u/D_sweetyyy

Before building a prospect list, how do you decide which companies and contacts actually fit your ICP?

What factors do you usually look at?

For example:

Industry

Company size

Revenue

Location

Job title

Technology used

Buying signals

Other criteria

Would be interesting to see how different sales and marketing teams approach this.

Curious to hear from everyone here.

What part of B2B prospecting takes the most time or causes the most frustration for you?

Finding the right prospects

Identifying the right decision-makers

Getting accurate contact information

Cold email

Cold calling

LinkedIn prospecting

Getting replies

Something else?

Share what you're dealing with and what you've tried so far.

Went through Google's May guidance on generative AI optimisation properly and there's a section literally titled "what you don't need to do" that I think more people should know exists, because it's basically a free procurement tool if anyone's currently quoting you for GEO work.

Six things get named. Four they say are unnecessary, two they actively warn against.

The unnecessary ones: llms.txt and AI specific files, content chunking, rewriting content specifically for AI, and special AI schema. The llms.txt one is the most useful to know because there are platforms charging a monthly fee to generate these files and Google's wording is about as blunt as they get, something along the lines of you don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup or markdown to appear in generative AI search. So that subscription is buying nothing as far as Google's surfaces go.

Chunking is interesting too because it's been sold hard for the last year. Google's position is their systems already handle multiple topics on a page fine and engineers have specifically said don't fragment your content, there's no ideal page length.

The schema one I'd be careful about misreading. They're saying schema isn't required for the AI features, not that schema is useless. It still gets you rich results in normal search. So the takeaway is don't pay for "special AI schema" as a line item, not go delete your markup.

Two they warn against are manufactured brand mentions and anyone claiming to be Google approved. The mentions one is worth separating carefully because genuine third party presence does seem to correlate with AI visibility, that part holds up. It's manufacturing it that's the problem, and the spam systems are built to tell the difference.

The bit I found most useful though is a line from their third party tools page. Something to the effect of third party tools don't have access to our internal ranking data, they can't guarantee performance, any predictions are their own. That's general language covering every tool, including all the established SEO platforms, not just the new AI visibility products. Which means any "AI visibility score" you're being shown is a model, not a measurement. And anyone promising a specific percentage lift in citations is claiming something Google says outsiders structurally can't substantiate.

Big caveat that most coverage skips: all of this is scoped to Google's own AI features. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity run on different retrieval models and might respond to things Google dismisses. So it's not a universal debunk, and if a vendor is recommending llms.txt for AI agents or docs tooling specifically that's a different and more defensible argument than recommending it for AI Overviews.

What's left on the list of things that work is boring, which is kind of the point. Useful crawlable content, technical basics like indexation and Core Web Vitals, and for local businesses a properly maintained Business Profile which Google names directly.

Anyone had a GEO proposal land on their desk recently? Curious how many of these are still showing up in pitches now that the guidance is public.