Free playbook for B2B teams, 2026 edition
The B2B AEO & GEO Playbook From invisible to cited.
A plain-English, operator-grade guide to getting your company named and linked by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI Overviews. Find where you stand in 30 minutes, benchmark against competitors, then follow a week-by-week 90-day plan.
12 chapters · about 65 pages · Updated September 2026
AEO & GEO Playbook
From invisible to cited
more organic clicks per impression when a brand is cited in a Google AI Overview than when it is not source
growth in commercial-intent queries showing AI Overviews, November 2025 to April 2026 source
average sources cited per answer by Claude versus Perplexity on B2B buyer questions source
Inside
What the playbook covers. Beginner to operator.
How to use this playbook
Who each chapter is for and the order to read it in. A 60-second version of the whole method for busy founders.
- Answer engines retrieve, then select, then cite
- Measure where you stand before changing anything
- AEO is good search practice applied to a reader that quotes you
What changed: search, answers and the B2B buyer
Plain definitions of SEO, AEO and GEO, and why comparison and question queries now trigger AI answers. How Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Copilot retrieve and cite differently.
- Comparison queries trigger AI Overviews 95.4% of the time (Seer Interactive)
- Each engine has a different sourcing personality
- Mentions and citations are separate metrics
Where do you stand? The 30-minute self-audit
A step-by-step check of crawler access, indexing, AI answers, entity accuracy and off-site footprint. A 20-point scoring sheet tells you whether you are invisible, known but not chosen, or in the conversation.
- Check robots.txt, your CDN and View Source first
- Ask five buyer prompts across four engines
- Your score decides your first move
Benchmarking: build your prompt set
How to source 50 to 100 buyer prompts by funnel stage and run them across engines with repeat runs. Formulas for mention rate, citation rate, position, sentiment and share of voice, with a worked example and template.
- Cap branded prompts at 10 to 15 percent
- Run each prompt three times per engine per cycle
- Report share of voice on your top 20 high-intent prompts
Technical foundations
Which crawlers to allow (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Googlebot, Bingbot) and how firewalls silently block them. Rendering, sitemaps, IndexNow, page experience and the reality of llms.txt.
- Search bots and training bots are separate decisions
- Most AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript
- Google says no AI text file or special markup is required
Entities and schema
Build one company fact sheet, then express it with Organization, Person, Service, Article, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList markup. Ready-to-edit JSON-LD templates linked with @id and sameAs.
- Consistent facts beat more markup
- Structured data must match visible text
- sameAs ties your official profiles to one entity
Content that gets cited
The answer block pattern, question-based site architecture and planning for query fan-out. Comparison pages, pricing explainers, original data, freshness and author entities.
- Put the answer in the first sentence
- Publish honest comparison and pricing pages
- Original data makes you the source
Off-site corroboration
Why engines trust agreement across independent sources and which ones matter for B2B: listicles, Clutch and G2, partner directories, LinkedIn, YouTube, podcasts and PR. The real rules for Wikipedia and Wikidata.
- Clutch was Claude's most cited third-party domain (Orbit Media)
- Map the domains your target answers already cite
- Earn independent coverage before thinking about Wikipedia
Measurement
A GA4 AI Assistants channel with a ready regex, Google Search Console, Bing's AI Performance report and server logs. Self-reported attribution, influenced pipeline definitions and a one-page board report.
- Measure visibility, exposure, traffic and revenue separately
- Bing AI Performance shows grounding queries
- Tie AI visibility to CRM pipeline
Industry playbooks
One-page playbooks for SaaS, system integrators, data consulting, cybersecurity, crypto infrastructure, supply chain tech, legal and CLM, healthcare IT and higher education. Starter prompts, evidence to build and traps to avoid in each.
- Buyer phrasing and trusted sources differ by industry
- Publish the proof your category expects
- Use the starter prompts to seed your prompt set
The 90-day plan and the operating rhythm
A week-by-week plan from baseline to board report, in the right order. The weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual rhythm and who owns each part.
- Measure, fix access, then entities, content and off-site
- Two full prompt runs by day 90
- Compounding comes from a steady rhythm
Mistakes, myths and red flags when hiring an AEO agency
The most common AEO mistakes and the myths that waste budget, each checked against platform documentation. Red flags and the questions to ask before you sign with an agency.
- No one can guarantee AI placements
- Avoid scaled low-value AI content
- Hire for method and pipeline connection
Read the opening. Then take the whole thing.
