Perspectives · Brand & content strategy

Your brand in ChatGPT's answers: A plain guide to generative engine optimisation

Ask ChatGPT or Gemini to recommend a brand in your category and look at who comes back. Small and regional brands are missing from most of those answers. This guide covers how AI engines choose the brands they name, what Google says helps, and what a small business in India can start on this month.

Published: 13 Oct 2026
Reading time: 7 min
Topic: Brand & content strategy
By: Kaushik Bhagwat

01The gap

Who gets named in AI answers

A June 2026 study of more than 100,000 AI responses tracked how often brands appear when someone asks a question in their category. Brand size decided most of the result.

73%

Global household names, named on the first run

44%

Mid-market and regional brands

11%

Niche and small brands

The study, by Pratyush Kumar of the visibility tracker Ranqo, ran prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini for more than 100 brands between March and May 2026. Each step down in brand size cost about 30 percentage points of visibility. Read the paper.

Fewer people click through to websites, which raises the stakes. Cloudflare data shows human traffic to finance, publishing and retail websites fell close to 40% between June 2025 and April 2026, while bots grew to around half of all online traffic. A buyer who gets a shortlist inside the chat window may never search further, and a brand left off that shortlist does not get considered.

02Definitions

What generative engine optimisation means

Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is the work of getting a brand mentioned and cited in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Mode. Some agencies call it AEO, answer engine optimisation.

Google's own guidance treats it as part of SEO. Its guide for site owners says that from Google Search's point of view, optimising for generative AI search is optimising for search.

The same guide explains the mechanics. AI Overviews and AI Mode pull pages from the regular Search index and use them to ground each answer, a technique called retrieval-augmented generation. They also run related searches in the background, which Google calls query fan-out. Google's example: a question about a lawn full of weeds can trigger separate searches for herbicides, chemical-free removal and prevention.

So a page that Google cannot index, or that does not rank for the questions around your product, has little chance of appearing in Google's AI answers. ChatGPT and Perplexity run their own retrieval and draw on a different mix of sources.

03Sources

Where AI engines get their answers

AI engines cite a small set of websites again and again, and most of them host conversations, videos and reviews about brands.

Peec AI analysed 30 million sources cited by ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews in the US in March 2026. The ten most-cited domains were Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Forbes, G2, Yelp, Facebook, Medium and TechRadar. Each industry has its own leaders too: for hotels, Booking.com and Airbnb often outrank Reddit.

The engines also disagree with each other. One industry estimate puts the share of domains cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity at about 11%. Perplexity leans on Reddit and on review and comparison sites such as G2 and TripAdvisor. ChatGPT leans on Wikipedia, which takes between 26% and 48% of its top-10 citation share depending on the period measured.

A plan that covers your own website reaches one source among dozens.

04Mentions

Why mentions count for more than links

For years, SEO revolved around backlinks. In AI answers, the stronger signal so far is how often other people talk about a brand.

Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands to find which factors line up with being named in ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews. Mentions of a brand on YouTube, in video titles, descriptions and transcripts, showed the strongest correlation, at about 0.737. Branded mentions across the web came next, at 0.66 to 0.71. In the earlier version of the study, which looked at AI Overviews, backlinks correlated at 0.218.

These are correlations. A brand discussed on YouTube tends to be large and active in many other ways, and the study does not prove that one causes the other. The direction still holds: AI engines learn about a brand from what other people publish about it.

Google adds a warning. Its guide says that seeking inauthentic mentions is less helpful than it looks, because the spam systems that protect Search also feed its AI features. Paying for planted forum posts or fake reviews falls on the wrong side of that line.

05Myths

What you can skip

Much of the GEO advice in circulation asks site owners to do things that Google says it ignores.

llms.txt files

Google Search does not use them for ranking or for its AI features, and Google says that keeping one will neither help nor harm your visibility. Some AI coding tools read them, so a developer documentation site may still want one.

Chunking content into small pieces

Google says its systems understand pages that cover several topics and can show the relevant part. There is no ideal page length.

