Your customers stopped Googling. They're asking AI.
AI assistants now answer billions of questions a month — and they hand back a shortlist of names, not ten blue links. If your business isn't on it, you're invisible. Here's what changed, and what to do about it.
By Garvit Jain, Vardhan AI
Photo: Luke Chesser / Unsplash
A customer looking for a service used to open Google, scan a page of links, and click around. That habit is dissolving. By late 2025 ChatGPT had crossed 800 million weekly users, and Google's own AI Overviews now reach roughly 2 billion people a month across 200+ countries. For a growing share of buyers, the first answer they see is written by an AI — not chosen from a list.
One answer, not ten links
Search used to be a menu. You got ten results and picked one. An AI assistant collapses that into a recommendation: “The best options are A, B, and C.” If your business is the fourth-best answer, it may as well not exist — there is no second page, no scrolling, often no link at all. This is the zero-click world, and it rewards whoever the model decides to name.
GEO is the new SEO
A 2024 paper from researchers at Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI, and IIT Delhi named the discipline: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Testing 10,000 queries, they showed that the right content and structure can lift a brand's visibility in AI answers by up to 40%. SEO optimised for a ranking algorithm; GEO optimises for what a language model trusts, cites, and repeats.
What this means for an Indian business
When a parent asks an assistant “best pediatric clinic in Indore?” or a buyer asks “reliable packaging supplier near Pune,” an AI is now answering. Whether it names you depends on signals you can actually influence:
- Clear, structured information about who you serve, where, and what you're known for
- Consistent mentions and reviews the models can find and trust
- Schema markup and an
llms.txtso AI crawlers read you correctly - Content that answers the real questions buyers ask, in their words
The window is open now
Share-of-answer compounds. The brands that become the trusted citation in their category today get recommended again tomorrow, at near-zero cost per lead — while competitors are still buying ads against a shrinking search page. McKinsey estimates that about 75% of generative-AI value lands in customer operations, marketing and sales, software, and R&D — discovery is squarely in that path. Being the answer is no longer a nice-to-have; it's the new front door. Curious what it costs to actually get started? See our GEO pricing guide for India.
Sources
- 1.Sam Altman: ChatGPT has hit 800M weekly active users — TechCrunch (2025)
- 2.Google's AI Overviews reach over 2 billion monthly users — Digiday (2025)
- 3.GEO: Generative Engine Optimization — Princeton et al., arXiv 2311.09735 (ACM SIGKDD 2024)
- 4.The economic potential of generative AI — McKinsey (2023)