What changed in the buyer journey
Users still search. Increasingly they also ask chat interfaces and receive synthesized overviews before a click. Regional 2026 coverage of Google Marketing Live EMEA and AI Mode availability describes a conversational, multimodal search surface — and a higher bar for being the source that gets cited.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is less a bag of tricks than a discipline: problem-solving content, technical clarity, verifiable sources, and precise data. The same foundations that make pages useful to humans make them usable to models.
What B2B sites get wrong
Thin service pages that say everything and prove nothing. Unsourced statistics. No author or company accountability. No structured answers to the actual jobs buyers search for — “why PoCs fail,” “how to integrate agents with CRM,” “custom vs no-code for AI.”
If your page cannot stand as a primary source, it will not be selected as one.
A practical GEO checklist for service companies
Publish deep pieces against high-intent problems you can deliver. Cite primary research. Keep claims dated and specific. Connect every article to a real face of your system — software, web, automation, services — with a clear next step.
Traffic without qualification is vanity. Traffic that arrives with the right problem statement is pipeline.