I've spent the last 14 months working with B2B SaaS companies on GEO—the full-time obsession of tracking, analyzing, and improving how AI assistants recommend them. After working with 40+ companies across categories from DevOps to HR tech to revenue intelligence, I can tell you what actually moves the needle and what's just theory.
Here's the state of play: 87% of B2B software buyers now use AI chatbots as part of their research process (G2, 2026). AI referral traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude has grown 7x year-over-year, and the visitors who arrive via AI are measurably further along in their buying journey—58% of marketers report that AI-referred traffic converts at significantly higher rates than organic search.
Despite this, 73% of B2B SaaS companies are still treating GEO as an afterthought. Here are the 8 moves that account for the majority of results I've seen—ranked by actual impact, not by how easy they sound.
Move 1: Run the Benchmark First (Takes 2 Hours, Changes Everything)
Before doing anything else, understand your current position.
Run 30 "best [category] for [use case]" queries across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Cover your core use cases—small team, enterprise, specific integrations, specific industries. Record who gets mentioned and who doesn't. This is your baseline.
Then run the same queries with your brand name included: "How does [your product] compare to [competitor]?" The sentiment and framing AI uses when talking about you specifically tells you what the training data "thinks" about your positioning.
Most teams skip this step and go straight to tactics. Don't. Without the baseline, you're optimizing blind and you have no way to measure progress. What you'll almost certainly find: your AI visibility doesn't correlate neatly with your Google rankings, your review scores, or your actual product quality.
Move 2: Define Your Entity, Then Lock It Everywhere
AI systems build a mental model of what your brand is based on how it's described across hundreds of sources. If those sources disagree, you become unclassifiable—and unclassifiable brands don't get recommended.
The exercise: write a 2-sentence description of your product that covers who it's for, what it does, and what makes it different. This is your canonical entity definition.
Then audit every place this description exists online: your homepage, About page, LinkedIn company page, G2 profile, Capterra listing, Crunchbase, PitchBook, every review platform. They should all reflect this same core description—not word-for-word identical (that looks unnatural), but semantically consistent.
One client I worked with had seven different ways they described their product across different platforms. AI responses about them were all over the map—some accurate, some outdated, some combining features from their old product with their new one. After we standardized the entity definition, their AI visibility improved by roughly 40% in 60 days, with no other changes.
Move 3: Fix Your Review Platform Profiles Before Anything Else
G2, Capterra, TrustRadius—these are disproportionately weighted in AI brand recommendations. I've seen this pattern repeatedly: companies with modest Google traffic get consistently recommended by AI because their G2 profiles are excellent. Companies with massive Google presence get ignored because their G2 profiles are stale.
What "excellent" means here:
- Feature tags that match your current product (not the version from 2022)
- Use case categories that are specific to your actual buyers (not just every category you technically fit)
- Recent reviews—the last 6 months matter more than your 3-year review history
- A high response rate from your team on reviews, especially critical ones
The review recency point surprises people. AI systems appear to weight recent reviews heavily, probably as a proxy for "is this product still actively used and supported." A product with 500 reviews but the last one from 8 months ago looks less relevant than a product with 80 reviews and 15 from the past month.
Move 4: Target the Articles Your AI Citations Come From
The most efficient GEO move I've found: identify which editorial articles AI is already citing for your category, then get mentioned in those articles.
Here's the process: take the 30 benchmark queries you ran in Move 1. For every AI response that cites sources (Perplexity always does, ChatGPT's Browsing does), note which URLs keep appearing. The pages that show up 3+ times across different queries are the high-trust nodes in the AI citation graph.
Those pages are your targets. Not for backlinks—for editorial inclusion. Find the authors, editors, or publications responsible. Your outreach isn't "please mention us." It's "I have updated 2026 benchmark data on [topic] that would make your comparison more accurate, and happy to walk you through a demo for the next update."
This approach works because you're offering something genuine: better information. Most comparison articles go stale within 6-12 months. Writers are generally glad to hear from a legitimate product that helps them stay current. Getting mentioned in two or three of these high-citation articles can double your AI visibility within a single AI model update cycle.
