What Is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)? A Guide for B2B SaaS Marketers

Your buyer just asked ChatGPT to recommend a project management tool. Your competitors appeared in the answer. You didn’t… oops.

Before you beat yourself up over content quality (please don’t), consider that GEO is likely to blame. If you've never heard of Generative Engine Optimisation before, you're not alone. But you're also running out of time to figure it out. This guide covers what GEO actually is, how it works, how it differs from SEO (which is not dead, just evolving), and what B2B SaaS marketers need to do about it right now.

Key takeaways

• GEO vs SEO: SEO gets you ranked on Google. GEO gets you cited inside AI-generated answers. You need both.

• AI is changing search: Over 58% of users have replaced traditional search with AI tools for product and service discovery. That number will keep climbing.

• Content still wins: The same quality principles that underpin good SEO (authoritative, well-structured, fact-dense content) also drive GEO performance.

• B2B buyers use AI: 94% of B2B buyers currently use generative AI as a key source of information throughout the purchasing journey.

• Start now: Early movers are capturing citation share while competition is still low. The brands optimising for GEO today are the ones AI will reference tomorrow.

What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?

Generative Engine Optimisation is the practice of structuring your content and managing your brand's online presence. In doing so, AI platforms are more likely to cite, reference, or recommend you when someone asks them a relevant question.

The Wikipedia definition puts it cleanly: GEO ‘influences the way large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity AI, retrieve, summarise, and present information in response to user queries.’

Think of it this way: Traditional SEO is about climbing a list. GEO is about being the answer. When someone searches Google, they get ten blue links and choose one to click. When someone asks an AI tool the same question, they get a synthesised response that references a handful of sources. Your goal with GEO is to be one of those sources.

You might also see this called AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation), AIO (AI Optimisation), or LLMO (Large Language Model Optimisation). The terminology is still being argued about across LinkedIn. The concept is the same.

What is Generative AI?

Before getting into the details of GEO, it's worth being clear on what generative AI actually is. It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot.

Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that produce new content (text, images, code, audio) rather than simply retrieving or sorting existing content. They're trained on enormous datasets scraped from the internet and elsewhere, and they learn to predict what a useful response looks like based on patterns in that data.

The key thing that separates generative AI from a search engine: it doesn't show you a list of links. It reads, synthesises, and writes you an answer.

This is why GEO exists as a discipline at all. The optimisation goal has fundamentally shifted.

The main generative AI platforms you need to know

Let’s get started with the main generative AI platforms people are using today.

Generative AI platforms at a glance
Platform	Monthly visitors	Owned by	Cites sources?	B2B SaaS relevance
ChatGPT (OpenAI)	5.7 billion	OpenAI	Yes (Search mode)	High: product research, comparisons, definitions
Google Gemini	1.79 billion	Google/Alphabet	Yes (AI Overviews)	Very high: embedded in Google Search your buyers already use
Perplexity AI	187.30 million	Independent	Yes prominently	High: real-time sourcing favours fresh, fact-dense content
Claude	176.12 million	Anthropic	Yes in Projects/web	Growing: strong in enterprise and professional contexts
Microsoft Copilot	99.46 million	Microsoft/OpenAI	Yes	High: reaches buyers inside the tools they already work in

ChatGPT (OpenAI)

ChatGPT by OpenAI is the one that started the mainstream conversation. Launched in late 2022, it now has, as of February 2026, over 900 million weekly users. Its search feature (launched in late 2024) synthesises answers from web sources and cites them inline. 

Research shows it cites Wikipedia nearly half the time when answering factual questions, followed by news sites and educational resources. For B2B SaaS, that's a useful signal: authoritative, well-structured content from credible sources gets picked up.

Google Gemini

Gemini is Google's answer to the AI search moment. With over 750 million monthly users on the app, and AI Overviews now appearing in at least 16% of all Google searches, Gemini is increasingly how people consume Google results without clicking through to sites. 

For us B2B SaaS marketers who have spent years optimising for organic Google traffic, this one hurts. Your ranked content might never get clicked if Gemini answers the question for the user first.

Perplexity AI

Perplexity positions itself as an AI search engine, not a chatbot. It emphasises real-time information and cites its sources prominently which is actually good news for brands with strong, current content. 

It processes over 780 million queries in 2025. It also leans into community-vetted sources, which means content on platforms like Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn carries real weight.

Claude (Anthropic)

Claude is Anthropic's AI assistant and has 176.12 million monthly users. It’s not the most popular generative AI tool out there but has a dedicated fanbase due to its strong reasoning and nuanced analysis. It is increasingly used in professional and enterprise contexts. 

Like the others, it references external content when answering factual or comparative questions. Having content that's well-structured, factually rigorous, and authoritative increases the chance it gets pulled in.

