Getting Seen: How to Improve Brand Visibility in AI Search Engines

This is the second in a series on AEO and GEO for marketers and a follow-up to our post on Why B2B Brands Need an AEO/GEO Strategy.

B2B relationships in healthcare and manufacturing run on trust and credibility. Lengthy and complex buying cycles that lead to high-stakes decisions are not possible without both. But the earliest part of that process is increasingly handled by AI, and marketing teams need to shift strategies, fast. Teams hoping to grow their business must learn how to get seen by AI search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Gemini to establish that trust early, before getting cut from their buyers’ shortlists.

The good news? Many marketing teams already have the foundations in place. And the remaining steps toward an effective AEO/GEO are rooted in deep subject-matter expertise, which healthcare and industrial manufacturing companies have in abundance. Optimizing on the credibility of that expertise is what strong AEO and GEO are all about for healthcare and manufacturing brands.

The Stakes – and the Potential – in Regulated, Technical Industries

If AI is the new gatekeeper for B2B consideration, businesses hoping to grow need an active and well-executed AEO/GEO strategy to remain in the game. When buyers need both technical expertise and regulatory compliance, companies have to explain what they know clearly and accurately in the places buyers are looking for information.

Brands in industries like healthcare and manufacturing build their business models on enterprise-level contracts based on expertise and long-term partnerships. Where a consumer brand may lose a sale if misrepresented in an AI answer, a technical B2B brand can lose years of hard-earned credibility across an entire market. An AEO/GEO strategy can build AI visibility with key buyers, but only when authentic expertise and value form the basis of the message, and it is published across trusted channels.

How to Improve AI Search Visibility for Your Brand

AEO and GEO often get compared to search engine optimization (SEO), and for good reason. There is a lot of overlap. But there are some foundational differences. Despite SEO’s formulaic nature, it did give us a lot of data to work with, like rankings, search volume, click-through rates, and keywords to optimize for.

With AI answers, we get no comparable view into the sausage-making process. Varied and conversational prompts provide little precision anyway, so focused AI search optimization must happen differently. Instead, the idea is to demonstrate credibility in industry conversations and forums that matter to you and your buyers for large language models (LLMs) to recognize and repeat. It is an approach that emphasizes experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness – something the industry has dubbed E-E-A-T. Here’s how:

• Owned content that answers questions early and directly. AI tools extract exact, concise answers and deliver them directly within their responses. Make it easy for them. Like tried-and-true SEO approaches, make key points early in content with clean, direct, and quotable explanations.

• Data that is proprietary, trustworthy, and paired with competent analysis. Proprietary data, original research, or a specific and unique point of view signal to AI search engines that your experts know what they’re talking about and are knowledgeable sources for analysis. A landmark academic study on generative engine optimization found that adding credible citations, relevant statistics, and expert quotations could improve content visibility in generative engine responses by up to 40%, depending on the approach.

• Demonstrated expertise. AI visibility is stronger when expertise is easy to verify. Consistent authorship, credentials, and a body of work on related topics create additional signals that help establish who is behind the expertise and why the source may be credible. The goal is less about volume of content and more about creating a visible record of expertise that reinforces why your people are credible sources on the issues your buyers care about.

• Digital and web data foundations. Schema markup and structured data, clear site architecture, and strong internal relationships between related topics can make it easier for search and AI systems to understand who your organization is, what your content is about, and how those ideas connect. If you have a strong owned content strategy using SEO best practices, you are on your way to getting cited in AI answers.

• Earned visibility beyond your own website. The most influential, but also the most underinvested strategy, is to make your brand’s value visible on platforms you do not own. It is easy to publish a sharp point of view on your own website, newsletter, or blog. But it is much more likely to get attention from AI models if you have consistently demonstrated that your expertise is already valued by other experts and platforms actively involved in industry conversations.

  And don’t underestimate social media in this regard. While backlinks and earned third-party mentions matter, recent research from Meltwater, analyzing 9.5 million AI citations across major AI chatbots, found that LinkedIn is now the second-most-cited domain for B2B queries – behind only YouTube – with roughly three-quarters of those citations coming from individual profiles rather than company pages.

With AI, its Expertise Over Volume

Healthcare and manufacturing brands are founded on deep technical expertise. Traditional content marketing approaches focused on making that expertise accessible and understandable to the typical buyer. But the era of buying cycles driven by AI search demands a more intentional and coordinated approach. Strategies that lean further into depth of expertise, trust, and brand authority and demonstrate it broadly in the market will earn the credibility required for growth.

Next in this series: Our third and final installment explores why highly technical industries and communications purists have a fresh opportunity to thrive in the era of AI search (hint: we aren’t writing for keywords anymore).