For years, many industrial marketers struggled to apply conventional SEO playbooks to highly specialised sectors. Ironically, that challenge may have given them an unexpected advantage as search evolves towards AI-driven discovery. The content strategies that often looked inefficient through a traditional SEO lens increasingly resemble the qualities generative search engines appear to value most.
Key takeaways
• Many industrial B2B organisations were already creating GEO-friendly content long before the term existed because they focused on expertise, specificity, and real customer challenges rather than search volume.
• Traditional keyword-led SEO often struggles in specialist markets where buying decisions are complex, infrequent, and driven by small numbers of highly informed stakeholders.
• GEO appears to reward topical authority, contextual depth, and information gain more than exact keyword matching.
• The most valuable source of GEO content ideas is often not a software platform, but conversations with customers, sales teams, and industry experts.
For a long time, industrial marketers faced a slightly awkward problem.
Many of the products, services, and challenges they were trying to communicate simply did not fit neatly into conventional SEO logic.
Keyword tools are designed to identify topics that attract significant search volume. That works well in large consumer markets where thousands or even millions of people may be searching for similar products or questions.
It becomes much harder when your audience consists of a relatively small number of engineers, procurement leaders, operations directors or technical specialists making complex purchasing decisions.
A keyword tool might recommend creating content around a topic such as:
“What is a crawler excavator?”
The problem is that very few potential crawler excavator buyers are asking that question.
The people most likely to search it are students, researchers, or those new to the industry.
Meanwhile, genuine buyers are often wrestling with much more specific challenges around fuel efficiency, productivity, uptime, maintenance, or total cost of ownership and operation. Their questions may generate very little search volume but are far closer to a purchasing decision.
This has always been one of the limitations of applying mainstream SEO thinking to specialist B2B sectors.
We never ignored SEO. We just approached it differently.
Discoverability still matters.
Like most marketers, we have always paid attention to keywords, internal linking, hub-and-spoke structures, and technical optimisation. Those fundamentals remain important.
But we have never believed search volume alone should dictate content strategy.
Particularly in industrial markets, where attracting 10,000 irrelevant visitors is often far less valuable than reaching five highly qualified decision-makers.
As a result, many of our clients’ content programmes have been built around a different objective: becoming the most useful source of information for a specific audience.
That means focusing on recurring customer questions, operational frustrations, industry challenges, technical decision-making criteria, and other topics that sales teams discuss repeatedly with prospects.
In other words, content designed to demonstrate expertise rather than maximise traffic.
Why GEO changes the conversation
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of making content more visible and citeable within AI-powered search, such as ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews.
In contrast to SEO, GEO appears less dependent on exact keyword matching and more dependent on whether content demonstrates authority, context, and originality.
The precise mechanics remain largely hidden inside the major AI platforms and there is no equivalent keyword volume database showing exactly what users are asking an AI system, although some proxies are emerging. These include analysis of long-form conversational search behaviour in traditional search engines, for example.
What does seem increasingly clear is that AI systems favour sources that provide genuine information gain.
In simple terms, they are looking for content that contributes something useful, distinctive, or insightful to a topic rather than simply repeating information already available elsewhere.
That is a fundamentally different challenge from ranking for a keyword.
The best GEO strategy may be surprisingly familiar
There is still much we don’t know about how AI-powered search will evolve. But one lesson is already becoming clear.
If you follow the same keyword recommendations as everyone else, you will probably end up publishing the same content as everyone else and AI models already know that information.
What they need are sources that add something new, meaning the most valuable content strategy may not start with a software platform at all.
It may start with your customers, your sales team or dealers, your engineers – the people closest to the real problems, questions and frustrations shaping your market.
So, at a time when organisations are seeking to become more data-driven in their communication, GEO may reward a different kind of data entirely: lived experience, customer insight, and specialist expertise.
And that is something many industrial organisations have been building for years.
Hannah Kitchener
Associate Director
About the author
Hannah is an associate director in the UK, leading strategic campaigns for industrial clients across the EMEA region. A professionally qualified journalist (NCTJ), she combines specialist sectoral knowledge in construction, energy, and materials handling with a strong network of trade media contacts to secure valuable coverage. Her expertise in inter-cultural communication, honed by degrees in modern languages and translation, is key to executing campaigns that succeed across diverse European markets.
