The day I asked ChatGPT about us Last week I typed "best creative studios in Delhi" into ChatGPT. Just to see. We were not on the list. Neither was anyone you would actually recognise. Three of the five names it gave back were studios I have honestly never heard of. The list was wrong. It was also the only answer the person searching that day ever saw.
If you are a brand reading this and quietly assuming customers still find you the way they did three years ago, you are wrong about a lot of things. But mostly, you are wrong about this one.
About one in three searches now happens inside an AI tool. ChatGPT. Gemini. Perplexity. Bing Copilot. Claude. The user types the question, the AI does the work, the user reads one paragraph and a short list. They do not click ten blue links anymore. Most of them do not even open one.
India is the second-biggest market for ChatGPT in the world. Traffic from here grew 160% through 2025. Almost no Indian brand has done anything about it. I find that genuinely strange.
So what is GEO GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation. Yes, another acronym. (The agencies will start overcharging for it by Q4. Bookmark this article and feel smug about it then.)
The simple version: GEO is everything you do to make AI systems aware you exist, and willing to mention you when someone asks about your category. It is what SEO was to Google around 2003. Mostly invisible work. Mostly nobody doing it yet. Mostly the brands that get on the train early will be the ones the AI defaults to in three years.
There is a wrinkle though. The three big AI tools do not source their citations the same way.
- Gemini pulls roughly 52% of its citations from brand-owned websites. So your own site has to be clean.
- ChatGPT pulls roughly 49% from third-party directories and "best of" lists. So you have to be on those lists.
- Perplexity leans on industry-specific directories. So you have to be on the lists for your specific category.
If you only optimise for one of them, two-thirds of AI search stays invisible to you. You have to do all three at once.
What to do this week I am going to give you five things. A decent developer can ship the whole list in a day. Some of it you can do yourself in an evening.
1. Write an llms.txt and put it at the root of your site. It is a small plain text file that introduces your business to AI crawlers. Who you are, what you do, who you work with, how to reach you. Ours lives at [bigbangstory.com/llms.txt](https://bigbangstory.com/llms.txt) if you want to nick the structure. Took us an hour. The point is to make the AI's job easy.
2. Stop blocking the AI bots in your robots.txt. I have personally looked at around fifty Indian brand sites this month. Almost half are accidentally telling GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot to go away. If the crawler cannot read your site, the AI cannot quote you. Open robots.txt. Allow them. Done.
3. Ship JSON-LD schema for your business. Organisation. ProfessionalService. LocalBusiness. These are tiny scripts that tell the AI exactly what you do, where you are, who you work with, and how to engage you. The AI is dumb about implicit things and clever about explicit ones. Spell it out.
4. Get on the third-party "best of" lists. This one is gnarly. ChatGPT trusts those listicles more than your own website (frustrating, but true). So you have to hustle onto them. Google your category. Find the top five articles ranking. Email each writer. Yes, this feels like 2010 PR work. Yes, it still works in 2026.
5. Publish a point of view, not a press release. Not a thought-leadership piece written by ChatGPT and lightly edited by a human (the irony of that piece getting cited by ChatGPT is not lost on anyone). A real opinion, with specific stats and named quotes. Princeton did some research on this. Articles with clear stance, hard statistics, and quotable lines get cited by AI 30 to 40 percent more often. So write the thing you actually believe. Not what your category says it believes.
That last one is the one most brands will skip. The first four feel like infrastructure work. The fifth feels like work-work. It is.
The cost of not bothering Pretend you sell skincare in Mumbai. A founder in Bangalore opens ChatGPT and asks for the best D2C skincare brands in India. ChatGPT gives them six names. You are not one of them. The founder bookmarks two, ignores the rest. They never visit your site. You do not get pitched, rejected, or considered. You get skipped. Quietly.
Twelve months from now, when everyone notices this happening, the agencies will start mass-emailing about GEO services. The brands that started in 2026 will have a citation moat that takes years to build. The brands that wake up in 2027 will pay a lot of money to catch up to where the early movers are already sitting comfortably.
I am not writing this because we sell GEO services. (We do, but that is not the point of this.) I am writing it because I have asked ChatGPT about my own industry, more than once, and the answers have been very gently wrong every single time. Every wrong answer is a real client we never got the chance to convince.
What we actually do for clients on this We bake GEO into every brand engagement now. Schema, llms.txt, bot allowlist, the boring foundational stuff. Plus the point-of-view content that does the citation-earning. Plus a quarterly look at what the AI is currently saying about you, and whether it is right.
It is not the glamorous part of the work. It is the part that decides if you exist in the AI's answer or not.
If your brand is not in ChatGPT, and you would like that to change, that is our orbit.