Microsoft Copilot

Built on OpenAI's models and woven into Microsoft's product suite (Teams, Word, Outlook), Copilot is the one your buyers might be using inside the tools they already have open. In 2025, Microsoft reported 37.5 million conversations took place and 99.45 million monthly visitors.

For B2B SaaS, this is worth thinking about. If a procurement lead is using Copilot to research vendors while inside their email client, your brand needs to be part of the output.

How is GEO different from SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is not dead, dammit. Ignore those clickbaity LinkedIn posts. Anyone telling you to abandon SEO for GEO has misunderstood how AI models are trained.

AI systems pull from sources that are already credible on the web. They favour content that ranks well, has backlinks from trusted domains, demonstrates E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), and is technically accessible to crawlers. 

GEO builds on SEO’s foundations. What changes is the end goal and the measurement.

SEO is optimising for a position in a list of links. Success looks like: rank #1, get the click, track the traffic.

GEO is optimising to be included in a synthesised answer. Success looks like: your brand is cited, mentioned, or recommended inside the AI's response, regardless of whether the user clicks anywhere.

There are a few specific differences worth flagging:

GEO vs SEO: What actually changes?
	SEO	GEO
Goal	Rank in a list of links	Be cited inside an AI-generated answer
Success metric	Position, clicks, organic traffic	Citation frequency, share of voice in AI answers
Content structure	Keywords, headings, meta data	Definitions, fact density, FAQ schema, question-based headers
Authority signals	Backlinks, domain authority	E-E-A-T, off-site mentions, named authorship, third-party validation
Competition	10 results per query	2-7 citations per AI response
Freshness	Matters, but not critical	76.4% of ChatGPT’s most-cited pages updated in last 30 days
Off-site signals	Link building	Reddit, G2, LinkedIn, review platforms, press mentions
Measurement tools	Google Search Console, Semrush, Ahrefs	Profound, Peec AI, GA4 referral tracking, manual testing
Relationship	Foundation	Builds on SEO - you need both.

What AI values over traditional search engines:

• Clear, direct definitions (AI needs to extract a crisp answer fast)

• Fact density: statistics and data points every 150-200 words gives AI more to work with

• Conversational phrasing that mirrors how people actually ask questions

• Structured content: headers, FAQ sections, clean HTML that AI crawlers can parse easily

• External citations: linking to credible sources signals trustworthiness

• Brand mentions across the web, not just on your own site

Where traditional SEO signals still matter for GEO:

• Domain authority and backlinks (AI trusts sites that other credible sites trust)

• Technical accessibility: you’re still invisible if your site is slow, broken, or blocked to crawlers

• E-E-A-T signals: author bios, credentials, updated content, consistent brand presence

One number that puts this in perspective: traditional search engines show ten results per query. AI engines cite two to seven sources on average. The competition for inclusion is much higher. This is why starting early is imperative.

Why GEO matters for B2B SaaS right now

B2B buyers have always done research before speaking to sales. That part hasn't changed. What's changed is where they do it.

According to marketingcharts, 94% of B2B buyers now use generative AI as a key source of self-guided information during the purchasing process. They're asking ChatGPT which tools integrate with HubSpot. They're asking Perplexity to compare your product with a competitor's. They're asking Gemini to summarise the pros and cons of different pricing models. And they're doing all of this before they ever land on your website.

If your brand doesn't appear in those AI answers, you don't exist in that part of the buyer journey. It's as simple and as alarming as that.

For B2B SaaS specifically, this matters for a few reasons:

• The buying cycle is long and research-heavy: B2B SaaS deals involve multiple stakeholders, long consideration periods, and a lot of comparison. AI tools are a natural fit for exactly this kind of research. If your content isn't being cited, a competitor's is.

• Branded search is shifting: Even if buyers know your product, they might ask an AI to tell them more about it or to verify a claim your sales team made. What the AI says about you shapes perception before your AE gets on a call.

• AI-referred traffic is growing fast: According to Previsible's 2025 AI Traffic Report, AI-referred sessions jumped 527% between January and May 2025. This is not a trend to watch from the side-lines.

The benefits of optimising for GEO

Getting cited in AI answers is not just a vanity metric. Here's what it actually does for a B2B SaaS business:

1. You appear earlier in the buyer journey: The average B2B buyer is now doing AI-assisted research before they've even identified you as a vendor. GEO gets you into that conversation.

2. You build brand familiarity without ad spend: When AI tools cite your content repeatedly, buyers start associating your brand with authority in your space. Best of all, this is earned, not paid.

3. Your content works harder: A blog post optimised for GEO appears on Google, gets pulled into AI answers, cited by Perplexity, referenced in ChatGPT responses. The return on one piece of well-structured content multiplies.

