GEO for B2B

In a considered purchase nobody decides alone. A group does, and each person worries about something different. The technical lead cares whether it fits; finance cares what switching costs; whoever signs cares whether anyone will blame them later. And they all research separately, before calling anyone. If what you sell is a self-serve product, the journey is a different one: that is in SaaS SEO & GEO.

That journey is invisible today. It leaves no trace in your analytics, because it happens in searches, in forums, in conversations with AI and in recommendations from other people. It is what B2B calls the dark funnel: the stretch of the funnel you cannot see. By the time you see an identifiable visit, half the work is already done, for better or worse.

So B2B SEO is not about bringing traffic. It is about being present everywhere an opinion is being formed about who to hire.

First, the map by stage and by person. What someone searches while they are still framing the problem, what they search when comparing vendors, and what they search when justifying the decision internally. It is not the same content, and mixing it is the most expensive mistake. In B2B almost everything lives in the long tail: searches with ten or twenty a month and extremely high commercial intent.

Then the pages that carry the sale: service, sector, use case, and the awkward questions nobody answers on their own site. In B2B, the page that answers what everyone else avoids is the one that gets saved and shared inside the committee. Those pages anchor clusters that build topical authority over your specialism, instead of a pile of unconnected articles.

And the technical and authority work, which matter more than people expect: slow sites, failing Core Web Vitals, botched migrations and weak domains show up fast when search volume is small and every position counts. And authority here is not bought by the pallet: it is built with digital PR, with presence in the trade press and industry bodies, and with E-E-A-T signals — experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust — proven with names and faces, not with a claim to be the leader. If a migration is involved, the method is in international SEO.

That question used to go to a colleague. Now it goes to a model, and the answer comes back with three or four names. There is no second page to appear on. That work goes by several names depending on who you ask — GEO (generative engine optimization), AEO (answer engine optimization), AIO when the subject is Google's AI Overviews, or LLMO — and they all point at the same thing: getting the model to name you and cite you as a source.

What decides that answer is not your backlinks. It is your brand mentions and your solidity as an entity — who talks about you, in what context, and with what evidence. It is different work from classic SEO, even if it builds on it, and in B2B it is far less contested than in consumer. Underneath it runs on the usual things done properly: defined entities, structured data, an llms.txt that says what to read, and content chunked so a retrieval system (RAG) can cite it.

Measuring it is half the job: we ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude what your buyer would ask, and record whether you appear, which sources cite you and who you are up against. That is where your AI share of voice comes from, and it is the number we review every month.

The B2B content that works is not the most shared. It is the piece someone forwards inside their own company to convince a colleague. It tends to be unglamorous and very specific: real comparisons, decision criteria, risks, timelines, what happens when it goes wrong.

That is why we write with people who understand the sector, not with templates. Generic text in B2B is not neutral: it costs you, because the reader is an expert and spots it within two paragraphs.

Before emailing anyone, plenty of people now put the question to an AI first. It is worth looking at what comes back: when you ask a model to recommend an agency, the sources it cites are almost never the agencies' own websites. They are third-party studies, press releases, roundups in trade media, forum threads and LinkedIn profiles. We track this ourselves, month after month.

It is exactly the same mechanism that decides whether your name reaches a buying committee. And it has a second reading: a good share of those lists are written by the agencies themselves or lifted from a press release, so a ranking is not a reference.

These are the questions we would ask. They work on any agency, and we answer them the same way if you put them to us.

Months can pass between the first visit and the signature, so waiting for contracts to know whether the work is paying off means waiting too long. We watch earlier signals: which pages show up in returning visits, which queries bring in companies that match your profile, and how your presence in AI answers moves.

That is what lets you correct course monthly, instead of discovering next quarter that the wrong part of the funnel was being worked.