The B2B SEO, AEO & GEO Playbook for Agencies, MSPs & Consultancies
Somewhere today a prospective client asked an AI to name the best firms in your field. It named five. You weren’t one of them, and you’ll never know it happened, no lost form, no bounced visit, no line in your analytics.
This is a book about getting into that sentence.
The one idea everything rests on
For a B2B services firm, visibility in AI search is won off-site and earned, not on-site and optimized. The engines that now answer your buyers’ questions mostly decide who to name based on what other sources say about you, reviews on G2 and Clutch, mentions in industry media, a founder quoted in the places the model already trusts. The single most controllable thing you own, your own website, turns out to be one of the weaker levers.
What’s inside
- Introduction: The List You Never See
- Chapter 1: The Shift Is Real (and Measurable)
- Chapter 2: Name the Game: SEO vs AEO vs GEO
- Chapter 3: How AI Engines Choose Who to Cite
- Chapter 4: Foundations: Don’t Get Left Out of the Index
- Chapter 5: Content That Gets Cited
- Chapter 6: The B2B-Services Playbook
- Chapter 7: Measuring the Invisible
- Chapter 8: Proof, What ROI Is Real, and What’s Marketing
- Chapter 9: What’s Coming (Agentic Search)
- Chapter 10: Your 90-Day Plan
- Toolkit: every framework, checklist and source in one place
The frameworks you can act on
- The Citation Visibility Ladder: Six rungs from crawlable to chosen. Most services firms stall on rung two while the climb happens at rung four.
- The EARNED content model: Entity-named, Answer-first, Referenced, Novel, Extractable, Dated. How to build a page the engines will actually cite.
- The Off-Site Scoreboard: Reviews, case studies, founder authority and earned media, each with a baseline target. This replaces your rankings report.
- The Invisible Test: A ten-prompt, fifteen-minute monthly measurement that turns “are we even in there” into a tracked citation rate.
- The 3×3×3 Plan: Three phases, three fronts, three metric types, across 90 days.
Why this one is different
Most AI-search guides recycle the same eight studies, half of them mis-cited, wrapped around a pitch for whatever tool the author is selling. We made two promises instead.
First: every statistic carries its primary source and its date. When a popular stat is wrong, we say so plainly, there is an entire appendix of the widely repeated figures we deliberately refused to use, and why.
Second: we show our own data, including the parts that didn’t work. You’ll see anonymized numbers from Zaphyre client accounts, the wins, but also the month we misread our own report, the traffic that turned out to be our dev team, and the tactic we shipped early that the evidence later told us doesn’t matter.
Who it’s for
Written for the person running a B2B services firm (an agency, a managed IT provider, a consultancy) who sells expertise on a retainer, not seats on a subscription. In-house B2B marketers will recognise most of it too, and we flag where the playbook shifts for them.
Format
50-page PDF, 2026 edition. Instant download by email after checkout.