For twenty years, search worked like a library catalog. You typed a query, got ten links, and clicked the one that looked right. Your job as a marketer was to rank in that list.
Answer engines work more like a research assistant. The buyer asks a full question, often with context ("we are a 400-person logistics company on SAP, what yard management software should we look at?"). The assistant runs several searches in the background, reads the results, writes one answer, and links the sources it used. The buyer may never click anything.
That shift changes what winning looks like. You are no longer competing for a position on a page. You are competing to be named in the answer and linked as a source.
The definitions, in one table
| Term | Plain-English meaning | What you optimize for | Where it shows up |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEO (search engine optimization) | Getting your pages to rank in a list of search results. | Rankings, clicks, organic sessions. | Google and Bing results pages. |
| AEO (answer engine optimization) | Getting your content chosen as the direct answer to a question. | Being quoted, named and linked inside an answer. | Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, featured snippets, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Copilot, voice assistants. |
| GEO (generative engine optimization) | Getting your brand represented accurately and favorably in answers written by generative AI models. | Mentions, citations, sentiment and share of voice across AI assistants. | ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and AI features inside search. |
| AI visibility | The umbrella measurement: how often and how well AI systems present you. | Mention rate, citation rate, position, sentiment, share of voice. | All of the above. |
In practice, AEO and GEO describe the same work, and most agencies and buyers use the terms interchangeably. We use "AEO" through this playbook for brevity. SEO is not replaced. It is the foundation, because most answer engines retrieve from a search index before they write.
Why this matters for B2B specifically
- B2B questions are the kind AI answers. Seer Interactive's 2026 study of 5.47 million queries found Google shows AI Overviews on 36 percent of informational queries, 95.4 percent of comparison queries and 85.9 percent of question-format queries. B2B research is mostly comparisons and questions.
- Commercial queries are catching up. Semrush tracked more than 600,000 keywords from November 2025 to April 2026 and found commercial-intent queries showing AI Overviews grew 71 percent over that period.
- Being cited is worth a lot, and not being cited costs you. In the same Seer dataset, brands cited inside an AI Overview earned 120 percent more organic clicks per impression than when they were not cited. Queries with an AI Overview still had a lower organic click-through rate (2.4 percent in February 2026) than queries without one (3.8 percent).
- The reach is enormous. Google reported in May 2025 that AI Overviews had passed 1.5 billion users across 200 countries and territories.
Get the full PDF. Book 20 minutes and we send it.
The high-level view is on this page. The full playbook with templates, prompt sets, robots.txt and JSON-LD snippets and the 90-day plan is sent after a short call.
- Self-audit scoring sheet and prompt-set template
- Industry chapters for SaaS, partners, cybersecurity, crypto and more
- Measurement setup for GA4, Search Console and Bing
Book 20 minutes, get the playbook
A short call on where your AI visibility stands today. We send the full PDF straight after.
Questions buyers ask us. Answered plainly.
Still unsure? Ask us directly.
What is the difference between AEO, GEO and SEO?
SEO gets your pages ranked in search results. AEO gets your content chosen as the direct answer to a question. GEO improves how generative AI models like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini mention, describe and cite your brand. In practice AEO and GEO are the same work, built on an SEO foundation.
Do I need llms.txt to appear in AI answers?
No. Google says AI text files neither help nor harm visibility in Google Search, and the crawler documentation from OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity does not mention reading llms.txt. Crawler access, server-rendered content and clear answers matter far more.
How do I find out if ChatGPT or Perplexity recommends my company?
Run a set of real buyer questions through each engine in a logged-out or temporary session, three times each, and record whether you are named, whether your site is linked, and which competitors appear. The playbook includes a 30-minute self-audit and a full prompt-set template.
How long does AEO take to show results?
Technical fixes such as unblocking crawlers can take effect quickly; OpenAI says robots.txt changes for its search crawler take about 24 hours. In our client work, visibility metrics move first, referral traffic next, and pipeline over one to two quarters.
Who is this playbook for?
B2B founders, CMOs, SEO leads, content teams and web developers at SaaS companies, system integrators, data consultancies, cybersecurity, crypto infrastructure, supply chain tech, legal tech, healthcare IT and higher education. It starts from zero and goes to operator-level detail.
Want it done for you? That is our AEO, GEO & SEO service.
The free growth audit maps your funnel stage by stage against your revenue target, then shows the two or three moves with the biggest pipeline impact.