Generative engine optimization in Ottawa: how B2B companies get cited in AI search

Ottawa's private sector is built on companies that sell complex products to technical and institutional buyers. Invest Ottawa describes Kanata North as Canada's largest technology park, with more than 540 companies and over 33,000 employees, focused on network infrastructure, photonics, cloud computing and embedded systems. Its Why Ottawa sector pages add more than 1,800 tech companies in software and applied AI, 90% of Canada's industrial telecom R&D, more than 300 aerospace and defence companies and more than 180 federal agencies.

Few of these companies sell mainly to buyers "in Ottawa". They sell to carriers, hyperscalers, defence primes, hospitals and federal departments across Canada, the United States and beyond. Those buyers increasingly start with an assistant: Forrester reports that 94% of business buyers use AI during their buying process. When a network architect asks for optical transport vendors, or a program manager asks which Canadian firms build secure communications software, the assistant answers from the sources it can find and trust. GEO is the work of being one of those sources, described accurately.

What makes Ottawa different is that two of its largest buyer groups, public servants and bilingual buyers on both sides of the Ottawa River, research differently from a typical US software buyer. The rest of this guide covers what that changes.

The questions differ by sector, and so do the pages an assistant needs to answer them. This is the map we start from with Ottawa technology companies.

Two problems are common for Ottawa technology companies. The first is history: after acquisitions, spin-outs and rebrands, assistants keep repeating old company names and retired product lines. The second is format: the facts buyers need sit in PDF datasheets, slide decks or gated documentation that assistants cannot read or will not quote.

Federal procurement shapes the Ottawa market. Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) reports that the Government of Canada awarded $66.9 billion in contracts for goods, services and construction in 2024 to 2025, with $55.6 billion of that awarded by PSPC. Formal tenders are published on CanadaBuys, the official source for federal tender and award notices, but low dollar value purchases, below $25,000 for goods and $40,000 for services and construction, are often made directly with vendors. Before any tender, someone has to find out which vendors exist.

Public servants also have explicit guidance on AI. The Government of Canada's guide on the use of generative AI lists research among possible uses, and tells staff not to use generative AI tools as search engines unless sources are provided so they can verify the content. For a supplier, the implication is direct: an answer that cites your own page, a public contract record or a credible directory is worth far more to a government buyer than an unsourced mention.

Build pages that answer the questions public-sector buyers check:

• Are you a Canadian company, and where is the work done and the data stored?
• Which security clearances do the company and its staff hold, if any?
• Do you hold a standing offer, supply arrangement or other vehicle we can buy through?
• Can you serve us in English and French?
• What comparable public-sector work have you delivered, and is it on the public record?

Answer each one in plain text, using only facts your contracts and legal team allow you to publish. Never imply a clearance, certification or contract vehicle you do not hold. Assistants repeat what they find, and a procurement officer will check.

Ottawa is a bilingual market in law and in practice. The City of Ottawa's bilingualism by-law recognizes the bilingual character of the city and gives residents the right to communicate with it and receive available services in English or French. Gatineau, across the river in Quebec, is part of the same capital region. A buyer in either city may ask an assistant in either language, and French questions tend to be answered from French sources, so an English-only site is often missing from French answers.

Google now serves AI answers in both languages here. It introduced AI Mode in Canada in English in August 2025 and announced French in October 2025. French queries need French pages to cite.

• Write French pages natively or with professional review, not raw machine translation. Defence, telecom and health terminology differs from everyday French.
• Give each language its own URL with hreflang, so each version can be indexed and cited.
• Run the French question set separately, with the assistant set to French, and score it on its own.
• Keep facts identical across languages. A certification, clearance or product name that differs between versions confuses assistants and buyers.
• If you sell into Quebec, involve your legal team on consent and tracking for Quebec visitors before you change analytics.

Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode: a page needs to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet, and no special schema is required. For Ottawa technology companies, that puts the weight on familiar problems: specifications that exist only in PDFs, product facts inside images, and documentation behind a login.

Check crawler access for each assistant separately. OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot to surface sites in ChatGPT search and treats it separately from GPTBot, which is used for model training, so a site can allow one and block the other. Security-minded IT teams sometimes block AI crawlers across the board; agree a policy that protects what must stay private and keeps public marketing pages reachable. Our AI search visibility checklist lists the checks we run.

1. Weeks 1 to 2: write 40 to 60 buyer questions with sales and, if you sell to government, your public-sector team. Split them by product, comparison, security and procurement, and write each in English and French.
2. Weeks 2 to 3: run the questions in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. Record who is named, what is said about you and which sources are cited.
3. Weeks 3 to 6: rewrite capability, security, government and comparison pages so each answers one question in its first lines, with facts in text and links to public records where they exist.
4. Weeks 4 to 6: fix technical access: crawler rules, sitemaps, hreflang, and any key facts locked in PDFs or images.
5. Weeks 6 to 10: align third-party sources with your site, including association and partner listings, directories, supplier profiles and descriptions left over from acquisitions or rebrands.
6. Weeks 10 to 12: repeat the question set in both languages, compare it with the baseline, and report the changes next to AI referral visits, form answers and qualified pipeline.

There is no ranking position in an assistant, so we use three views. The first is the fixed question set, repeated monthly and scored for whether you are named, whether the description is accurate and which competitors appear beside you, split by engine and by language. Our guide to measuring share of answer explains the scoring.

The second is analytics: a GA4 segment for visits referred by AI assistants, read with the knowledge that some apps pass no referrer. The third is a "how did you hear about us" field on contact and demo forms, which catches buyers who asked an assistant before they visited. Google includes traffic from AI features in the Search Console performance report under the Web search type, so Search Console confirms indexing and impressions but cannot isolate AI answers.

Report all three next to qualified meetings and pipeline from the CRM. Government and enterprise cycles in Ottawa are long, so track early signals such as inbound questions from departments and target accounts, but judge the program on opportunities.

Our team is based in Montreal and works with B2B companies in Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal and the United States, in English and French. Our generative engine optimization service ties AI visibility to CRM reporting, so an Ottawa software, telecom or defence technology company can see which buyer questions turn into meetings. For our wider work with Ottawa teams, including ABM and paid search, see our Ottawa page.

If you are still comparing providers, our guide to choosing a GEO agency in Canada lists the questions to ask, including how French and US markets are handled.

To see how assistants describe your company today, talk to our team. We will run a short set of your buyer questions in English and French before a free 30-minute pipeline plan.