4. You compound over time: Early brands building citation authority now will be much harder to displace in twelve months. The AI models reinforce their training data iteratively. Brands that show up consistently build stronger positions that take effort to shift.

You get a competitive edge while most of your competitors are still arguing about whether AI search is real. Which it very much is.

How to Optimise for GEO: 12 Practical Tactics

Now you understand what GEO is, it’s time to work on making yourself more visible to generative AI engines. Here are 12 practical tactics that’ll help you.

#	Tactic	Difficulty	Impact	Do it first?
1	Write clear, direct definitions	Low	High	Yes
2	Answer the question in first 40–60 words	Low	High	Yes
3	Use question-based headers	Low	High	Yes
4	Pack in facts and stats	Medium	Very high	Yes
5	Add FAQ sections with schema markup	Medium	Very high	Yes
6	Build content clusters	High	Very high	Plan now
7	Earn off-site mentions	High	High	Plan now
8	Maintain technical hygiene	Medium	High	Yes
9	Update content regularly	Low	High	Yes
10	Optimise for conversational queries	Medium	High	Plan now

The full breakdown of each tactic lives in its own guide but here's the shape of what GEO optimisation actually looks like in practice. Some of these you can do this week. Others are longer plays that need planning.

Quick wins (low effort, high return):

• Write clear, direct definitions at the top of every page: AI extracts the most confident, specific statements it finds

• Answer the actual question in the first 40–60 words of every section: front-load the answer, then add context

• Use question-based headers (‘How does X work?’ not ‘Our Approach’): AI is trained on how humans ask questions

• Add FAQ sections with FAQ Page schema markup: pages with this are 3.2x more likely to appear in AI Overviews.

• Update your content regularly: 76.4% of ChatGPT's most-cited pages were updated in the last 30 days.

• Check your technical hygiene: if AI crawlers (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended) are blocked in your robots.txt, none of the above matters

Longer plays (plan now, build over time):

• Build content clusters, not standalone posts: topical depth signals expertise to LLMs

• Earn off-site mentions: Google AI Overviews are 6.5x more likely to cite third-party sources than your own domain (Onely)

• Optimise for conversational, long-tail queries: this is how buyers actually speak to AI tools

• Pack in facts and statistics: quantitative claims get cited; vague ones don't

• Build E-E-A-T signals properly: named authorship, external press mentions, transparent credentials

• Track your AI visibility: tools like Profound, Peec AI, and Semrush's AI Toolkit are making this measurable

What about measuring GEO?

GEO is harder to measure than SEO. Traditional metrics like clicks, rankings, and traffic don't fully capture whether your brand is being cited in AI answers that don't result in a click.

Newer KPIs being used include AI Visibility Rate (how often your brand appears in AI-generated responses), Citation Rate (how frequently your content is referenced as a source), and tracking referral traffic from tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity in GA4.

It's imperfect but it’s not a reason to ignore the channel. 

Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?

GEO is the practice of optimising your content and brand presence so that AI platforms like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude cite or recommend you when users ask relevant questions. Unlike SEO, which targets a position in a list of search results, GEO targets inclusion in a synthesised AI-generated answer.

Is GEO the same as SEO?

No, but they share the same foundations. SEO optimises for search engine rankings and clicks. GEO optimises for AI citations and brand mentions inside AI-generated answers. Good SEO makes GEO easier as authoritative, well-structured content performs better in both channels. You need both.

Does SEO still matter if GEO is growing?

Yes. SEO is foundational to GEO. AI systems reference sources that are already credible on the web which means domain authority, backlinks, E-E-A-T signals, and technical accessibility all still matter. The brands with strong SEO foundations are better positioned for GEO than brands starting from scratch.

Why does GEO matter specifically for B2B SaaS?

B2B SaaS buyers research extensively before speaking to sales, and they're increasingly using AI tools to do it. Forrester found that 89% of B2B buyers now use generative AI as a key information source during the purchasing journey. If your brand isn't being cited in those AI answers, you're absent from a significant part of the decision-making process.

How do I know if my content is being cited by AI tools?

The simplest way is to manually test. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews the questions your buyers are most likely to ask, and see whether your brand or content appears. For more systematic tracking, tools like Profound, Peec AI, and Semrush's AI Overviews features are building out measurement capabilities. Check your GA4 for referral traffic from ChatGPT and Perplexity too.

Do I need to create entirely new content for GEO, or can I optimise what I already have?

Start with what you have. Audit your existing content for clear definitions, fact density, structured headers, and FAQ sections. Update older posts with current data and a fresh date. Add FAQ sections to your highest-traffic guides. New content built with GEO principles from the start is ideal, but existing content that ranks well is already part of the way there.