Writing for buyers and bots: what GEO-friendly content looks like in B2B

Lots of people are trying to work out what “GEO-friendly” content is.  

“How do I write content in a way that is more likely to get found and surfaced by an LLM.” 

That question makes sense. AI is changing how people discover information, compare vendors and sense-check decisions. Everyone is telling you it’s important. The Economist has recently started running two versions of its website, one for humans rich with images and one for optimised for bots. 

In B2B especially, buyers are using AI to compress research and validate choices. They are going beyond browsing and using LLMs to try to get to confidence faster.  

So nailing content that helps you reach the bots, in turn helps you reach your buyers. But, with all the varying advice flooding onto the web, there is a danger of overcorrecting.  

There are some formatting things that help, a little bit. Some of the things that help a buyer understand content also help AI systems retrieve, summarise and repeat it. Clear headlines help. Strong structure helps. Explicit language helps. So does getting to the point, but good GEO content still needs to be good content.  

The goal is not to write for bots instead of buyers. It is to write for buyers in a way bots can understand. 

Yes yes that’s great but, dear author, everyone on LinkedIn is telling me I need to just do loads of FAQs and Top 10s! 

Uuggghh, fine…. 

1. Start with helpful, people-first content 

As I was saying…. Good GEO content still needs to be good content.  

If content is thin, generic, or purely trying to ‘game the system’ it is less likely to be trusted. 

This article is designed to be helpful because lots of companies are over-indexing in a panic about how to write for bots - and they don't really need to. Maybe you found this by searching ‘How to write for LLMs’ and hopefully, you find it useful, but the start point of this blog was trying to help people looking for an answer. 

A good rule of thumb is, if LLMs didn’t exist, would a human still want to read or share this? 

2. Use a headline that says what the piece is about.  

This one is kind of obvious, but sadly does mean some of the more creative, extended metaphorical titles are disappearing.  I deleted the original title of ‘tickling the robotic overlords’ fancy with your blogs’ because it wasn’t as obvious as it could be. 

Some B2B content loses in the first line because it’s either too vague, or trying too hard to be clever. A good headline says what the piece is about. 

Bad: 

• Connectivity without compromise 

• The future is already here 

• Rethinking resilience in a changing world 

Better: 

• What buyers should ask before picking an OSS platform 

• How private 5G changes network design for ports 

• Why data centre visibility matters more in AI infrastructure 

That doesn’t mean every headline has to be formulaic. Please don’t let LLMs be the death of puns, but the headline should be useful. If a bot is searching the entire internet, make it obvious what is underneath the heading.  

3.Make ‘the answer’ easy to find 

Be explicit about who the content is for, and what the page answers. 

That doesn’t mean using endless headings like: 

ChatGPT read this part 

And then saying “Good GEO content is good content” shoved underneath. 

But it does mean trying to explain why something matters and what you think is helpful. So, we’ve structured our advice as a top 10 so you (and your LLM of choice) can skim and summarise it, after telling you why it’s important to get this right in B2B at the top of the page. 

A person might search 'how to optimise my blog for LLMs' so having a quick answer on that would be useful, but when things aren’t easy to summarise quickly, make them easy to compartmentalise. 

4.Show trust signals 

Trust and credibility helps LLMs as much as it does people. Be clear about who wrote the piece, why they have credibility, and what has informed their opinions. 

It’s me, hi, I’m the author it’s me.  

I’m Declan Bradshaw, a partner at Temono, a B2B communications agency. I've been in PR and content marketing for a decade. I've got a degree in journalism, and I actually did pretty well in GCSE English too I’ll have you know. I've done extensive research into GEO, taking the best reading from the SEO guys, the LLM sites themselves, fellow PRs, and all the tub thumpers on LinkedIn. I wrote a whitepaper about how LLMs work for a B2B brand in my last job, and in this one I’ve written a GEO guide for B2B which you can see here. This is my LinkedIn if you want to see a headshot from a few years back as well. 

5.Get the technical foundations of your page sorted  

Again, somewhat obvious, but if an LLM can’t find and read your content, it doesn’t matter how well you’ve written it. There’s strong consensus that AI visibility depends heavily on the same technical foundations as SEO. Make sue content is crawlable, indexable, has clean HTML, fast pages, and structured data. Search Engine Land’s technical GEO guidance, Semrush, HubSpot, and various AI-search optimisation guides all converge on this. Get your house in order! 

6.Say no to Slop-Eds! 

This is the hill I will die on. Ask any PR and they’ve had a client send something clearly written by an LLM, in minutes, that is frankly, crap. Opinion pieces have opinions, personal experience, evidence. Slop-Eds have, well, slop. Have some pride in what your name gets attached to and say no to Slop-Eds! 

Alright steady on cowboy… Get on with the actual advice. 

Google’s official line is that AI-generated content is not inherently banned, but content produced at scale mainly to manipulate rankings is risky or spammy if it is low-value. Search Engine Land, Semrush, OpenAI’s own writing guidance, and Google-adjacent commentary all reinforce the “AI helps draft/revise, but humans still need to review for clarity, quality and usefulness” position. AI is a tool, it helps you build the content castle if you know what good is supposed to look like. If you use it as your content creator, well then that castle is built on sand. 

7.Use Q&A when it fits, not ham-fisted in 

Lots of advice is telling people to make everything an FAQ and use loads of bullet points. So, 

• Here 

• Some 

• Are 

That should get us into 5% more answers…. 

FAQs are a specific type of content, designed for quick reads to help people in need of immediate answers. Same with bullet points and lists, they are fine to use, good to use for some things, but should be balanced with other longer-form detailed content. Not every article you post now needs to be an FAQ. 

8.Keep content fresh 

The current thinking is that AI search tends to favour fresh or recently updated content, especially for fast-moving topics. Perplexity’s AI search guide mentions this, though it’s clearly more important for some queries than others. 

This blog was written in June 2026. If the advice materially changes, I’ll update it, but don’t fake freshness with meaningless updates. If you are producing content on a niche, technical topic, it might stay fresh for a lot longer. 

9.Stay the course – keep writing 

Clarity, Consistency, Consensus - that's our model for LLM visibility. Consistency is what we’re focussing on here. It means keep building up a topic cluster about the same/similar things. It's mad how many B2B companies don't even have a blog, let alone keep it updated. Posting one article about something only does so much, build a topic cluster and link to your own content to anchor that expertise deeper. 

10.Get other people to reference your content 

The last of our 3 Cs, Consensus, basically means getting other people to reference, share or validate your content so LLMs see it as more trustworthy. 

But how do I get people to cover, my content?! Damn! If only I knew a PR agency…. 

Final Thought 

Another thing that might help is adding a final thought, so here it is. 

There are no magical hacks to getting LLMs to surface your content, but being clear about what it is about and who it is for is a good start, alongside making sure bots can actually crawl it on a technical level. 

Once you are clear on that front, build up a consistent cadence on a topic, and create a consensus among your peers that you have expertise. 

But if you remember one thing, good GEO content is still good content.  

So, write for buyers first, just in a way bots can understand.