Generative Engine Optimization, explained for Indian brands

Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of getting a brand named, quoted or linked inside the answer an AI engine writes, rather than inside the list of links below it. The engines that matter in India are ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.

The shift is not that people stopped searching. It is that the search result increasingly answers the question instead of pointing at pages that answer it. When a buyer asks which brand to choose, the model returns three or four names. If yours is not among them, the rest of your marketing never gets a turn.

Entity clarity comes first. If four engines give four different answers to who the company is, nothing downstream is stable. That means one canonical name and description, Organization and Product schema, and consistent details on every profile you control.

Then content an engine can lift: one question per heading, the answer in the first fifty words, self-contained blocks, a date and a named author.

Then source placement. Category prompts are usually answered from a short list of sources: category publications, comparison pages, marketplaces, and community threads. Getting onto that list is most of the work and most of the cost.

• Entity: make the brand legible
• Content: make it liftable
• Sources: get on the list engines read

In India this work sits in the Rs 75,000 to 2 lakh per month band, with full programmes starting at Rs 1,50,000. An audit alone is Rs 25,000.

Brand prompts, meaning questions that name you, usually correct inside sixty days. Category prompts, the ones that do not name you, move between day sixty and day one hundred twenty depending on how much source placement is required.