At the Agency Hackers October 2025, we sat in a room full of marketers and watched a collective penny drop. The era of optimising for Google's tenth blue link is over. Welcome GEO: Generative Engine Optimisation.
If that sounds like just more marketing jargon bear with us. This might be the most important shift in digital marketing since… well, the birth of SEO itself...
The B2B search game has changed (and so has the playing field)
Here's the thing: your potential clients aren't Googling "best B2B marketing agency Manchester" anymore. They're asking ChatGPT, "What kind of agency should I hire to help with demand gen?" or prompting Perplexity with "Show me agencies in Birmingham that understand LinkedIn paid campaigns". The answers they get? Well they're not coming from a search ranked list of web page links. They're being generated by AI models that have digested page after page on the internet and are now synthesising an answer from a wider and deeper information pool. So, as a B2B marketer, your job isn't to rank anymore. It's to become a key part of the answer, by owning thought leadership in an identified space.The shift from keyword stuffing to being genuinely useful
The old SEO playbook told us to pepper our copy with keywords, backlinks and pray to the algorithm gods. GEO flips everything we’ve learnt to date. It asks a simpler, harder question, is your content actually worth citing?AI models don't care about keyword density. They care about credibility, structure and originality. They want content that reads like a trusted source, think less "10 Tips to Boost Engagement!!!" and more "Here's what we learned running 20 data-driven B2B campaigns last year."
That means we need to be clearer in our writing, smarter in our use of structured data and we need to produce more meaningful content that demonstrates genuine expertise and proven experiences. If your blog is fluffy, generic and could've been written by anyone, AI won't rate or remember it. If it sounds like you, with your perspective and your evidence? That's when you have a higher chance of being cited when it comes to the GEO algorithms.
The quiet B2B marketing advantage: original thinking
Here's the good news buried in all this disruption. If you've been doing thought leadership properly, publishing original research, sharing real insights, creating content that actually teaches your audience something meaningful, then you're already halfway to winning at GEO. AI models are ravenous for high quality, factual, expert content. The brands producing datasets, case studies and genuinely useful explainers will get fed into training data and cited in outputs. The brands churning out generic blogs? They'll fade into the background noise and the search black hole more and more. So in a strange way, GEO rewards the thing we should've been doing all along with our shared content - being genuinely helpful.Imogen Docx
AI Innovation Lead
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Final Thought: What we're doing about it at Upp B2B
GEO has been on our radar for a while and whilst we are working away on it internally for our own and our clients’ content, it’s fantastic to have heard about where things are heading from industry leaders at ‘Agency Hackers.’ Coming away we're rethinking how we structure content not just for human readers, but for the AI models that will summarise it for our audiences. We're investing our time in more original research and data that deserves to be cited. The future of B2B search won’t be defined by keywords alone, but by context and GEO search is the key to unlocking it. Because the future of B2B marketing isn't about gaming algorithms. It's about becoming the kind of source that AI trusts and references. And if that sounds like more work than stuffing keywords into a meta description? Well, yeah. But it's also a lot more interesting for your audiences and your brand positioning in market. Generative search doesn’t just reward what you say, it rewards who you are. Make sure AI knows your brand, trusts it, and shares it.it’s time to stop chasing leads and start meeting them where they already are. If you’re looking for a steer on where to get started on your GEO strategy, feel free to drop us a line to: hello@uppb2b.co.uk and we'd be happy to help you bring GEO into your search strategy.
