How B2B brands get recommended by ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity
Your buyers ask an assistant before they ask you. It answers in two sentences and names two or three companies. Here is what decides whether one of them is you.
Vedran ObradovićFounder, Vizura Studio®The shortlist moved
According to G2's 2026 survey of 1,076 B2B software buyers, 51% now start research in an AI chatbot more often than in Google, and 69% chose a different vendor than planned because of what an AI told them. The first impression of your brand increasingly happens without a visit to your website.
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your brand readable, understandable and citable by these systems. It overlaps with SEO, but the goal is different: not a ranking in a list of links, but a place in a two-sentence answer.
How a machine reads your brand
- Crawl. A bot requests your pages. It often ignores JavaScript and obeys your robots.txt and firewall - even when you did not mean it to block it.
- Parse. It throws the design away and keeps text, headings and structured data. What is not in the HTML does not exist.
- Resolve. It decides who you are: one name, one category, one buyer, linked to profiles it already trusts.
- Answer. A buyer asks. It compresses everything it knows into a short answer and picks who to recommend.
Five fixes that move the needle
- Open the door. Check that GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot are not blocked by robots.txt or your CDN firewall.
- Say what you are in one sentence. "Northwind is maintenance planning software for multi-site manufacturers" beats "the intelligent platform for modern teams" every time.
- Be one entity. Use the same name, category and description across your site, LinkedIn, Crunchbase and G2, and connect them with Organization schema and sameAs links.
- Publish proof machines can quote. Numbers, customer names and case studies in plain HTML - not locked in PDFs or images.
- Add a machine layer. Structured data, an llms.txt file and clean heading structure make your content easier to parse and cite.
Where design fits in
A beautiful site can still be invisible to machines. The fix is not a tag checker - it is a brand problem: unclear category, unnamed buyer, proof hidden in slides. That is why brand strategy and machine readability now belong in the same project.
