Resources · last reviewed 5 November 2026 · by Wahid Ryland
B2B GEO: how B2B companies get named by AI engines
B2B GEO is the work of getting your company onto the shortlist when a buyer asks an AI engine for a recommendation. When someone asks ChatGPT for the best cyber insurer for a 50-person firm, the answer names a handful of companies. B2B GEO decides whether yours is one of them, and whether the engine uses your website as its source.
Why B2B is different
A B2B category has a small number of questions that matter, each worth a lot. Buyers ask for comparisons and shortlists, not single answers, and the engines reply with a short list of names. Being fourth on a Google results page still gets clicks. Being left out of an AI answer means the buyer never hears your name.
The sources are different too. In B2B, engines lean on industry directories, review and comparison sites, trade press and the companies’ own documentation, far more than on consumer reviews or social posts. Which sites count varies by category, so the first job is finding out which ones your engines actually cite.
What our measurements show
We ask six engines the same 11 buyer questions per category, three runs each on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini and one on Grok and Google AI Overviews, and keep every answer. The companies named most often in four of our B2B categories (share of answers, snapshots of 29 and 30 October 2026):
| Category | Named most often | Snapshot |
|---|---|---|
| Payments APIs | Stripe 79.7%Adyen 67.3%PayPal 67.3% | |
| Cyber insurance | Chubb 68.2%Coalition 61%Travelers 50% | |
| Wealth management software | Orion 74.7%Black Diamond 57.8%Tamarac 51.9% | |
| Insurance policy administration software | Guidewire 57.1%Duck Creek 53.9%Majesco 50.6% |
Four patterns come up again and again:
- Engines disagree. In wealth management software, Black Diamond was named in 24 of 33 Perplexity answers and 7 of 33 ChatGPT answers to the same questions. One engine’s view of your category is not the others’.
- Specialists can beat incumbents. In cyber insurance, Coalition was named in 61% of answers, ahead of Travelers and AIG. Being the biggest name in a category does not guarantee a place on the shortlist.
- Named is not cited. In a complete payments scan, Stripe was named in 88 of 115 answers but its own site was cited in 39. The engines knew the brand without reading its pages. The research.
- Some answers come from memory. On 5 of 11 payments questions, Claude answered without searching in every run, so no website could be cited. The research.
A B2B GEO plan
- 01
Measure the shortlist
Ask every engine the questions your buyers ask, several times each, and record who gets named and whose site gets cited. This is the baseline everything else is judged against.
- 02
Make the company unambiguous
One name, one description and one category, used the same way on your site, your structured data, Wikidata, LinkedIn and every directory profile. Engines can only recommend an entity they can identify.
- 03
Get onto the sources engines read
Each category has a small set of sites the engines keep citing: review platforms, industry directories, comparison articles, trade press. Find yours from the answers, then get listed, correct and current on them.
- 04
Publish answers to buyer questions
Comparison pages, alternatives pages, pricing and integration pages, written so a single paragraph answers the question. B2B buyers ask “X vs Y” and “best X for Y”, and these pages are what engines quote.
- 05
Re-measure per engine
Track named and cited separately, engine by engine, on a fixed schedule. Engines disagree, so an average across them can hide a gap on the one your buyers use.
For timing, see how long GEO takes to show results. For how engines pick sources, see how AI search engines decide which sources to cite.
B2B GEO by vertical
- SaaS. Integrations, pricing and alternatives pages carry most of the weight. B2B GEO for SaaS.
- Fintech and payments. Developer documentation and comparison content are cited heavily, and memory answers are common. Payments APIs leaderboard, loan origination, fund administration.
- Insurance. Carriers, brokers and insurtech software are measured separately because buyers ask different questions. Cyber, small business, embedded insurance, policy administration software.
- Other industries. GEO by industry.
Doing it yourself, with a tool or with an agency
You can run the plan in-house if someone owns it and the measurement is repeatable. A tracker such as the Cited Score (from $79 a month) handles step 1 and step 5. Managed programmes from $997 a month do the full plan. Agencies that want to offer GEO to their own clients can resell the measurement under their own brand.
Questions
What is B2B GEO?
B2B GEO (generative engine optimization for business-to-business companies) is the work of getting a company named and cited when buyers ask AI engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Grok for a recommendation in its category. It covers how the company is described across the web, the third-party sources the engines read, and the content on its own site.
How is B2B GEO different from B2B SEO?
SEO earns a position in a list of links. GEO earns a place in the answer itself, which usually names only a few companies. Google AI Overviews draw on Google's own ranking systems, but ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Grok do not, so a strong Google ranking does not guarantee a mention. Most B2B companies need both.
How is B2B GEO different from B2C GEO?
B2B categories have fewer, higher-value questions, longer buying cycles and more comparison questions (“X vs Y”, “best X for a mid-sized firm”). The sources engines cite are also different: industry directories, analyst and review sites and trade press matter more than consumer reviews or social media.
How long does B2B GEO take?
Technical and entity fixes can be made and verified within days. Engines that search the live web can reflect changes within weeks of your pages being re-crawled. Answers given from model memory change on the model's schedule, which can take months. See the full timeline in How long GEO takes to show results.
How much does B2B GEO cost?
Tracking alone starts at $79 a month for one company on Get AI Cited. Managed GEO starts at $997 a month (GEO Foundations) and bespoke programmes from $2,500 a month. Prices elsewhere vary widely; ask any provider what is measured, on which engines, and how often.
Which AI engines matter most for B2B buyers?
Measure all of them before choosing. In our snapshots the same company can be named in most answers on one engine and few on another, so the engine your buyers use decides whether you are on their shortlist.
How every figure on this page is measured: Cited Score methodology.