Which AI Engines Matter Most in India? Where to Track and Optimise in 2026
Most marketing teams in India think AI search means ChatGPT. Google AI Overviews actually serve about 3 in every 4 AI answers Indians see. Why ChatGPT feels bigger than it is, and where to put your AEO effort.
Author
Founder
Abhilash is the Founder of Paprik AI. He writes about AEO, AI search visibility, and how brands can win in AI-driven discovery.
The question I get most from marketing teams in India is some version of this: which AI engines should we track, and which should we optimise for? Most of them expect the answer to be ChatGPT. Most interestingly, most of them don't even think of Google as AI, apart from Gemini.
The actual story is quite different. Google AI Overviews serve about 73% of the information-seeking AI answers people in India see each day. ChatGPT serves about 14% and the Gemini app about 6%. Add Google AI Mode, and those 4 surfaces from 2 companies, Google and OpenAI, cover about 94% of AI answers in India. Meta AI, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Copilot and DeepSeek share the remaining 6% or so.
So the biggest AI engine in India is one most marketers don't count as AI at all. Here's how that happened, why ChatGPT still feels bigger than it is, and where I'd put your answer engine optimisation effort.
TL;DR
Google AI Overviews are the biggest AI engine in India by a distance: about 500 million people a month, roughly half of India's internet users, and about 480 million AI answers a day. That's a 73% share of AI answers in India.
ChatGPT is second: about 14% of daily AI answers, but about 77% of the clicks AI chatbots send to websites. That's why it looks bigger than it is.
The Gemini app and Google AI Mode reach far more people than they answer questions for. AI Mode reaches about 200 million Indians a month but serves around 1% of AI answers.
The long tail is about 6% combined. Track it, but don't build a strategy around it yet.
For most brands, that means Google's AI surfaces first, ChatGPT second, and a quarterly check on the rest.
The Google AI Overview is India's biggest AI engine and serves 73% of India's AI answers
India has about 958 million people online¹, and almost all of their searching happens on Google². Over the last year, Google has quietly turned a large part of that search into AI answers. Google says AI Overviews now have more than 2.5 billion monthly users worldwide³, and India is roughly a fifth of Google's audience⁴. AI Overviews also show up more often in India than in the US⁵.
Put together, that's about 500 million Indians seeing an AI Overview every month, and about 480 million AI Overview answers a day. Indians make well over a billion Google searches a day⁶ ⁷, and these days around 4 in 10 searches come back with an AI Overview on top⁸ ⁹.
AI Overviews win for a simple reason. Nobody has to choose them. They are now the default on a huge share of the Google searches people were going to make anyway. Every other platform on this list needs someone to open a separate app and type a question into it. That's why the Google side of AEO is where most of the volume is, even though most of the conversation in India is about ChatGPT.
Why ChatGPT feels bigger than it is
ChatGPT is still a big deal in India. OpenAI says India has 100 million weekly ChatGPT users¹⁰, one of its largest markets. By our count it serves about 90 million information-seeking answers a day in India¹¹ ¹², about a fifth of what AI Overviews serve.
So why does every marketing team I speak to think of ChatGPT first? I think it's because of what they can see. When people click from an AI chatbot to a website, about 77% of those clicks in India come from ChatGPT¹³. And also because of the reason we discussed earlier: When people think of AI, they think of a dedicated app, and ChatGPT is the most frequently opened one.
A click from an AI Overview, on the other hand, shows up in your analytics as ordinary Google search traffic. Google's AI answers never get their own line in the report, so the one AI engine you can see clearly is ChatGPT.
And clicks are a small part of the story anyway. AI chatbots sent less than 0.1% of the search, social and AI referrals to Indian websites in August¹⁴, and worldwide Google still sends over 100 times more visits than all AI platforms combined¹⁵. Even inside an AI Overview, people rarely click: about 1 visit in 100 ends in a click on a link inside the summary¹⁶.
AI answers shape which brands people consider far more than they send traffic. If you only measure AI search by the traffic it sends, you'll see ChatGPT and miss most of what's happening.
