Answer engine optimisation: how to get cited by AI search

Somewhere in Bengaluru right now a woman is asking ChatGPT which IVF clinics in the city have the best reputation, and a founder is asking Google's AI Mode for a social media agency near HSR Layout. Each will get a paragraph that names a handful of businesses. Each will probably contact one of them. Neither will scroll a results page.

Being one of the names in that paragraph is what answer engine optimisation means. It is a clumsy phrase for a simple shift: the search engine used to send people to you, and now it increasingly answers them itself and cites whoever it trusted. The good news for anyone who already does search marketing properly is that the two disciplines overlap almost completely. The bad news is that "properly" has become a higher bar, and the studies below show exactly where.

The short answer

To be cited by AI answers, a page has to be indexed and eligible to appear in ordinary search, answer a specific question clearly near the top, carry numbers, named sources and quotations, be updated, and belong to a brand that is mentioned consistently across the rest of the web. Google says no special markup or AI file is needed and that it ignores llms.txt. Studies find that being in the top ten organic results still helps but is no longer enough, that brand mentions across the web correlate with AI visibility more than domain authority does, and that pages cited in an AI Overview get around 35% more clicks than pages that are not.

What changed, and how fast it changed in India

Google launched AI Overviews in the United States on 14 May 2024 and brought them to India on 15 August 2024, in English and Hindi, with a toggle between the two and a button to listen to the answer. Google noted at the time that Indian users listen to AI Overviews more often than users in other countries. By May 2026 the feature had 2.5 billion monthly users worldwide.

AI Mode, the fuller conversational version, rolled out to everyone in India in July 2025, added Hindi in September 2025 and Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu in October 2025, alongside a voice version, Search Live, that launched in India before anywhere outside the United States. Google said in that announcement that India is its largest market for both voice and visual search. By May 2026 AI Mode had passed a billion monthly users. Google announced in July 2025 that ads would arrive in AI Overviews in India later that year. Google still holds about 97% of search in India, so what it does with answers is what Indian search does.

The other engines are not small here either. OpenAI reported 900 million weekly ChatGPT users in February 2026, and Sam Altman said the same month that India has 100 million of them, the second-largest base after the United States. OpenAI priced its ChatGPT Go plan at ₹399 for India and then made it free for a year from November 2025. Perplexity gave Airtel's 360 million customers a free year of Pro in July 2025, and its Indian monthly users peaked around 22 million before settling back to roughly 14 million this summer, still five times the pre-offer level. Meta has called India its largest market for Meta AI, which sits inside WhatsApp.

What it has done to clicks

The researchers and Google disagree, and both are probably describing something real.

Pew Research Center tracked 900 American adults' searches in March 2025 and found that when an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits, against 15% without a summary, clicked a link inside the summary on just 1%, and ended their session entirely 26% of the time rather than 16%. Google called the methodology flawed, and its search head Liz Reid wrote that organic click volume was relatively stable year on year and that the clicks were higher quality.

The industry studies side with Pew on the direction. Ahrefs found the click-through rate of the top organic result fell 58% between December 2023 and December 2025 on queries where an AI Overview appeared. Seer Interactive, across 3,119 terms, measured organic click-through with an AI Overview present dropping from 1.76% to 0.61% and paid click-through from 19.7% to 6.3%. The same study found the one number that matters for this article: pages that were cited inside the AI Overview received about 35% higher organic click-through than pages that were not, though Seer is careful to say it cannot prove the citation causes the click.

Direct traffic from the AI assistants themselves is still small. SE Ranking's study of over 100,000 sites put AI referrals at 0.32% of traffic in 2026, up from 0.02% two years earlier, with ChatGPT sending three-quarters of it and those visitors spending 68% longer on site than average. Organic search still delivered about 43% of visits. The answer is eating the clicks around it, the brands named in the answer keep more of what is left, and the assistants are starting to send small numbers of unusually serious visitors.

How the engines choose who to cite

This is where the studies earn their keep, because the pattern has shifted inside a year.

Answers cite several sources at once. SE Ranking counted an average of 10.4 links in a ChatGPT answer, 9.3 in an AI Overview and 5 in Perplexity; Semrush found AI Mode responses draw on about seven unique domains, against roughly three in an AI Overview, with Reddit, YouTube and Facebook appearing in over two-thirds of AI Mode results. There is room in the answer, but only for a few.

Ranking still helps and no longer decides. In July 2025 Ahrefs found that 76% of pages cited in AI Overviews ranked in the top ten for the query. By March 2026 the same team found that figure had fallen to about 38%, with 31% of citations coming from beyond the top hundred. Google's systems have started fanning a question out into many sub-queries and pulling sources for each, so a page that never ranked for the headline query can be cited for the piece of it that it answers best.

Being talked about matters more than being linked to. Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands found that the number of web pages mentioning a brand correlated with its AI visibility at 0.66 for ChatGPT, 0.71 for AI Mode and 0.66 for AI Overviews, while the site's domain rating, the classic backlink measure, correlated at only 0.27 to 0.33. Mentions on YouTube correlated at about 0.74. In plain terms, the engines have read the whole web's opinion of you, and a hundred reviews, directory listings, podcast mentions and news pieces that say the same thing about your business weigh more than a few strong links.

Fresh beats stale. Ahrefs found AI assistants cite content that is on average 25.7% fresher than what ranks organically for the same query.

