GEO for Indian brands: how to get cited in Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT

A growing share of your future customers will never see your website's homepage. They will ask Google a question and read the AI Overview at the top, or ask ChatGPT or Perplexity which magnesium to buy, and act on the answer. If your brand is not named in that answer, you were not in the room. Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is the work of getting into that answer.

There is a lot of noise about GEO. Here is what matters for small consumer and health brands.

How these answers get built

Google AI Overviews draw on pages that Google already crawls and indexes, and link to some of them as sources. ChatGPT search and Perplexity run their own searches and read pages in real time, then summarise and cite. In all cases, the system is looking for pages that answer the question directly, look trustworthy, and agree with what other sources say.

That gives you three levers: be crawlable, be quotable and be corroborated.

1. Be crawlable

• Check your robots.txt. For ChatGPT search, OpenAI's search crawler is called OAI-SearchBot. If you block it, you are unlikely to be cited. Perplexity uses PerplexityBot. Decide deliberately rather than inheriting a template that blocks everything.
• Know what Google-Extended does and does not do. Blocking Google-Extended affects use of your content for Gemini model training. It does not remove you from AI Overviews, which rely on normal Googlebot crawling and indexing.
• Put key facts in HTML text. Ingredients, dosage, pack size, price and certifications locked inside a product image or a PDF are hard for any engine to quote. Write them out on the page.

2. Be quotable

AI answers lift sentences. Write sentences that are worth lifting.

• Answer first. Under a heading like "What is berberine HCL 97%?", the first sentence should be the answer, in plain words, in under 30 words. Context and nuance come after.
• Use the question your customer types. "Which magnesium is best for sleep?" is a better heading than "Our Magnesium Philosophy". Pull real questions from Amazon Q&A, customer support chats and your Search Query Performance data.
• Be specific. "Contains 7g of fibre per serving" gets quoted. "Packed with fibre" does not.
• Add comparison and "how to choose" pages. Many AI queries are "best X for Y in India". A fair, well-structured guide that explains what to look for, including when your product is not the right choice, is exactly the kind of page these systems cite.
• Use structured data. Product, Organization and FAQ schema do not guarantee anything, but they make your facts unambiguous.

3. Be corroborated

An AI system is more confident naming a brand when several independent sources say similar things about it. Your own site saying you are the best is one voice. You need others.

• Keep your facts identical everywhere. Same brand name spelling, same founding year, same product names and doses across your site, Amazon, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile and press mentions.
• Earn mentions in lists and roundups. Indian health and lifestyle publications, niche blogs and comparison sites are frequently cited. Send them samples, lab reports and a clear one-page fact sheet.
• Show up in real discussions. Reddit and Quora threads are often used as sources. Participate as the brand, openly, and answer questions properly. Astroturfing gets found out and does lasting harm.

What we did for a clinical AI client

For Clinivox AI, a clinical decision-support tool, the website originally described the product in broad, aspirational language. We rewrote the core pages around the questions doctors and hospital buyers actually ask: what it does, which specialities it covers, how it handles data, how it compares to general-purpose chatbots. Each page opened with a direct answer. We tightened the company's facts across every profile it owned.

How to track it

There is no perfect GEO dashboard yet. Keep it manual and consistent:

1. Write down 20 questions your customers ask, in their words.
2. Once a month, ask each one in Google (logged out, Indian location), ChatGPT and Perplexity.
3. Record whether your brand is named, whether you are linked, and which sources are cited instead.
4. Study the sources that beat you. They are your content brief.

GEO is not a new trick. It is old-fashioned clarity, written for a reader that happens to be a machine.