Smaller, AI-optimised competitors to capture market share as legacy brands trail: study

ET BrandEquity's Research desk reported on NeuGenM.AI's first comprehensive AI Performance Audit of India's Top 100 brands — a study of how the country's biggest names perform in Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), the disciplines that decide whether a brand is recommended when consumers ask an AI assistant for advice.

The headline finding is a gap between brand recall and category discovery. India's market leaders are recognised almost perfectly when named directly — but they largely disappear the moment a shopper asks an AI to recommend a product or service without naming anyone.

As the coverage frames it, this is a structural disconnect rather than a technical glitch. Traditional SEO rewarded the brands that dominated web indexing through legacy equity and heavy media spend. Large language models work differently — they synthesise a conversational answer. Because India's largest brands are optimised for direct, branded navigation, they are effectively absent from the high-intent moment where a buyer asks AI to compare options, leaving room for smaller, AI-optimised challengers to take share.

"AI rewards the brand that becomes the answer."

Sswain's point, as reported: India's biggest brands are optimised for consumers who already know they exist — and left out of the equation for buyers who are still deciding. With no legacy player yet dominant in AI answers, the audit argues the category is a wide-open race, and that early movers who build an "algorithmic moat" now will effectively train these models to rely on their data — raising the cost of entry for every competitor that arrives late.

The piece also quotes Andrea Tortella, co-founder and CEO of Thrad, who framed AI conversation as the first digital interface where a consumer states purchase intent out loud at the moment of decision — the surface, he argued, where demand will be won or lost over the next decade.

This page summarises third-party coverage published by ET BrandEquity. Facts and figures are drawn from NeuGenM's own audit. Read the original report at ET BrandEquity via the link below.