Move 5: Build the FAQ Content AI Actually Wants to Cite
I've read a lot of advice about "creating FAQ content for AI." Most of it is too generic. Here's what actually works.
Look at the most common questions your sales team gets asked. Look at what buyers ask in demos. Look at the "stupid questions" your customer success team hears. These are the questions your actual buyers are also typing into ChatGPT.
Write answers to 20-30 of these questions in a dedicated FAQ section on your site. Make each answer:
- Specific enough to be directly quotable
- Honest enough to include context where a competitor might be a better fit for certain use cases (AI trusts this more, and prospects do too)
- Structured with clear headers so AI can parse the specific answer without reading the whole page
The AI-optimized FAQ is different from an SEO-optimized FAQ. You're not stuffing keywords. You're writing answers that are so clear and complete that when an AI tries to answer the same question, your answer is the obvious source to cite.
Move 6: Establish Reddit Presence in Your Category Subreddits
I know this sounds like a tangent. It's not.
Reddit is the single largest source of brand citations in AI recommendations I've tracked—showing up in roughly 34% of citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. The reason: Reddit threads are authentic user experiences, which AI systems weight heavily when synthesizing brand recommendations.
For B2B SaaS, the relevant subreddits depend on your category. DevOps tools should be active in r/devops and r/sysadmin. Revenue intelligence platforms should care about r/sales and r/salesforce. HR tech should watch r/humanresources and r/recruiting.
The strategy isn't to promote your product. It's to be present in the conversations where your buyers ask for recommendations. Get your happiest customers to share genuine experiences in appropriate contexts. Participate transparently with your brand account. Build a presence that makes authentic recommendation possible.
This takes months, not weeks. But it creates a durable citation signal that keeps working even when you're not actively managing it.
Move 7: Launch a Strategic Comparison Content Series
"[Your product] vs. [Competitor]" content is one of the highest-ROI investments in GEO right now—but only if it's done right.
When buyers ask AI "how does [your product] compare to [competitor]," the AI synthesizes available sources. If your competitor has published a comparison page that positions themselves favorably and you haven't published any comparison content, guess whose framing gets used.
Write honest comparison pages. Acknowledge where a competitor is stronger for certain use cases. Acknowledge where you're stronger. AI systems trust balanced comparisons—and so do the buyers who verify AI responses.
These pages should cover: feature differences (specifically, not vaguely), pricing model differences, who each product is ideal for, what integration ecosystem each supports, and what recent users say about switching between them (pull genuine quotes from G2 reviews with attribution).
One B2B SaaS company I worked with went from zero AI mentions in competitor comparison queries to appearing in 68% of relevant AI comparisons within four months of publishing 12 well-researched comparison pages.
Move 8: Track Weekly, Adjust Monthly
GEO positions aren't static. Models update. New articles get published. Competitors generate reviews. What got you recommended three months ago might not be enough now—or might have gotten you positioned differently than you'd like.
The minimum viable monitoring setup: 30 core prompts, run weekly, across ChatGPT and Perplexity at minimum. Track your brand's mention rate, the sentiment used when you're mentioned, how often you lead the list vs. appear later, and which competitors are consistently outranking you.
When you see a change—positive or negative—trace it. Did a competitor get a major review surge? Did a comparison article get published? Did your G2 profile get a batch of new reviews? Understanding what caused a shift tells you what to reinforce or counter.
Competitive organizations are now allocating 15%+ of their digital marketing budget to AEO/GEO work. That number is going to look prescient within 18 months.
The Compounding Effect
These 8 moves aren't independent. They compound. A strong entity definition makes your editorial mentions more consistent. Better editorial mentions drive more AI citations. More AI citations drive more brand searches. More brand searches drive more reviews. More reviews improve your G2 profile authority. Better G2 authority increases AI recommendation rates.
The brands running this flywheel now—not perfectly, but consistently—are building an AI visibility moat that their competitors will find very expensive to close.
The question isn't whether to start. It's whether to start now or wait until your competitors have already pulled ahead.
Running the benchmark is the first step. geobuddy.co automates the weekly prompt tracking across all major AI platforms, so you always know where you stand—and when something changes.
Originally published on GeoBuddy Blog.
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