AEO agency India: AI search optimisation from our New Delhi office

Why is India one of the biggest markets for AI answers?

Because the user base is huge and the products are being priced for it. Sam Altman has said India has about 100 million weekly ChatGPT users and is its second-largest market, though OpenAI has not published an official figure.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT Go, an India-first plan, on 19 August 2025 at ₹399 a month. Perplexity reached Indian users through Airtel, which offered its customers 12 months of Perplexity Pro free. Together these moves put AI assistants in front of far more Indian buyers, which is why Indian brands now need to know what these tools say about them.

When did AI Overviews and AI Mode launch in India?

India was among the earliest markets. AI Overviews arrived on 15 August 2024, the same day as the UK.

AI Mode opened in Search Labs on 24 June 2025 and went to everyone in India on 8 July 2025, ahead of Google's wider English expansion. Google then added Hindi, and in October 2025 seven more Indian languages. For Indian brands that means AI answers now appear for queries typed in several scripts, not just English. It also means your Search Console data should be read by language and region, not only in total, since AI-feature traffic sits inside the 'Web' search type.

How should Indian brands handle Hindi and regional-language answers?

Test each language you sell in, because engines behave differently by language. Studies of AI Overviews suggest they mostly cite sources written in the language of the question, so a Hindi query tends to pull Hindi pages.

ChatGPT works differently: Peec AI found it often runs English searches even when the prompt is in another language, so strong English pages still feed its answers. Our practical rule is to keep authoritative English pages, add genuine Indian-language pages for the questions your buyers ask in those languages, and mark them up with hreflang. We do not assume machine-translated pages will be cited.

Is Google the only search engine that matters in India?

For classic search, very nearly. StatCounter's September 2026 data puts Google at 96.63% of Indian searches and Bing at 1.92%.

So Googlebot access, indexing, Search Console's generative AI report and organic foundations come first. Bing Webmaster Tools is still worth a quick setup for Copilot, but the bigger second front in India is the assistants: ChatGPT and Perplexity run their own crawlers, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, which need to be allowed in robots.txt and in any Cloudflare rules. We also look for Perplexity-User and ChatGPT-User requests in your server logs, which show real people asking those assistants to read your pages.

Which Indian directories and platforms do AI answers draw on?

The ones Indian buyers already use to check a business. We align your details on each and track which appear in your prompt results.

We also look at what sits around each listing. A Justdial or IndiaMART profile with an old phone number, a closed branch or a product range you stopped selling years ago can be repeated by an assistant as if it were current, so corrections there often matter as much as anything on your own site.

• Justdial and Sulekha for local and consumer services.
• IndiaMART for manufacturers, suppliers and B2B trade.
• Google Business Profile for every branch, with correct hours and categories.
• LinkedIn, YouTube and Reddit, which Peec AI lists among the most-cited domains worldwide.
• Organization schema with sameAs links that tie these profiles to your website.

Which Indian rules apply to AEO and AI search work?

Several, and two are still evolving. The CCPA Dark Patterns Guidelines 2023 cover disguised advertisements, which rules out paid posts dressed up as independent reviews or forum answers.

ASCI ran a consultation on a draft AI-disclosure framework that closed in June 2026; we track whether it is finalised before advising on labels. The DPDP Rules were notified in November 2025, with full compliance due by 14 May 2027, which affects how AI referral traffic is tracked and how consent is collected. This is general information, not legal advice.

What does an AEO agency India businesses hire cost, and how do we work?

Published Indian rates come from agencies, not surveys. upGrowth's 2026 benchmark puts GEO and AEO retainers at ₹75,000 to ₹3,50,000 a month. We quote one fixed price for each engagement after a free AEO visibility check.

Our head office is in New Delhi and we work on Indian Standard Time, so calls, reviews and fixes run inside your normal day. The practice is led by founder Harsh Khubchandani, who began his career at ZS and was featured in The Economic Times 'Dynamic Business Leaders of 2024'.