A growing number of your customers no longer start on Google. They ask ChatGPT which CRM to use, ask Perplexity for the best options in a category, ask an AI assistant for a recommendation — and act on the answer. If your brand isn’t in that answer, you’re invisible to a fast-growing slice of high-intent buyers, and no amount of Google ranking fixes it. This is the discipline people are starting to call GEO — generative engine optimisation — and for Indian brands it’s early enough that getting it right now is a genuine advantage.
Here’s how AI recommendations actually get made, and how to get into them.
Understand how the models decide
When someone asks an AI for a recommendation, the model isn’t running a live search of your website. It’s drawing on a picture of your category built from everything it has absorbed — articles, reviews, forums, comparisons, social discussion, listicles, and increasingly live retrieval from the web. Your brand appears in the answer if that picture includes you as a credible option. So the game isn’t optimising a page; it’s shaping the web-wide impression of your brand that the model has learned.
That’s a different job from classic SEO, and it rewards presence across many surfaces rather than ranking on one.
The signals that drive AI recommendations
From what we see, a handful of things consistently move whether a brand gets recommended:
- Being mentioned in the content the AI trusts — the “best X” listicles, comparison articles and round-ups in your category, on sites the models weight heavily.
- Third-party validation — reviews, ratings and independent coverage, not just your own marketing claims.
- Consistent category association — being repeatedly discussed alongside the problem you solve, so the model links your name to that need.
- A clear, extractable description of what you do and who you’re for — so the model can confidently slot you into the right recommendation.
Notice that most of these live off your own website. GEO is largely an earned-presence game.
Get into the sources the AI reads
The highest-leverage GEO move is getting your brand into the third-party content models rely on for recommendations. In practice that means the comparison and “best of” content in your category — the pages that list options and that AI heavily draws from when asked to recommend. Getting fairly featured there, earning reviews on the platforms that matter, and being covered in industry publications does more for your AI visibility than almost anything you can do on your own domain.
This is earned-media work with a new purpose. The op-ed, the round-up mention, the review — they were always good for brand; now they’re also how you get into the AI’s answer.
Make your own content maximally citable
Your own site still matters — the models do retrieve from it, and it anchors their understanding of you. Make it easy: a crystal-clear description of what you do and who you serve, first-hand data and specifics the model can quote, proper author and organisation signals, and content structured so the useful parts extract cleanly. Everything that makes content citable by AI Overviews makes it citable by ChatGPT and Perplexity too — it’s the same underlying craft.
Track your AI visibility
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Start simply: regularly ask the major AI assistants the recommendation questions your customers would ask — “best X for Y in India”, “alternatives to [competitor]”, “who should I use for Z” — and note whether and how your brand shows up. That’s your GEO baseline. Watch it move as you build presence. It’s crude but it’s real, and it’s more than most of your competitors are doing.
Why now is the moment
GEO in India is where SEO was fifteen years ago — most brands aren’t paying attention, the surfaces aren’t saturated, and the brands that build presence now will be the defaults the models recommend for years. AI-assistant usage for buying decisions is climbing fast in India, and the answers are being shaped right now. The brands that treat this as a real channel today will own the recommendation; the ones that wait will spend the next few years wondering why the AI keeps suggesting their competitors.
If you’d like our team to run a GEO baseline for your brand — where you show up in AI answers today and how to improve it — the first call is free. Our SEO service now folds GEO into how we think about visibility.
About Webfluence — we’re a performance marketing studio in Bangalore running paid, SEO and creative for 30+ Indian brands. If you want a working session on any of this, our team takes free 30-minute calls from our HSR Layout office.
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