Generative engine optimization, usually shortened to GEO, has quickly become part of the vocabulary of software marketers.
The idea sounds straightforward: make a company more visible when buyers use AI assistants and AI-powered search engines.
But what does a GEO agency actually do?
For B2B software companies, the work extends beyond rewriting content for AI systems. A serious engagement combines commercial search research, technical SEO, content engineering, competitive intelligence and third-party authority development.
The objective is not merely to get a brand mentioned more often. It is to increase the likelihood that buyers encounter accurate, relevant information about the company during their evaluation process.
Before changing anything, a GEO agency should investigate how AI systems currently respond to important buyer questions.
Consider an established project management software provider competing with Asana, monday.com and ClickUp.
An agency might examine questions about project management software for engineering teams, professional services firms, remote teams and large enterprises.
The responses may reveal that different competitors dominate different situations.
One brand might be the default general recommendation, another might win on price, and a third might be preferred when a buyer names a particular workflow.
Those differences determine the strategy.
A generic goal such as "increase AI visibility by 30%" tells the marketing team very little unless the underlying questions, competitors and measurement method are defined.
A GEO agency should identify the questions most likely to influence software selection.
These can be organized around category discovery, alternatives, head-to-head comparisons, integrations, pricing, buyer requirements and objections.
The same questions should then be evaluated across relevant systems, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews where they appear.
Because the answers can vary by platform and sampling conditions, the agency should retain the actual responses rather than reporting a single unexplained visibility score.
The next job is to examine what AI systems can discover and understand about the company.
Common opportunities include:
The purpose is to make genuinely useful information easy to retrieve and interpret.
This does not require abandoning traditional SEO. Search engines still need to crawl, index and understand the underlying content.
A software company does not control every website that influences its reputation.
Independent reviews, industry publications, comparison articles and specialist information sources may all be used to understand a product category.
A GEO agency should determine which of these sources appear repeatedly in answers and which have a meaningful audience of actual buyers.
It can then pursue relevant editorial coverage, research contributions, accurate product information and industry visibility.
High Salience, an AI search and SEO agency specializing in B2B software, describes this approach as combining search intelligence, retrievability and source authority. Its publicly available research covers 21 software categories and records how ChatGPT mentions and recommends individual brands.
Such research illustrates why source selection should be based on category evidence rather than a standard list of websites.
After implementation, the agency should repeat the original commercial query set.
The comparison should assess whether the company's brand appears more frequently, whether it is recommended for the right buyer situations and whether the description of the product has become more accurate.
It should also identify whether recurring sources have changed.
These measurements need to be considered alongside branded search activity, direct inquiries, demo requests and opportunities recorded in the company's CRM.
An increase in AI mentions without commercial relevance is not necessarily meaningful progress.
No GEO agency can guarantee a particular ChatGPT recommendation, AI Overview appearance or permanent position in an AI-generated shortlist.
Models, retrieval systems, ranking inputs and generated responses change.
Likewise, a website cannot secure durable visibility simply by adding a particular schema type or inserting more mentions of its target keywords.
A credible engagement focuses on improving the underlying information environment and testing whether those changes produce results.
For B2B software companies, GEO works best as an extension of an established search and demand-generation strategy.
The right agency should make the company easier to discover, understand, validate and recommend when prospective buyers are deciding which software belongs on their shortlist.