By Tom Telford, Chief Digital Officer at Clarity Global
AI overviews and agents have quickly become the foundation of discovery for B2B buyers. If you want your organisation’s language, proof points, and perspectives to appear in those AI answers, your Chief Marketing Officers must unify both your PR and marketing objectives, budgets, and company measurement as soon as possible. Without this coordination, you’ll feed AI models unclear information and they’ll return the same.
Through AI, the B2B buying journey can be protracted. Already we’re seeing a dependency on AI‑generated summaries, followed by a deeper round of desk research across vendor sites, trade press, analysts, and peer communities. AI is being used to shorten the early research cycle, but engaged B2B buyers will still verify, compare, and challenge. I am taking great pleasure in shouting, “SEO isn’t dead” for at least the third time in my 20 year career in digital! Don’t discount the traditional results just yet. This is the moment to earn trust.
In fact the fundamentals for both Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and traditional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) remain similar to when Google first revolutionalised Search. Keyword research becomes prompt landscape mapping, taking the specific questions real buyers, and their AI copilots, ask: from problem framing to shortlist and objection‑handling.
On‑site optimisation is still about smart, structured content, but with enterprise‑grade credibility—named authors with expertise, references, data, customer evidence, security and compliance details, integration guides and detailed thought leadership. Create ‘Brand Answers’ pages for your category claims, product capabilities, and implementation approaches that are written in plain English and marked up with sensible schemas.
Crucially, to drive today’s relevancy, PR is king. In B2B, this means trade titles, analysts, partner ecosystems, review websites, and expansive social content strategies. It’s not manufactured links. Place research, opinion, and customer proof where buyers already look. Earned citations in respected outlets and reports become the corroboration AI systems reuse, and the sources human buyers click when they go deeper.
This only happens when PR, SEO, and content work as one. The red thread for CMOs is integration. Build a message map that defines how your category, company, products, and proof points should be described, then align PR, SEO, content, and social media to it. By turning the campaign narrative towards an entity strategy, you begin to influence terminology across brands, spokespeople, places, and products/services. This will make your positioning unambiguous for both humans and machines.
Returning to the B2B buying journey again, we are already seeing AI compress early‑stage discovery. By summarising categories, surfacing shortlists, and highlighting risks, the awareness and engagement phases of a buying cycle are combined and accelerated. Your presence in those first answers matters more. But B2B buyers still run extra checks and your job is to make that verification easy and consistent.
When thinking about AI Overviews in search engines, a complementary ad campaign is crucial. This ensures your presence at multiple touchpoints: the AI overview, organic results, paid ads, and other content areas such as the knowledge graph, videos, and images.
For now, there is an early-adopter advantage by moving to shape the language models and for buyers to adapt their buying behaviours. That language then echoes through request for proposals (RFPs), analyst calls, and board packs. Wait too long and competitors set the terms you’ll be judged against.
To wrap up, if any of this resonates, the following steps might help to kick start your GEO journey:
- Audit how AI describes your brand and rivals across the top 50 prompts per persona (e.g. CFO, CISO, CIO, line‑of‑business).
- Build a ‘Brand Answers’ library: canonical pages for category definition, differentiators, security/compliance, integrations, return on investments (ROIs), case studies, implementation, and support.
- Fix technical hygiene: speed, structure, authorship, schemas for FAQs, products, organisations, and persons.
- Orchestrate PR around that library: original research, customer stories, and executive POVs placed in the trade titles and analyst notes your buyers trust. Look at what media outlets are being quoted by your competitors and add these to your target lists, even if you’d traditionally overlook them.
- Measure what matters: tools are getting more sophisticated, but it’s early days. ROI-proof points are sparse but this will rapidly change in the coming months.
- Bring your teams together to discuss and create shared key performance indicators (KPIs) around outputs like tactical milestones and outcomes such as increased inclusion in AI outputs.
