Six months ago, a supplement brand discovered something strange. Revenue was climbing — ₹30 lakh one month, ₹60 lakh the next — but nothing had changed in their ad spend. No new campaigns. No viral moment. Just a silent, unstoppable surge.
When they dug into the analytics, they found the culprit: ChatGPT was recommending their brand by name to thousands of people every day.
People were typing questions like “what’s the best magnesium supplement for sleep” into AI assistants — and this brand kept coming up as the #1 recommendation. Not one of ten results. The answer.
Today, that channel drives $400,000 per month in attributable revenue. And it costs them almost nothing to maintain.
This is the playbook they used — rebuilt, refined, and made actionable for any business in 2026.
Here’s what’s happening right now, whether you’re paying attention or not:
People aren’t just using AI for fun. They’re using it to decide what to buy.
“What’s the best ceramic coating for my car?”
“Best web design agency in Kerala?”
“Which accounting software should I use for my small business?”
These are purchase-intent queries. The exact same ones you’re bidding ₹50–₹200 per click on in Google Ads.
Except when someone asks ChatGPT, there’s no ad auction. There’s no page of 10 results. There’s usually one recommendation. Maybe three.
You’re either the recommendation — or you don’t exist.
And here’s the stat that should make you stop everything: customers who discover brands through AI recommendations convert at 4.4x higher rates than traditional Google search traffic. Because when ChatGPT tells someone “this is the best option,” they don’t comparison shop. They just buy.
This is what Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is — the practice of optimising your business to appear as the recommended answer in AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google’s AI Overviews.
Almost no Indian businesses are doing this yet. That’s your window.
Here’s the complete system — built through real implementation, not theory.
Traditional SEO starts with keyword research. AEO starts with a different question:
What are people actually asking AI assistants about your category?
Here’s how to do it in one afternoon:
This is your competitive intelligence. Most businesses have never even looked at this. When the supplement brand ran their first audit, they appeared in zero out of 50 queries. Their competitors showed up in 23.
Six months later: 41 out of 50 queries. #1 in 28 of them.
This is a dedicated guide on your site designed specifically for AI models to find, understand, and cite. 99% of businesses don’t have one.
URL format: /guides/best-[your-category]-[year]
What to include:
This single page was responsible for 60% of the brand’s AI citations. When ChatGPT recommended them, it was almost always pulling from this page.
⚠️ Critical insight: AI models don’t want to cite your product page — it’s obviously biased. They want to cite a guide that looks neutral and comprehensive. Even if it lives on your own site, the format earns the trust.
A simple, Wikipedia-style page at /brand-facts that states who you are and what you do in a neutral, factual format.
Include:
Why it matters: AI models are constantly trying to verify facts about brands. If they can’t find clean, structured information about you, they won’t recommend you. They’ll recommend the brand they can verify.
This page gets crawled by AI bots more than any other page on the site. It’s the trust signal that makes AI comfortable recommending a brand.
This is the move that 99.9% of businesses will never think to do — and it’s probably the most powerful differentiator.
Create a small JSON file at a standard URL on your website that AI agents can read directly without needing to scrape your pages:
{
"name": "Your Brand Name",
"category": "Your Category",
"priceRange": "₹999–₹4,999",
"topProducts": [
{
"name": "Your Flagship Product",
"keyFeature": "Describe the main benefit",
"thirdPartyTested": true
}
],
"certifications": ["ISO", "GMP"],
"returnPolicy": "30-day money-back guarantee",
"lastUpdated": "2026-02-25"
}Keep the lastUpdated field current. When AI models are choosing between two similar brands and one has clean, machine-readable data and the other doesn’t — guess which one gets recommended.
Schema markup is structured data that helps AI models understand exactly what’s on each page. Most businesses either have zero schema or bare-minimum default schema.
Here’s what you need, by page type:
ItemList schema (your ranked products/services) + FAQPage schemaOrganization schema with founding date, social links, and knowsAbout tags for your categoryProduct or Service schema with full attributes, pricing, ratings, and identifiersOn WordPress, Rank Math or Yoast handles the basics. The product/service page schema needs custom attributes — your specific specs, certifications, and review data properly mapped.
This is what separates brands that kind of show up in AI from brands that show up consistently.
AI models don’t just look at your own site. They look at what other trusted sources say about you. If the only place recommending your brand is your own website, the AI is less likely to trust it.
The brand built third-party citations with 5 moves in 30 days:
/compare/us-vs-competitor) that cited external sources — so AI models see the citations going both waysResult: Zero third-party citations to 8+ authoritative external sources in 60 days. Perplexity especially rewards this — it almost exclusively recommends brands with external validation.
ChatGPT now has a shopping feature where users can browse and compare products directly. This pulls heavily from Google Merchant Center data.
Non-negotiables for ecommerce businesses:
| Metric | Before AEO | After 6 Months |
|---|---|---|
| AI recommendation visibility | 0 / 50 target queries | 41 / 50 (#1 in 28) |
| Revenue from AI traffic | ~₹0 | ~₹3.4 crore/month |
| Conversion rate from AI referrals | 2.8% (Google organic) | 11.2% from AI traffic |
| Total organic revenue | ~₹60 lakh/month | ~₹4 crore/month |
The conversion rate difference is the real story. 11.2% vs. 2.8%. When ChatGPT tells someone “this is the best option for you,” they arrive pre-sold. No comparison shopping. No reading 10 reviews. The AI already did that work for them.
This isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it system. AI models update constantly and competitors will eventually catch on. Here’s what to do every week to stay ahead:
That’s it. 90 minutes a week to maintain a channel that converts at 4x your best paid traffic. Show us another marketing activity with that ROI.
Don’t try to do all 7 layers at once. Here’s a phased approach:
brand-facts.json fileThe brands that move on this now will own their categories in AI recommendations within 6 months. The brands that wait will find themselves locked out by competitors who got there first.
AEO isn’t the future of SEO. It’s the present — and the window to get in early is closing fast.
Need help implementing AEO for your business? Creative Sparks works with ecommerce brands and businesses across India to build AI-ready web presence — from Answer Hub pages to full schema implementation. Get in touch to discuss your strategy.