Rewriting pages for AI

AI systems match synonyms and meaning, so a page does not need every phrasing of a query. Publishing a separate page for each variation can breach Google's scaled content abuse policy.

Special schema markup

No special schema.org markup is required for AI features. Structured data still helps with rich results in regular search, so keep what you have.

06India

What this means for brands in India

AI search in India now runs in the languages your customers search in.

Google's AI Mode works in English and Hindi across India. In October 2025 Google added seven more Indian languages: Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. India was also the first country outside the US to get Search Live, which answers questions by voice and through the phone camera.

Our read: an answer to a Marathi or Tamil question will draw on what the engine can find for that query. A brand whose website, reviews and listings exist in English alone gives it less to work with than a competitor with a Marathi product page and reviews written in Marathi.

Local details count as well. Google's guide names Business Profile and Merchant Center as ways for products and services to appear in AI responses. A Business Profile with old opening hours or a disconnected phone number now feeds AI answers along with the map listing.

07Checklist

A starting checklist for a small brand

None of this needs a new tool. Most of it is groundwork that small brands tend to skip.

Confirm your key pages are indexed.Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet to appear in AI features. Check your product and service pages in Search Console.
Publish what only you can write.Google favours first-hand, non-commodity content: your pricing logic, your process, what went wrong on a job. A generic tips post repeats what an AI model already knows.
Describe the business the same way everywhere.Use one name, one line about what you sell and one address across your website, Google Business Profile, Justdial, IndiaMART, LinkedIn and marketplace listings.
Complete your Google Business Profile.Fill in categories, hours, photos, products and prices, reply to reviews, and connect a Merchant Center feed if you sell products.
Ask real customers for reviews.Focus on the platforms your category uses: Google and Justdial for local services, Amazon and Flipkart for products, Clutch and G2 for B2B services.
Get your name onto YouTube.A founder explainer, a product demo or a customer walkthrough puts the brand name in titles, descriptions and transcripts.
Answer questions where buyers ask them.Take part in relevant Reddit communities and LinkedIn threads under your own name, and say who you work for.
Pitch the trade press.A story in a sector publication or a regional newspaper gives AI engines a third-party source to cite.

08Measuring

How to tell if it's working

You can track AI visibility with a spreadsheet and an hour a month.

Write down 10 to 20 questions a buyer in your category would ask, such as "best organic ghee brands in India" or "packaging printers in Pune for small runs". Once a month, ask each one in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Mode. Log whether your brand appears, where it sits in the answer, and which sources the engine cites. The cited sources tell you where to work next.

In Google Search Console, the Generative AI performance report shows how your pages perform in Google's AI features. Paid GEO tools can automate the prompt tracking. Weigh their claims with care: Google says no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems.

Expect slow movement. Mentions, reviews and press coverage build over months, and each engine refreshes what it cites on its own timetable. If you want help with the website side, our search and content team works on this for brands across India.

09Questions

Questions people ask

Is GEO different from SEO?

Google treats them as the same work: its AI features pull from the regular Search index, so SEO basics decide whether a page is eligible. GEO adds attention to sources outside your website, such as reviews, YouTube, Reddit and press coverage, which ChatGPT and Perplexity draw on.

Does an llms.txt file help?

Not for Google. Google Search ignores llms.txt files for ranking and for AI Overviews and AI Mode, and says keeping one neither helps nor harms. Some AI coding tools read them, which can help documentation sites, but for most businesses they are not a visibility tactic.

How long does it take to appear in AI answers?

Expect months. Indexing a new page can take days to weeks, and the signals that correlate most with AI visibility, such as YouTube mentions, reviews and press coverage, build up over time. Track the same set of questions every month so you can see movement.

Do I need a paid GEO tool?

Not to start. A monthly manual check across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Mode, plus Search Console's Generative AI performance report, covers most small brands. Paid tools help when you track hundreds of prompts, though Google says no third-party tool can see its ranking systems.

10Sources