Generative engine optimization for US B2B companies: how to get named in AI answers

Forrester’s State of Business Buying 2026, based on its survey of nearly 18,000 business buyers worldwide, reports that 94% of buyers use AI during their buying process. The same research found that AI search tools often deliver incomplete or unreliable information, and that buyers increasingly check AI output against trusted external sources such as peers, product experts and industry analysts.

The buying group is also larger than most marketing plans assume. Forrester reports that a typical buying decision now includes 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers, and that purchases with generative AI features roughly double the size of the buying group. Every one of those people can ask an assistant a different question about you.

For a VP of marketing at a US SaaS, industrial tech or professional services firm, the practical meaning is simple. Before a buyer fills in a form, an assistant may already have written a shortlist, summarized your pricing model and compared you with two competitors. GEO is how you make sure that summary is accurate, current and backed by sources the buyer will trust when they check it.

There is no single "AI search." Google rolled out AI Mode to everyone in the US on May 20, 2025, without a Labs sign-up, and it now sits beside AI Overviews, Copilot, ChatGPT search, Gemini and Perplexity. Each assistant retrieves information in its own way, which changes what you have to fix. The table below lists only what each provider documents publicly.

Two points stand out. First, Bing matters for GEO even in teams that rarely look at it for SEO, because Copilot answers are built on it. Second, Google states that there are no special requirements or schema needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Strong, indexable, specific pages remain the foundation everywhere.

We group the work into five streams. Most US B2B sites need all five, but the order depends on what the first audit shows.

• Answer-first pages. Each product, use case and industry page opens with a plain two or three sentence answer: what it is, who it is for, what it integrates with, how it is priced. Assistants quote clear statements; they skip vague ones.
• Comparison and pricing transparency. Buyers ask assistants "X vs Y" and "how much does X cost." If you publish nothing, the answer comes from a competitor’s comparison page or a stale forum thread. Publish fair comparisons and at least your pricing model, even if the number is scoped.
• Third-party sources. Review profiles such as G2, analyst coverage, partner directories, industry media and expert commentary. Forrester found buyers are more likely to engage based on information from industry experts than from AI tools, so these sources shape both the answer and the buyer’s check of it.
• Index coverage in Bing and Google. Verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console, submit sitemaps, and fix pages that are excluded or lack snippets. OpenAI does not name its search providers on its publisher page, so a clean Bing index is cheap insurance as well as a requirement for Copilot.
• Schema and crawler access. Use Organization, Product and FAQ markup to keep entity facts consistent, knowing Google says no special schema is required for its AI features. Then check robots.txt and your CDN or bot protection so OAI-SearchBot, Bingbot and Googlebot are not blocked by accident.

Our guide to which pages AI assistants read on B2B websites goes deeper on page types. The common mistake we see is spending the first month on schema and llms.txt files while the pricing page still says "contact us" and the newest product has no page at all.

The questions differ by sector, so the prompt set must too. A SaaS buyer asks about integrations, security reviews, migration effort and pricing per seat or per usage. An industrial technology buyer asks about certifications, compatibility with installed equipment, lead times and service coverage across US regions. A professional services buyer asks who has done this work for a company like theirs, and what the engagement looks like.

In each case, the assistant needs a page that answers the question in specific terms, and a third-party source that confirms it. Industrial and services firms often have the expertise but not the pages: the proof sits in sales decks and RFP answers. Turning that material into public, approved pages is usually the fastest GEO gain they have.

PlanConversion is a revenue generation agency based in Montreal, and we run GEO work for companies selling into the US. Montreal sits in the Eastern time zone, so our team works the same hours as East Coast clients and overlaps most of the working day with Central and Pacific teams. Weekly calls and launch days happen in real time.

Because our costs are in Canadian dollars, US companies paying in USD often find that a senior Montreal team compares well with a US agency of similar seniority. We scope fees after a short discovery call rather than publishing GEO prices. For ABM, paid media and RevOps alongside GEO, see our US page.

If you are comparing providers in both countries, our sister article on choosing a GEO agency in Canada lists the questions to ask any agency, wherever it is based.

This is the sequence we use for a first quarter. It assumes marketing owns the website and can publish weekly.

1. Days 1 to 10: build a prompt set of 40 to 80 real buyer questions with sales, grouped by category, use case, comparison and pricing. Run them in ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Mode and record who is named, how you are described and which sources are cited.
2. Days 10 to 20: run the technical checks. Verify Bing Webmaster Tools and Search Console, fix indexing and snippet issues, and confirm robots.txt and bot protection allow OAI-SearchBot, Bingbot and Googlebot.
3. Days 20 to 45: rewrite the ten pages that matter most with answer-first openings, approved facts and current proof. Publish or update a pricing model page and two to four fair comparison pages.
4. Days 30 to 60: fix third-party sources. Update review profiles, partner listings and directory entries, correct outdated facts, and brief analysts or industry media where you have news worth covering.
5. Days 45 to 75: add Organization, Product and FAQ schema where it reflects visible page content, and publish answers to the sector questions that had no good page.
6. Days 75 to 90: rerun the full prompt set, compare against the baseline, and set the next quarter’s priorities by revenue impact.

Start with share of answer: for each question in the fixed set, are you named, is the description accurate, and which competitors appear beside you. Rerun the set monthly, because single answers vary by session and phrasing. Our guide to measuring share of answer explains the scoring and how to report it.

Then add the signals each platform gives you. OpenAI says ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to referral links, so those visits can be segmented in analytics. Bing Webmaster Tools now has an AI Performance report, in beta, that counts citations in Copilot and Bing AI summaries. Search Console shows how pages perform in Google Search, where AI features appear.

Finally, connect it to revenue. Create an AI-referred segment, add a "how did you hear about us" field to demo forms, and report both next to meetings, opportunities and pipeline in the CRM. Leadership should see GEO in the same report as paid media and ABM, not in a separate deck of screenshots.

Our generative engine optimization service runs alongside our paid media, ABM and RevOps work, so AI visibility is planned with the same buyer questions and reported in the same pipeline view. We do not promise placement in any assistant. We improve the pages, facts and sources answers draw on, and we measure the change every month.

If you want to see how assistants describe your company to US buyers today, talk to our team. We will run a short set of your category questions across the main assistants before the call.