Being seen isn't the same as being asked
The platforms that look biggest by users aren't always the ones answering the most questions.
Google AI Mode is the clearest case. Google says it has passed 1 billion monthly users worldwide³, and India was one of its first two markets¹⁷, so about 200 million Indians use it in a month. But very few use it for everyday searching: in the US, only about 1 search in 300 goes to AI Mode¹⁸. In India that works out to roughly 6 million answers a day, around 1% of the total.
You don't have to choose between the two. AI Mode runs on the same Google index and Gemini models as AI Overviews, and Google now describes them as "one seamless Search experience"¹⁹. Work that earns AI Overview citations carries over.
The Gemini app tells the same story. About 229 million Indians use it every month²⁰, but it answers about 40 million questions a day, around 6% of the total. People have it on their phones; they still reach for Google search, and the AI Overview on top, when they want an answer.
The long tail: Meta AI, Claude, Perplexity and the rest
Together these serve about 6% of AI answers in India.
Meta AI is the one to watch. Meta says India is Meta AI's largest market²¹, and it sits inside WhatsApp, which most Indians already use. Meta doesn't say how much it is used there, so it may well be bigger than our 3%.
Claude is popular with developers, but it sends barely 1% of the clicks AI chatbots send to Indian websites¹³.
Perplexity has about 20 million monthly users in India²² ²³ and answers around 4 million questions a day²⁴, well under 1% of the total.
Grok, Copilot and DeepSeek each send under 2% of India's AI chatbot clicks¹³.
Even if every one of these is twice as big as we think, Google's AI surfaces and ChatGPT still serve more than 85% of AI answers in India.
Which AI engines should you track and optimise for in India?
Tracking and optimising are different decisions. Tracking is cheap, so track widely. Effort to change what an engine says about you should follow where the answers are.
Tier | Engines | Share of AI answers | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|
1. Prioritise | Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini app | About 80% | Start here. One stack: Google's index, rankings and Gemini models |
2. Add | ChatGPT | About 14%, and 77% of chatbot clicks | Needs its own work, because ChatGPT finds sources differently |
3. Monitor | Meta AI, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Copilot, DeepSeek | About 6% combined | Check brand mentions quarterly. Invest if one passes about 5% of answers |
For most Indian brands, that means:
Earn AI Overview visibiity and citations first. It's the biggest surface, and the same work helps in AI Mode and Gemini. How AI Overviews choose citations covers the mechanics.
Treat ChatGPT as its own engine. It finds and cites sources differently from Google, so ranking well in Google doesn't carry over. How ChatGPT surfaces brands explains the difference.
Don't let click data set your priorities. Clicks make ChatGPT look bigger than it is, because Google's AI clicks are counted as ordinary search traffic.
How we got to these numbers
Google doesn't publish India numbers for AI Overviews or AI Mode, so we built them from what Google, OpenAI and independent trackers do publish. We scaled Google's global user numbers to India's share of its audience, and checked that against how many of India's internet users search on Google every month. For daily answers, we combined India's daily Google searches with how often an AI Overview appears, and set that against ChatGPT's and the other apps' own usage. We pushed every input up and down, and AI Overviews came out first every time. Every source is in the footnotes below.
Sources
Business Standard, Jan 2026: IAMAI–Kantar, Internet in India 2025
TechCrunch, Jul 2026: Google's AI search is rapidly becoming the default (Similarweb data)
TechCrunch, Feb 2026: India has 100M weekly active ChatGPT users
TechCrunch, Jul 2025: ChatGPT users send 2.5 billion prompts a day
TechCrunch, Jul 2025: AI Overviews have 2B monthly users, AI Mode 100M in the US and India
Keywords Everywhere: Google AI Mode tracker (SparkToro data)
Business Standard, Jun 2026: Sensor Tower State of AI, India users
TechCrunch, Jul 2024: India is the largest market for Meta AI
TechCrunch, Aug 2026: Perplexity's free offer left it with millions more users in India