Specifics beat adjectives. The original generative engine optimisation paper from Princeton and IIT Delhi tested what changes to a page increased its visibility in generated answers: adding quotations lifted it about 41%, statistics about 33% and cited sources about 30%, while keyword stuffing cut it by 8%. The engines reward the things a careful human writer does anyway.

What Google asks for

Google's own guidance is short and a little deflating for anyone hoping for a trick. Its documentation on AI features says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode and no special structured data to add. Its May 2026 guide on optimising for generative AI features says the features are rooted in the core ranking systems, that a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, that commodity content should be avoided, that structured data is not required, and that site owners do not need to create "new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown", which will "neither harm nor help" because Google Search ignores them. Clear headings and sections get a specific recommendation.

That paragraph includes llms.txt, the proposed file that lists a site's content for AI systems. Google's Gary Illyes said in July 2025 that Google does not support it and is not planning to, and John Mueller has compared it to the keywords meta tag. The file is harmless, costs nothing, and other crawlers may read it, so there is no reason not to have one. There is also no reason to expect it to do anything on Google. The Google-Extended control, for the record, governs whether Gemini may train on your content and does not affect inclusion or ranking in Search.

The playbook for an Indian business

Eight moves, in the order we would do them for a client.

1. Answer the question in the first sixty words. Every page that exists to answer something should do so immediately, in one or two plain sentences that could be lifted out and still make sense. That passage is what gets quoted. The rest of the page earns the trust that makes the engine willing to quote it.
2. Write headings as the questions people ask, and answer each one under it. "How much does IVF cost in Bengaluru?" as a heading, with the figure and its source in the first sentence below, is exactly the shape the fan-out looks for. Our healthcare and pricing articles are built this way on purpose.
3. Put numbers, names and quotes in, with links to where they came from. The GEO paper's findings are a writing brief: statistics, attributed quotations and cited sources, each of which also happens to make an article more useful to a human.
4. Keep it current and show the date. Update the pages that matter, change the date when the content changes, and say when figures were last checked. Freshness is measured.
5. Be exactly one entity everywhere. Name, address, phone, opening hours and the one-line description of what you do should match character for character across your website, Google Business Profile, Justdial, Clutch, LinkedIn and every directory. The engines are reconciling all of them into a single picture of you, and inconsistency reads as doubt. On our own site the address and phone are stored once and reused on every page and in the structured data for that reason.
6. Get mentioned where you are not the author. Reviews on Google and the directories, listings, trade press, podcasts, guest columns, event pages, YouTube appearances. This is the 0.7 correlation, and it is the part most Indian SMEs skip because it feels like PR. It is PR, and it now ranks.
7. Make sure the engines can read you. Indexed, fast on a phone, no accidental blocks on crawlers, no important content hidden behind scripts, structured data for your organisation and your articles that matches what is visible on the page. None of this is new. All of it is now a precondition.
8. Write in the languages your customers ask in. AI Mode answers in Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Malayalam and Urdu. A Bengaluru clinic whose patients ask in Kannada and whose website only speaks English is not in the running for those answers.

How to tell if it is working

The tools for tracking this are young, so the measurement is partly manual. Once a month, ask the engines the dozen questions a customer would ask about your category and city, and record who gets named. Watch referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and Google's AI surfaces in your analytics, small as it is. Track mentions of your brand across the web, because the studies say that is the input. And keep watching ordinary rankings, because a page still has to be indexed and ranking for the sub-questions it answers before any engine will quote it.

We offer SEO as one of our seven services, which we call the Discovery Trail, and this article is roughly what the first conversation about it now sounds like. If you want to know who the engines are naming in your category instead of you, tell us the category and we will run the questions.

Frequently asked questions

What is answer engine optimisation?

Answer engine optimisation, sometimes called generative engine optimisation, is the practice of making a brand's content the source that AI-generated answers cite, in Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity and similar tools. It builds on search engine optimisation and adds emphasis on direct answers, cited specifics, freshness and consistent brand mentions across the web.

Does llms.txt help you appear in Google AI Overviews?

No. Google has said it does not support llms.txt and has no plans to, and its 2026 guidance states that AI text files will neither harm nor help because Google Search ignores them. The file is harmless and other crawlers may use it, so having one costs nothing, but it does not affect Google.

Do you need special schema markup to be cited in AI search?

No. Google's documentation says there are no additional requirements and no special structured data for AI Overviews or AI Mode. Ordinary structured data for your organisation, local business and articles remains good practice because it helps the engines understand the page, but it must match the visible content.

How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT?

Be indexed and visible in ordinary search, answer specific questions clearly near the top of your pages, include figures and named sources, keep pages updated, and build mentions of your brand across reviews, directories, press and video. Studies find that brand mentions across the web correlate more strongly with AI visibility than backlink authority does, and that ChatGPT answers cite around ten sources each.

Is SEO dead because of AI search?

No, though it has changed shape. Google says its AI features are rooted in its core ranking systems, and cited pages are drawn from pages that are indexed and ranking for the questions they answer, even where they never ranked for the headline query. What has changed is that ranking alone no longer guarantees the click: pages cited inside an AI Overview get around 35% more clicks than pages that rank but are not cited.

Which AI search tools matter in India?

Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, because Google holds about 97% of Indian search and AI Mode now works in eight Indian languages; ChatGPT, with 100 million weekly users in India as of February 2026; Perplexity, after its Airtel partnership; and Meta AI inside WhatsApp, for which India is the largest market.