PlaybookGenerative engine optimization
AI Visibility for Recruiting and HR Tech
by the AEO GEO Labs team3 min read
HR software is bought by committee, and committees start with a shortlist. Increasingly that shortlist comes from a prompt: "best applicant tracking system for a 200-person company," "Greenhouse vs Lever vs Ashby," "payroll software that handles contractors in five countries."
The engines answer with three to five names and a sentence each. For an HR platform, being one of those names is the difference between being evaluated and being invisible to the deal. The mechanics are mostly clarity and consistency, and most vendors have both problems.
How engines handle HR software prompts
In our testing, engines answering a B2B software prompt tend to triangulate from review platforms like G2 and Capterra, comparison content from analysts and publishers, vendor pages that state features and pricing plainly, and community threads in HR and recruiting groups.
The engines appear to weight company size and use case heavily. A prompt that says "200 employees" or "high-volume hourly hiring" gets a different list than a generic one. Vendors whose pages state who they are for tend to be matched; vendors who say "for teams of all sizes" tend to be skipped.
Say who it is for
The most useful sentence on an HR software site is the one that names the customer: "An applicant tracking system for companies with 50 to 500 employees hiring mostly salaried roles, from $X per month." Put it on the homepage, in Organization and SoftwareApplication schema, in llms.txt, and on every review-site profile.
If you serve several segments, write a page for each with its own sentence. "Recruiting software for staffing agencies" and "recruiting software for in-house teams" are different prompts with different lists.
Features and integrations in text
HR buyers ask about specifics: "does it integrate with Workday," "can it do structured interviews," "does it handle I-9 verification." Engines answer from pages that list these things. An integrations page with every integration named in text, a features page with each capability described in a sentence, and a plain compliance page stating which regulations and regions are covered all give a model something to quote.
Check these pages with the javascript-visibility-checker. Integration directories are frequently rendered client-side, and a directory a crawler cannot read is a directory that does not exist.
Pricing
HR software pricing is often per-employee, tiered, and hidden. Engines answering "how much does X cost" name the vendors whose cost they can read. If exact pricing is negotiated, publish the structure and a starting point. "From $8 per employee per month, billed annually, with a 25-employee minimum" is enough for a model to place you in a budget bracket.
The review-site layer
For HR tech, G2 and Capterra are not optional. Engines cite them constantly. The profile should carry the same positioning sentence, the same company size range, and the same feature list as the website. Reviews should be real, from real customers, asked for without incentives beyond the ones the platforms themselves allow and disclose.
AEO GEO Labs never seeds reviews or buys placements in any category. The work is making an honest footprint consistent and findable.
Comparison pages
"X vs Y" is a huge share of HR software prompts. Publish honest comparison pages for the alternatives buyers actually weigh. State where the competitor is better. Keep the facts current, because a comparison page with a competitor's old pricing will be quoted with your name on the error.
Community presence
HR and recruiting communities on Reddit, Slack, and LinkedIn are where buyers ask for recommendations first. Those public threads are read by engines. Being present as the vendor, disclosed, answering questions accurately even when the answer is "we are not the right fit for that," builds the third-party mentions that engines weigh.
Measuring share of answer
List the thirty prompts a buyer in each of your segments would type, including the comparison prompts and the ones that name a company size. Run them weekly across the engines. Record whether you are named, in what position, what is said about pricing and fit, and which sources are cited. Wrong facts first, then absences.
Start with the sentence
Write the sentence that says who the product is for and from what price. Put it everywhere. Then make the integrations and features pages readable in text and add SoftwareApplication schema. Run the prompts. AEO GEO Labs can audit the full footprint and run the prompt set weekly, but most HR vendors see the first change from a single clear sentence and consistent profiles.