One of the biggest priorities for marketing teams is managing the transition from conventional search to customers and prospects using AI for research. While SEO remains essential, it’s crucial that your brand appears in AI search summaries and chatbot responses.
Marketers are bombarded with advice and recommendations on how to run Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) campaigns. Some of this advice is great, but other recommendations are simply snake oil. We decided to conduct some research to determine what really influences whether a B2B brand shows up in generative AI responses.
How we analyzed B2B AI visibility
Our research used one of the leading GEO tools, Brandi, to analyze brand mentions and website citations in AI responses. The analysis was comprehensive, tracking over 1,000 prompts from 29 brands using four different AI engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, and Google AI Mode/Gemini).
We analyzed a mix of B2B technology companies, including electronic components, semiconductors, industrial automation, software, logistics, electrification and engineering. There was a mix of company sizes, although we focused mainly on large and medium-sized companies.
The prompts were created by Brandi’s intelligence engine based on the top topics and questions that each brand felt it should score for.
English-language prompts and responses were used in all analyses.
What 1,000 prompts tell us about B2B AI visibility
Here’s what the data revealed about how B2B brands appear (or don’t appear) in AI-generated responses.
Many B2B brands have low visibility
AI visibility is the frequency with which a brand is cited in response to a set of cues, expressed as a percentage. Our research found that only a fifth (21%) of brands appear in more than 25% of quick answers that matter to them. A third of brands appeared in less than 5% of AI responses.
This is not because the research focuses on companies with a low GEO. In two-thirds of cases, the top brand in the B2B category we analyzed had less than 25% visibility, and almost one in five (17%) of the most visible brands appeared in less than 10% of AI responses.
This is clearly worrying. Today, B2B brands don’t appear in the AI ​​responses to cues from their customers and prospects. As B2B customers move from conventional search to AI chatbots, the visibility of most vendors will decrease.
Having the right content on your website is a crucial factor in ensuring your brand is visible. Brands whose domains were in the top 10 domains cited by AI responses had an average of 25% visibility, while brands outside the top 10 were featured in AI responses only 7.6% of the time on average.
Interestingly, there were diminishing returns when a domain was most cited: brands whose domain received the most citations achieved only 31% visibility on average (only a small improvement over the top 10 brands), indicating that you can’t build a GEO strategy purely on native content.
Your customers are searching everywhere. Make sure your brand appears.
The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI ​​visibility data you need.
Start free trial
Wikipedia and Reddit are not as important as you think
Despite the received wisdom that Wikipedia and Reddit are major contributors to GEO visibility, they have limited impact for B2B brands. For 60% of brands, Wikipedia was not in the top 25 cited websites, and for 30% it was not cited in the answers to the questions created. This could change if brands invest time and money in influencing Wikipedia content. It also suggests that building content for other platforms may be more important.
Reddit was even less influential, not ranking in the top 25 cited domains for more than four-fifths (83%) of brands analyzed. This likely reflects the nature of B2B tech brands, which tend not to be discussed as much on Reddit as consumer brands.
Due to commercial agreements, ChatGPT has almost exclusive access to Reddit. If this AI model is important to you, it’s still worth considering a Reddit strategy, although you’ll need to have products or services that the Reddit community will engage with and discuss.
Gaining visibility in AI responses isn’t just about written content
Video should be a key part of any GEO strategy, as platforms like YouTube are widely used by AI models. For approximately 75% of brands, YouTube was among the top 25 domains mentioned in AI responses.
It’s no surprise that Google’s Gemini model – which includes AI answers at the top of search pages – most likely cited a YouTube video. However, all AI models use video, meaning written content alone is not enough to guarantee strong AI visibility.
The return of the LinkedIn article?
LinkedIn was surprisingly influential, appearing in the top 25 domain citations for 37% of brands. LinkedIn articles – even some posted a few years ago – appear in AI replies, despite LinkedIn itself apparently losing interest in the format. A strong presence on LinkedIn is therefore crucial for B2B brands, and writing long-form articles on the platform is a sensible GEO strategy.
Own media assets earned
Even as leaders at major AI companies promote the authority of earned media, we’ve found that owned media is critical in determining which B2B technology brands appear in AI responses. More than twice as many private websites are cited as earned media sites. While many of their own sites will be competitors, B2B brands will need to create content for their website, their channel partners, and other partner brands in the ecosystem if they want to be visible in AI responses.
Interestingly, the earned media that influences AI responses often differs from a brand’s top-level media list. Often a small number of titles generate the most citations from trade publications, and sometimes publications that were rejected by PR specialists due to a perceived lack of influence on the brand’s audience had a substantial impact on the responses audiences receive when using AI.
Given that AI company leaders are emphasizing the importance of earned media, we would expect the balance between owned and earned media to move toward earned media in the future.
What this means for your GEO strategy
Ensuring that your B2B brand is visible in the AI ​​responses provided to your customers and prospects is critical to long-term success. Yet most responses do not mention the leading brand, and most companies are only visible in a small percentage of AI responses. However, developing an effective GEO strategy is not easy. The data doesn’t support much of the accepted wisdom promoted by GEO gurus.
To be successful, B2B companies must conduct a detailed analysis of their market to understand the factors influencing key AI models. This data-driven approach is critical because this research highlights that accepted wisdom is often wrong.
#B2B #brands #mentioned #genAI #answers #MarTech