SEO and AEO for B2B Tech Startups: A Beginner’s Guide

SEO gets your pages ranked in Google and Bing. AEO gets your answers quoted by AI tools. AEO vs SEO is not an either-or choice. The work overlaps, so you do the foundations once.

Some people call AEO GEO, short for generative engine optimization. The five checks below cover both.

Google says there are no extra requirements to appear in its AI Overviews or AI Mode. The SEO basics still apply. So the order is simple. Foundations first, then answers, then mentions.

The Five Checks for SEO and AEO are readable, questions and keywords, answers, mentions and measure. Each one can be tested on its own.

Run these in the next 24 hours:

• Readable: open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Look for a Disallow rule next to GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended.
• Questions and keywords: list 10 phrases your buyers search, with searches per month and difficulty.
• Answers: read one section of your main service page on its own. Does it make sense?
• Mentions: search "best [your category] for startups". Note the pages that list rivals but not you.
• Measure: add "How did you hear about us?" to your contact form, with an AI assistant option.

Search engines and AI tools cannot always read your site, and the cause is often a setting nobody chose.

• A Disallow rule next to one of those bots asks that service to stay out. Some sites block them by accident, through a template rule. Google’s own guide says crawling must be allowed in robots.txt and by any CDN or hosting layer in front of your site.
• Switch JavaScript off and open your main service page. If the text disappears, some AI crawlers see an empty page. Google asks for important content to be available as text.
• Check that your sitemap lists only pages you want found, and submit it in Google Search Console.

Short on time? The free Website Health Check runs 27 checks in about 30 seconds. They include whether AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity may read your site through robots.txt, whether you have an llms.txt file, and whether you have a sitemap. It does not run the JavaScript test. For wider fixes, see your B2B website needs fixes, not a redesign.

Keyword research finds the questions and keywords your buyers type before they have heard of you. You can start it for free.

• Start with your own data. In Google Search Console, open the Performance report and sort by impressions. Queries at positions 6 to 20 are the cheapest wins.
• Add what buyers say. Take questions from sales call notes, your last 10 enquiries, Google’s People Also Ask and the autocomplete suggestions under your main topic.
• Ask an AI tool: "If someone asks [your main question], what sub-questions would you research before answering?" AI tools split one question into many small ones, so cover the whole topic, not one keyword.
• Check each phrase for searches per month and difficulty. Google Keyword Planner is free with a Google Ads account. Paid tools add difficulty scores.
• Keep a phrase only if it passes three checks. Would a buyer who asks it be worth winning? Does Google show pages like yours for it? Can you compete with the pages already ranking?

Do not chase volume. In B2Ne’s own keyword sheet, "HubSpot data cleaning" gets about 30 searches a month worldwide, and advertisers pay about $17.71 a click. Few searchers, real buyers.

Put your 10 best phrases in one sheet with three columns: searches per month, difficulty and whether a buyer would ask it. Google each phrase and mark which already have a page of yours. The gaps become your B2B SEO strategy. For turning questions into content buyers act on, see why most B2B content gets ignored.

Each key page should answer the question in its first sentence. AI tools and busy buyers both read the first sentence of a section first.

• Make each H2 a question. Answer it in the next sentence, using the same words.
• Make each section stand alone. AI tools cut pages into pieces, and you do not choose where.
• Name things. Write "the HubSpot CRM clean-up", not "our solution".
• Do not chase word count. In Ahrefs’ study of 174,048 pages cited in Google AI Overviews, 53.4% were under 1,000 words. Write until the question is answered, then stop.

Some other sites mention you, and fewer than you want. AI tools build an answer from many sources, so being named in more than one credible place is how you get cited by ChatGPT and similar tools.

• List 10 places your buyers read: partner sites, industry lists, LinkedIn, niche communities. Note where you are already named.
• Search "best [your category] for startups" and "alternatives to [a competitor]". Write down every page that lists competitors but not you.
• In communities such as Reddit and niche forums, answer real questions with real answers. No promotion.
• Make your website, LinkedIn page and founder profile say the same thing in the same words.

Pick three pages where you should be named. Send one honest note to one of them this week.

You know it is working by checking three things each month, and should expect a slow start. Together they show your AI search visibility: how often AI tools name you when buyers ask.

• AI visits. In Google Analytics 4, add a channel group for AI traffic with these sources: chatgpt.com, perplexity, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com and claude.ai. It undercounts, so use it for direction.
• Where leads say they heard of you. Ask on your contact form and discovery calls.
• Your buyer-question test. Take 20 questions your buyers ask. Run each through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Log whether you appear linked, mentioned or absent. Keep branded questions ("tell me about us") apart from unbranded ones ("who helps with X"). Run each more than once, because answers change.

Technical fixes can show within days to weeks once pages are recrawled. Ranking for competitive B2B terms typically takes three to six months. Save your first 20-question test as your baseline. For the wider tracking setup, see analytics for B2B tech startups.

Checks 1 and 2 fit into one week of a founder’s time. Checks 3 to 5 repeat every month, and they stop when nobody owns them.

One hire rarely holds technical SEO, writing, outreach and reporting at once. B2Ne is a founding marketer with a specialist team of 18+ experts, so each check has a specialist behind it. The pages you fix are the pages your campaigns point to.

B2Ne’s B2B SEO and AEO service runs the Five Checks as one ongoing system, not a one-off audit. B2Ne is a B2B marketing agency, but not a traditional one.

• Technical SEO fixes for the pages your buyers use first: the home page, your service pages and your best articles. See website optimisation.
• A topic map built from your buyers’ real questions, and clear writing briefs for the pages that matter most. See content strategy.
• A quarterly SEO scorecard, and a dashboard that puts keyword rankings next to how often AI tools mention you. See analytics and insights.

This is SEO for B2B SaaS and tech companies with about €500k to €2.5M in revenue. B2Ne works across Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, and the Five Checks work in any market.

Signs you need it: you show up for your brand name but not for what your buyers need. You publish a lot but traffic is not growing. When buyers ask AI tools about your space, your competitors come up instead.

Month 1: we learn how your business actually sells.

• Month 2: we test what should change.
• Month 3: what works becomes a system your team keeps.

Results start showing in month 3, because that is when the system is in place. You can start monthly, with 30 days’ notice. SEO and AEO is one of eight services inside a Half-Time or Full-Time Team Member plan. You can also buy it on its own. See how the plans work.

B2Ne does not promise a ranking or a ChatGPT recommendation. It does not rewrite your whole website either. It removes the reasons a tool would skip you, and reports the trend every quarter.

B2Ne drafts its guides with an AI assistant, and a person checks every one before it goes live. Here is what sits behind this one.

• B2Ne’s own SEO and AEO notes. More than 160 entries and a 56-task library, built from sources that include an 86-minute beginner course from an SEO software vendor, a 68-minute practitioner walkthrough with about 288,000 views, and LinkedIn’s own blog post on AI search visibility. Each source is rated for reliability, and figures we could not check are not used here.
• Two outside checks. We read Google’s guide to AI features and your website (last updated 10 December 2025) and Ahrefs’ study of 560,346 AI Overviews, which gave 174,048 cited pages with readable content, against the originals.
• Keyword research. 12 phrases were checked in two keyword tools on 3 November 2026, against 16 months of Search Console data for business2nexus.com.
• Links. Every link was opened to confirm it works.
• Updates. We review the guide every 45 days, and the date changes only when the content does.

Start with the free Website Health Check to see where you stand. If you want a team to run the checks, book a 30-minute discovery call. We review your current setup and outline the clearest next step. No pitch, no pressure. Either way, hand the Five Checks table to whoever manages your website before the next release.