AEO vs SEO: what changes for Indian brands

Most Indian marketing teams already run SEO: keywords, rankings, Search Console reports. Now buyers also ask AI assistants what to buy. AEO, answer engine optimisation, is the name for trying to be part of those answers. You may also hear GEO, generative engine optimisation, used for the same idea. This guide explains what actually changes, and what doesn’t.

The short difference

	SEO	AEO
What you’re aiming for	A high position in a list of links	Your brand named in the answer itself
What the buyer sees	Ten or more results, and they choose what to click	One answer with a few brand names and a few cited sources
What decides it	Search engine ranking	The assistant’s model, plus the pages it reads through search
Whose pages matter	Mostly yours	Yours, and every other page the answer cites
What you measure	Rankings, impressions, clicks	How many answers name you, and which websites they cite
How stable it is	Rankings move slowly	Answers can change every time the question is asked

Why it matters for Indian brands now

ChatGPT is no longer a niche tool in India. In February 2026, ahead of the India AI Impact Summit, Sam Altman said more than 100 million people in India use ChatGPT every week, which the report describes as second only to the United States.

Not every one of those people is shopping. But categories where buyers research before they pay, such as insurance, health foods, mattresses, electronics and financial products, are exactly where someone types a full question and reads the answer instead of clicking through ten links.

Where SEO and AEO overlap

The good news: most SEO work still counts.

• AI answers are often built from search. OpenAI says ChatGPT may share search queries with “third-party search providers such as Bing”. Google says pages must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet to appear as a supporting link in its AI features, and that “all existing SEO fundamentals continue to be worthwhile”.
• Crawlability matters for both. A page a crawler can’t read can’t be ranked or cited. For ChatGPT, that includes allowing OpenAI’s search crawler, OAI-SearchBot; OpenAI says sites that block it won’t be shown in ChatGPT search answers.
• Clear pages help both. A page with a plain title, a clear answer and facts written as text serves a search engine and an AI answer alike.

Where they differ

Named versus ranked. In SEO, position eight still gets some clicks. An AI answer often names only a handful of brands. If you’re not one of them, the buyer may never see you.

Other websites carry more weight. An AI answer often cites several pages and summarises them. If a comparison site, a review site or a regulator’s list is cited and you’re missing from it, the answer can leave you out even when your own page ranks well. This is why an AEO review looks beyond your own site.

The question is longer. Buyers ask complete questions: “which term plan is best for a 30-year-old non-smoker in India?” rather than “term plan”. ChatGPT turns that into its own shorter searches. Ahrefs’ study of 66.6 million ChatGPT responses found that responses containing these searches had about 1.6 of them on average. Your pages need to match both the buyer’s full question and the plain facts those searches look for.

Answers vary. Ask the same question twice and the list can change. One screenshot from your CEO’s phone isn’t a measurement. You need several asks per question and a count.

Some answers come from memory. When ChatGPT doesn’t search, it answers from its training, which stops at a training cutoff. New products or a recent rebrand may not be known there yet.

What to measure for each

For SEO, you already know the numbers: rankings, impressions, clicks, conversions from organic traffic.

For AEO, measure counts you can check:

• Across a fixed set of buyer questions, each asked several times, how many answers named your brand. Write it as “named in [n] of [N] answers”, never as a percentage on its own and never as a made-up score.
• Which other brands were named, and how often.
• Which websites the answers cited, especially in the answers that left you out.
• What the answers said about you, and whether it matches your own website.

If you weren’t named, the honest description is “not named in any of these answers”, a statement about the search you ran, not a claim about every AI answer everywhere.

Where to start

1. Check the basics. Use our 15-minute checklist or the free checker to confirm OpenAI’s crawler can read your site.
2. List ten questions your buyers ask in their own words, including “in India” where it matters, and ask each one several times.
3. Note the cited websites. That list tells you where AEO work happens for your category: your own pages, marketplaces, review sites, comparison pages or a regulator.
4. Keep your SEO. It is still the foundation the answers draw on.

How Citationly helps

Citationly measures the AEO side for your category in India: questions prepared for your category, each asked three times on ChatGPT with web search on, every answer recorded. You see which brands are named, which sites are cited, and what to do next. See pricing or book a demo.