The engine under your AI visibility number is being rebuilt in public. The only part of the measurement you control is the list of questions you ask it, and most of the advice on writing that list comes from the companies selling the tracking. Method · 21 September 2026 On 4
On 15 September the company retired its one-click AI-blocking switch. What replaced it lets Google, Apple and Microsoft keep crawling, on a promise. Every other company's training bots stay locked out, and one name is missing from the announcement altogether. Engines · 16 September 2026 Somewhere in
We read the public pages of 94 AI visibility tools on 13 September 2026. Four name Hindi or Hinglish anywhere on those pages. Ten have an Indian address, rupee pricing or Indian clients. Not one, Indian or global, says on the pages we read how the prompts it runs for
Bloomberg reported this morning that Profound, the New York company that tracks how brands show up in AI answers, has closed a $180 million Series D. The round values the company at $1.8 billion post-money and was led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. As always, every number
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Chowdhury and Garimella collected complete ChatGPT histories from 557 Indian users: 88,958 conversations between December 2022 and February 2026. Purchasable products made up 2.2% of them. Practical guidance was 29.5%, seeking information 22.7%, writing 17%. English was the detected language in 80% of conversations; Hindi in
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Reliance Jio and Google announced free Google AI Pro, a ₹35,100 value, for 18 months on 30 October 2025, first for 18-to-25-year-olds on unlimited 5G plans and for all ages from 10 November. Jio had about 506 million subscribers at the time. Neither company has
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Airtel gave its customers a year of Perplexity Pro free from July 2025, calling it a ₹17,000 value for its 360 million customers. New sign-ups closed on 16 January 2026. Sensor Tower estimates Perplexity's monthly users in India went from about 2.6 million before the
A lot, and nobody agrees on how much. Ask an AI engine the same question twice and the brands it names can differ. SparkToro and Gumshoe found less than a 1-in-100 chance of getting the identical brand list twice across 100 runs. MaxAEO found 17% of prompts changed
By web referrals, ChatGPT dominates. Statcounter's India sample for August 2026 put ChatGPT at 78.7% of AI-chatbot referrals, Gemini at 12.7%, Perplexity at 3.6%, Claude at 3.1% and Copilot at 1.9%. That measures links clicked from AI answers, not people. Meta AI
The customer and the tool decide. The people using AI engines don't. The engines don't publish what users type, so every tool works from a stand-in list: prompts the customer writes, prompts an AI generates from the customer's website, prompts rewritten from search
Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is the work of getting a brand named or cited when someone asks an AI engine like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Claude a question. Search optimisation was about ranking a link on a results page. GEO is about being inside the answer. Nobody outside the
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Semrush's 2026 study of its clickstream data found that 65 to 85% of real ChatGPT prompts matched no keyword in its database. That matters because several tools build their prompt lists by rewriting search keywords. Semrush's real-prompt data comes from a panel supplier, Datos, which
We read the public pages of 94 AI visibility tools. Many say their prompts come from real users. Across all 94, exactly two pages name the supplier: Semrush names Datos on its enterprise methodology page, and Adobe names Semrush. Everyone else says "panels" or "partners" without
Profound's Prompt Volumes page lists the ten countries its licensed real-user conversations come from. India is not on the list. The same page gives three different size figures for the dataset. Who is speaking: Profound, which sells AI visibility tracking. Label: Verified. We read the page. The
A lot, and nobody agrees on how much. Ask an AI engine the same question twice and the brands it names can differ. SparkToro and Gumshoe found less than a 1-in-100 chance of getting the identical brand list twice across 100 runs. MaxAEO found 17% of prompts changed
By web referrals, ChatGPT dominates. Statcounter's India sample for August 2026 put ChatGPT at 78.7% of AI-chatbot referrals, Gemini at 12.7%, Perplexity at 3.6%, Claude at 3.1% and Copilot at 1.9%. That measures links clicked from AI answers, not people. Meta AI
The customer and the tool decide. The people using AI engines don't. The engines don't publish what users type, so every tool works from a stand-in list: prompts the customer writes, prompts an AI generates from the customer's website, prompts rewritten from search
Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is the work of getting a brand named or cited when someone asks an AI engine like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Claude a question. Search optimisation was about ranking a link on a results page. GEO is about being inside the answer. Nobody outside the
Google's India announcement for AI Mode, in October 2025, says queries there are nearly three times longer than traditional searches. It gives no unit and no base, so we can't tell whether that means words or characters, or longer than what. Who is speaking: Google, which