How do I find out whether AI answer engines cite us, and how should that work sit next to our SEO?
Measure first, because most teams argue about AI visibility without a baseline. Write down the twenty or thirty questions a buyer asks before choosing a product like yours, run them every month in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Mode, and record whether you are named, cited with a link, or missing, and who is named instead. Add a line to your signup and demo forms asking where they heard of you, since much of this traffic arrives with no referrer. Then resist building a separate programme. Google says plainly that AI Overviews and AI Mode need no special optimisation: a page has to be indexed and eligible for a snippet, and the traffic is counted inside Search Console's normal web results. What earns citations is what already earns rankings plus being talked about elsewhere: pages that answer one question cleanly, help documentation, comparison pages honest about where you lose, and mentions in reviews, communities and press, which Ahrefs found track AI visibility far more closely than backlinks. Run it as an addition to SEO with its own measurement, not as a replacement.
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Graphite's Ethan Smith has run this for real clients, so the advice is specific: landing pages, YouTube and genuine Reddit participation move the needle, help-center content is the underused asset, and AI-written pages underperform. Also the source of the claim that ChatGPT traffic converts around six times better than Google.
A current, India-hosted take on the honest version of this question: what AI has actually changed in customer discovery and demand generation, and what still needs a human. Good counterweight to the tooling articles, which describe the automation but not the judgment.
Google's own documentation on how pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, which settles what is and is not required before you spend on a separate programme for it.
The evidence behind the strategy shift, at a sample size nobody else has published: branded web mentions correlate at 0.664 against backlinks at 0.218, and the top quartile by mentions averaged 169 AI Overview mentions versus 14 for the next quartile.
The good news for a small company, quantified: brand size correlates strongly with Google AI Overviews (0.65) but weakly with Perplexity (0.30) and barely at all with ChatGPT (0.15). That gap is the opening a young Indian brand can actually walk through.
