From findable to citable
GEO is not renamed SEO. It is a structurally different approach: it does not optimize for ranking, it optimizes for recommendation. The goal is to appear as a qualified supplier in the response a generative AI generates for your buyer.
The change no one has measured yet
The B2B industrial funnel has silently broken. The research phase — where the buyer builds their supplier shortlist — has moved from traditional search engines to generative systems.
A procurement manager looking for axial piston hydraulic pumps no longer types on Google and scrolls ten results. They open Perplexity or ChatGPT and ask a direct question. They get a response with three or four names. If your name is not there, you don't enter the evaluation.
The problem is that presence in these responses does not depend on SEO positioning, advertising budget, or brand awareness. It depends on the structure of your content — and its compatibility with how language models build their responses.