sites, analyst notes, community forums and trade publications. It's reasonable to assume assistants that search the web encounter those sources too, but no AI vendor has published how much weight they carry, and you should be skeptical of anyone who quotes a figure.

Keep this work inside the rules. Nothing in this article is legal advice; if you run a review or referral program, have an attorney look at it.

• Claim and complete your profiles on the review sites that matter in your category, with the same description, category and pricing information as your own site.
• Ask customers for honest reviews. Under the FTC's rule, incentives may not be conditioned on a review expressing a particular sentiment, and the FTC says failing to disclose an incentive could itself violate the FTC Act.
• Disclose paid mentions. The FTC's endorsement guidance says a recommendation is covered when an advertiser, or someone working for an advertiser, pays for it or gives something of value. Ask any agency placing mentions for you whether those placements are paid and how they are disclosed.
• Skip manufactured mentions. Google's guide says seeking inauthentic mentions across the web "isn't as helpful as it might seem."
• Don't mark up your own testimonials for stars. Google's review snippet rules say that when a business controls the reviews about itself, its pages using Organization markup are ineligible for the star review feature, and that you shouldn't aggregate ratings from other websites.

Technical access: crawlers, JavaScript and gated content

B2B sites have a few recurring technical problems that keep good content out of reach.

Blocked crawlers. Enterprise firewalls and bot-management tools can block unfamiliar user agents. OpenAI says a site must allow OAI-SearchBot to be eligible for ChatGPT search answers, and Anthropic says blocking Claude-SearchBot may reduce your site's visibility and accuracy in user search results. You can block training crawlers such as GPTBot separately if that's your policy. See AI crawlers and robots.txt for the full list and the trade-offs.

JavaScript-only content. Google says it can process content within JavaScript as long as it isn't blocked. Bing's guidelines warn against hiding critical content behind client-side rendering. We found no statement from OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity on whether their crawlers run JavaScript, so the safe choice is to have key product, pricing and documentation content present in the HTML the server sends.

Documentation on a subdomain. Check what the robots.txt file on the docs subdomain allows, since it is often managed separately from the main site. Anthropic, for one, says an opt-out has to be set on every subdomain you want it to cover.

Structured data. Google says structured data isn't required for generative AI search. It still documents Organization markup for disambiguating your company, Product markup for pages where people can't buy directly, and a Software app type. Use what honestly fits and matches the visible page.

Measuring the effect on pipeline

This is the hard part for B2B, and no single source gives the whole picture.

The GA4 channel definitions spell out what counts as AI Assistant traffic. To connect any of this to revenue, add "AI assistant (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or similar)" as an option on demo and contact forms, have sales ask the question on discovery calls, and record the answer on the opportunity. Then watch three things together over quarters, not weeks: AI-referred sessions on product and pricing pages, self-reported AI influence on opportunities, and branded search. How to turn those into a case for budget, without invented benchmarks, is covered in how to build the business case for GEO.

Conclusion

B2B GEO is the discipline of publishing the facts buyers ask for (what you do, who it's for, what it costs, how it compares) in places and formats that search engines and assistants can reach, and keeping third-party profiles accurate and honestly earned. None of it guarantees a place on an AI-generated shortlist, and all of it makes your site more useful to the people on the buying committee. eSEOspace offers a generative engine optimization service, and you can start with a free GEO audit. More guides are in our GEO and AEO Guide.

Frequently asked questions