B2B AI Shortlists

Generative engine optimization for B2B means getting your company named when buyers ask AI for a vendor shortlist. Write down the shortlist questions your buyers ask, run each one several times per engine, and record who is named and what the answer cites. Then fix the material those answers rely on, one change at a time.

The difficulty in B2B is that the four main engines do not read the same things. We asked three shortlist questions on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews, three times each, and the answers were built from completely different material: one engine cited vendor websites almost exclusively, another cited only third-party roundups, and a third showed no sources at all.