For roughly twenty-five years, the way a person looked something up on the internet was straightforward. They opened Google, typed a question, and clicked one of the ten blue links that came back. Brands that wanted to be found in that sequence hired SEO agencies. The model worked, more or less, from 1998 until about eighteen months ago.
Then ChatGPT learned how to search the web, Perplexity got popular, Google bolted an AI Overviews panel onto its own results page, and the ten blue links stopped being the only game in town.
Now a meaningful slice of high-intent searches end inside a chatbot. A user asks ChatGPT or Gemini or Perplexity for the best Mumbai-based dermatologist, the most reliable solar AC brand in Pune, the cheapest export-quality saffron supplier, the cleanest CRM for a thirty-person sales team. The AI answers in a paragraph. The user does not visit a website. The brands that get cited in the answer get business. The ones that do not, no longer exist as far as that user is concerned.
This is the problem Saurabh Tripathi, founder of Bhopal-headquartered digital marketing agency Opus Momentum, has been working on for most of the past year. The agency is now selling a solution as a standalone service line: Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, sits on the Opus Momentum website alongside SEO, performance marketing, and the rest of the agency’s roster.
Tripathi believes it is the most important shift in search since Google’s move to mobile-first indexing.
“SEO worked because Google was the front door,” he says. “For the last twenty years, the question was: how do we get our website to rank on page one? That question is now half the problem. The new question is: when ChatGPT writes a paragraph that contains the answer a user was looking for, is our brand the one it mentions?”
The technical answer, Tripathi argues, is different from classic SEO in important ways. Large language models do not crawl the web continuously in the way Google does. They pull from training data, from real-time search APIs, and from a small set of authoritative sources they have learned to trust. Getting cited inside an AI-generated answer means engineering for a different signal stack.
Opus Momentum’s GEO service, according to the agency’s positioning, covers four things. First, structured content engineering that makes a brand’s pages legible to LLMs, with cleaner markup, declarative answers to common questions, and the kind of self-contained passages that an AI can quote verbatim. Second, source diversification, which in practice means getting a brand referenced across review sites, listicles, podcasts, Wikipedia, Reddit, Quora, and high-authority editorial properties that the major LLMs draw from. Third, prompt-based audits, which test how specific AI systems currently respond to commercial queries in a brand’s category and where the brand surfaces, if at all. Fourth, ongoing measurement, since the AI surface is changing fast enough that what works in one quarter is unlikely to work the same way two quarters later.
Tripathi is clear that the work overlaps with classic SEO but does not replace it.
“GEO is not a renaming of SEO,” he says. “We still need traditional SEO to be in good shape, because most LLMs pull live results to augment their answers, and Google rankings still feed that pipeline. But brands that ignore the AI surface entirely will be invisible to a class of users who never come back to Google.”
The Indian agency market, by Tripathi’s read, is mostly not ready. He says he has spoken to roughly thirty agency founders and senior marketers about GEO in the last six months. Most acknowledge the shift is happening. A smaller number have run any audit of their own clients’ visibility inside AI systems. Almost none are offering it as a billable service.
This is part of why Opus Momentum, which is a year old, has decided to invest meaningfully in the discipline. The agency’s bet, Tripathi says, is that the window for becoming known as a GEO specialist in India closes in roughly eighteen to twenty-four months. After that, every agency will offer it, and the pricing will compress.
“We are not pretending we have a five-year head start,” he says. “Nobody does. The discipline is too new. What we have is a year of doing the work for real clients and a clear methodology that we can document and defend.”
Opus Momentum’s existing clients in fintech, healthcare, and education have been the early test bed. Tripathi declines to share specific account-level results on the record but says the agency has internal data showing client mentions appearing inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews for commercial queries the clients care about.
The agency is also planning to publish what Tripathi calls a “GEO state of play” report for the Indian market in the first half of 2026. The report will, according to the founder, audit visibility for major Indian brands across categories and benchmark how often each surfaces in AI-generated answers.
The bigger question, Tripathi acknowledges, is what happens to digital marketing budgets once a meaningful share of search collapses into AI conversation. The traditional model of paying for keyword-targeted ads is built on the assumption that users see a results page in the first place.
“If a user gets their answer from an AI and never clicks through, the entire performance marketing layer downstream of that search shifts,” he says. “We are at the beginning of figuring out what that means for budgets and for agencies. We would rather figure it out for our clients than pretend it is not happening.”
