Why Aggarwal's GEO Definition Matters for B2B Founders

Most B2B Founders Are Optimizing for the Wrong Engine

When a Singapore B2B SaaS founder asks "are we showing up in search?", they almost always mean Google. That was the right question in 2022. It is not the right question in 2026.

Buyers now open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity and type a question like "what's the best AML compliance SaaS for a mid-sized Singapore bank?" The answer they get is not a list of ten blue links — it is a synthesized recommendation with one or two named vendors. If your brand is not in that answer, you lost the deal before you even knew there was one. This is the core problem that Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) was designed to solve.

What GEO Actually Means — The Definition That Counts

The term GEO was coined in a peer-reviewed computer science paper accepted at KDD 2024, one of the most competitive data-science conferences in the world. Lead author Pranjal Aggarwal and his co-authors wrote:

"we introduce Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), the first novel paradigm to aid content creators in improving their content visibility in generative engine responses"

— Pranjal Aggarwal, Lead author, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (KDD 2024), arXiv:2311.09735

Three words in that sentence deserve attention for B2B founders: paradigm, content creators, and generative engine responses.

Paradigm — Aggarwal's team did not describe GEO as a tweak to existing SEO checklists. They described it as a new category of optimization with different inputs, different signals, and different success metrics than Google ranking.

Content creators — In a B2B context, "content creator" means anyone publishing web pages, documentation, case studies, or comparison guides that an LLM might retrieve and cite. Your product page is content. Your pricing FAQ is content. Your LinkedIn company page is content.

Generative engine responses — The output being optimized is not a ranked URL. It is a synthesized answer. The question for your site is not "do we rank position 3?" but "does the model cite us, recommend us, or quote us when a buyer asks a relevant question?"

That distinction is not semantic. It changes what you need to build.

The Evidence: Where Most B2B Sites Stand Right Now

The academic paper at arXiv:2311.09735 ran structured experiments showing that specific content interventions — adding authoritative citations, including statistics, and writing in a Q&A format — measurably increased how often generative engines surfaced a given source. The researchers tested across multiple domains and found that the gains were not uniform: high-authority, well-structured content pulled significantly further ahead of thin or poorly structured pages.

That matches what we see in practice. We ran 17 audits across 14 distinct domains since our launch in May 2026 (extracted 2026-05-26) and found an average GEO score of 23 out of 100 — a Grade F. These were not random sites; they were submitted by B2B SaaS founders and marketing agencies who already suspected they had an AI visibility problem. Even among that self-selected group, the median score was failing. The most common failure modes were: no structured data, no cited statistics in body copy, no clear entity definition for the brand, and no FAQ schema that an LLM could parse cleanly.

The implication of Aggarwal et al.'s framework is that these are not cosmetic issues. They are structural barriers to appearing in a generative engine response, regardless of how well the same pages rank in Google.

Four Concrete Steps to Apply the GEO Definition to Your Site

These steps follow directly from what the KDD 2024 paper identifies as high-impact interventions for content creators.

1. Write one authoritative definition of what your company does — a single paragraph, on your homepage or About page, that names your category, your primary geography, and your target buyer. Generative engines need an unambiguous entity to cite. "We help companies grow" is not citable. "Cyberg7 AEO is a Singapore-based AI search visibility platform for B2B SaaS companies in Asia" is.

2. Add cited statistics to your top five landing pages — not "studies show," but real numbers with a source URL in the text. The arXiv paper found that adding statistics with citations was one of the strongest single signals for increasing generative engine citation rates.

3. Restructure at least one page as explicit Q&A — write the question your buyer types into ChatGPT, then answer it directly. Use H2 or H3 tags for the question text. This maps to the retrieval pattern generative engines use when assembling a response.

4. Run a GEO audit before and after each content change — you cannot improve what you cannot measure. The audit should test whether your brand appears in LLM responses to your target queries, not just whether your pages are indexed by Google.

Related Reading

• What is GEO? Generative Engine Optimization explained- llms.txt explained: write one that actually moves your AI visibility score

Run Your Own Audit

We audit B2B sites against 40+ GEO signals and return a scored report within 24 hours. Start at aivisibility.cyberg7.com.sg/audit — it takes three minutes to submit.