GEO for B2B: How LLMs Reshape the Buyer Shortlist

Last week we wrote about how the B2B selling process is changing, as LLMs draw the buyer away from your known marketing funnel into an increasingly opaque, front-loaded journey.

Out of 20 deals, 19 go to a vendor the buyer identifies before the formal evaluation begins. This part is familiar, if a bit more extreme than it was 10 years ago, but it underscores how our attention and investment are often focused way too late in the process.

AI citations happen in the most influential phase, with an estimated 100 million B2B research prompts a day across the name brand LLMs. For the first time in several decades, the buying process is getting shorter (to be fair, only by a month from a high of 11.3 months) even as buying committees continue to grow.

Meanwhile, AI isn’t replacing the vendor relationship, just compressing the research phase. As usual in marketing, the rise of a new thing doesn’t remove the need for the old one.

This new responsibility to address discoverability in LLMs is additive, because the later stage of the process still depends on being credible to human beings, even as you must be discoverable by machines.

If you go looking for “GEO” best practices you’ll find quite a lot of opinion, but relatively scant top-tier research. The good news is that the high-impact levers are likely a good fit with existing content and SEO strategy.

• LLMs love a stat. The seminal study in the area from Princeton/KDD in 2024 found a roughly 40% uplift on stats, quotes, and citations. But the strength of the lift related strongly to the strength of the research underlying it.
• LLMs like third-party validation. Owned content underperformed earned content. Analyst coverage, PR, and validated research win.
• LLMs aren’t browsing. They benefit from content structured for a query, so think like a machine and make sure that those mid-funnel, deeper information pages are built around topic clusters, clear definitions, structured data, and FAQ style formatting.
• LLMs are asking the questions posed by overworked, understaffed humans. Chances are the prompt will look something like “top agencies helping mid-market manufacturers implement AI in London” so lean in on direct comparisons, evaluation criteria, and the questions that come up in sales calls.
• LLMs aren’t dumb. They don’t react any better to old-school SEO tricks like keyword stuffing than the new search algorithms do.