For 18 months I have been quietly running a test on every B2B prospect I meet.

I open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google AI Overviews. I type the kind of question their actual buyers type — “best [category] software for European SMBs”, “top alternatives to [their biggest competitor]”, “recommended agencies for [the specific pain they solve]” — and I read what comes back.

Most of the time, the brand I am about to meet does not appear in the answer.

Their competitors do.

That is the problem CitedLift exists to solve.

The shift that nobody asked for

Buyers used to start at Google’s ten blue links. Now a meaningful slice of them start by asking an AI assistant. Recent buyer studies put that number at 94% of B2B buyers using AI tools during their research process, and around 60% of the buyer journey complete before any vendor is contacted.

The buyer journey now happens before you are in the room.

That changes the unit of competition. It is no longer “rank #1 for keyword X.” It is “be cited inside the answer when a buyer asks a question.”

Different surface, different signals, different game.

What “cited” actually means

When ChatGPT or Perplexity or Gemini answers “top CRM tools for Dutch SMEs”, the model has to pick names. It picks them based on what it has read across the open web — review sites, comparison articles, third-party recommendations, your own well-structured pages, your customers’ case studies, podcasts, LinkedIn posts.

If your category is dominated by three competitors with hundreds of citations and you have twenty, the model will pick them, every time, by default. Buyers see those names. Their shortlist forms. You never enter the conversation.

This compounds fast. Once a brand is the cited answer, more journalists and review sites cite it, which makes the model surface it more, which gets more journalists to cite it.

The default answer accumulates the entire compound interest of the category.

Why traditional SEO is not enough

We do not think of CitedLift as an SEO agency. SEO targets the ten blue links on Google. GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — targets the citation slot inside an AI answer. Different surface, different signals.

SEO cares about: title tags, internal links, backlinks, Core Web Vitals, keyword density.

GEO cares about: entity clarity, retrievable facts, source authority, the existence of third-party content that describes you accurately, structured pages that ChatGPT can quote without paraphrasing.

You need both. Most agencies do one. We do both as one programme, because separating them in 2026 is malpractice.

Why “European B2B and ecommerce” specifically

Two reasons.

One: the European market is structurally underserved by GEO. Most public AI-visibility work has been written by and for American SaaS. The prompt grids assume American buyer behaviour, English-language queries, and a Google AI Overviews surface that ranks .com domains over .nl, .de, .fr. European brands need different prompt grids, different language coverage, different authority signals. We are the first agency built specifically for that market.

Two: the EU has a senior strategy / elite execution arbitrage that nobody else has packaged. We sit in the Netherlands, our delivery bench is across the EU and Eastern Europe — senior English-speaking talent at 30 to 50% lower cost than London, Amsterdam, or Berlin, without the language and timezone overhead of going further offshore. That is why we charge 25 to 35% less than the average Western GEO agency without cutting any of the parts that actually matter.

What the next 12 months look like

Three concrete predictions:

  1. Citation share will become a board-level metric. Within 18 months, “what is our citation share in ChatGPT for the top 30 buyer prompts in our category?” will be a question that boards ask quarterly. The companies that started measuring it in 2026 will be the ones with answers.

  2. The agencies that win will be the ones doing both diagnosis and execution. Monitoring tools will surface the gap. Content mills will fill the gap with slop. The middle — diagnose, then execute with senior-strategist judgement and a real human approving every piece — is the only durable model.

  3. Single-engine bets will fail. Anyone who optimises only for ChatGPT, or only for Google AI Overviews, will get punished by the next algorithm change. Multi-engine methodology with overlapping signals is the only safe play.

What you can do this week

  • Run our free 10-prompt visibility check. Forty-eight hour turnaround. We test where you appear vs. your top competitors across all four major AI engines. No commitment.
  • Or, if you already know you have a gap, book a 20-minute intro call. Founder-to-founder, no sales script, no junior account managers.
  • If you just want to read more about how this works, the comparison table on the homepage is the cleanest summary of why CitedLift exists and what makes us different from monitoring tools, content mills, and traditional SEO agencies.

— Oleksii