Every day a competitor gets cited by AI and you don’t, you are losing millions in revenue. That is the message from Mr. Sanditya Srivastava, founder of Mumbai-based Unveilr AI, an AI-native agency built by IITians and SEO experts that gets brands recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Grok. A fully managed solution, Unveilr AI handles the entire SEO and AEO suite end to end so clients stay focused on their growth.
VC-backed within a month of launch, it has grown every month since with zero customer churn, serving everyone from Shark Tank-funded startups to big enterprises, in India and globally, from Dubai to South Africa and expanding. We spoke with Mr. Srivastava about why AI search has become the new battleground for brands, and how companies are turning AI visibility into qualified leads. Excerpts:
“We are moving from a click economy to a recommendation economy. Brands no longer compete for rankings. They compete for trust inside AI, and right now most brands don’t know whether AI recommends them or their competitor.”
-
–Mr. Sanditya Srivastava, Founder, Unveilr AI
You call AI recommendations the new marketing battleground. Isn’t Google still where buyers are?
For two decades, digital marketing had one playbook: fight for Google’s page-one rankings, measure success in clicks. For most small and mid-sized brands, that fight was rigged from the start. Industry leaders with decade-old domains and massive budgets locked up page one, everyone else could only hope for visibility. That world is ending, and it’s ending fastest in India. India is now ChatGPT’s second-largest market, with over 100 million weekly active users. Consumers and B2B decision-makers alike now begin product research inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Grok, and instead of ten blue links they get a direct recommendation naming just two or three brands. If yours isn’t one of them, the buyer never finds out you exist.
Many brands have spent years building strong Google rankings. Doesn’t that protect them?
That’s the uncomfortable part: it doesn’t. Even classic Google search has turned AI-first. In verticals like healthcare, Google’s AI Overviews now appear on 88% of queries, and on nearly 100% of treatment and procedure searches. That answer sits above every organic result you fought years to earn, which is why click-through rates for Google’s top positions have collapsed to nearly half of what they were just a couple of years ago. On queries where an AI answer appears, even the #1-ranked page loses 58% of its clicks. And holding rank one doesn’t mean AI knows you exist. In our audits, roughly 80% of brands ranking #1 on Google didn’t even show up in the AI answer for the same queries. Every one of those answers naming a competitor is a qualified buyer redirected before your website ever sees the visit.
So what exactly does Unveilr do?
We do not optimize for just rankings, we optimize for AI recommendations that generate qualified pipeline. Our proprietary AI agents and monitoring stack track a brand’s citations across every major AI engine, work out why the models aren’t recommending it, fix those trust signals, and keep the brand recommended as the engines evolve.
“We help brands get qualified leads by optimizing not just for Google, but for ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Grok. And unlike traditional SEO, results don’t take months, our clients have seen AI visibility move in as fast as three weeks.”
-
–Mr. Sanditya Srivastava, Founder & CEO, Unveilr AI
What kind of results are we talking about?
B2C: A water-purifier startup with a very small team went from 3.3% ChatGPT visibility to 44.7% in 3 weeks, taking the top recommended spot in its category and beating industry giants that have dominated Google for years.
B2B: A giant legal services enterprise with a big in-house SEO team saw an 80% increase in ChatGPT visibility within 30 days, a 2.5x lift in qualified inbound leads, and a 2.7x jump in impressions. And these prospects convert better.
Because AI has already compared and shortlisted the options, they arrive pre-qualified, in our engagements they have converted up to 5x better than traditional search traffic.
A founder might say: my SEO is good, but my inbound leads are dropping. What’s going on?
The channel producing those leads has quietly become AI-mediated. An AI answer now sits on top of most commercial searches and absorbs the clicks that used to reach your site: same buyers, same searches, but an AI decides which brands get named before anyone scrolls. If it isn’t naming you, your funnel shrinks even while your rankings hold. Optimizing for AI recommendations isn’t a bet on a new channel, it’s protecting the qualified leads your existing channels already produce.
Why would ChatGPT recommend a competitor over a brand that’s objectively better?
Because AI models don’t read your website the way Google’s algorithm did. They synthesize structured data, entity recognition, third-party mentions, and reviews, signals most brands have never deliberately optimized. Your competitor isn’t necessarily better, they are more legible to the model. The good news is that models re-evaluate their sources continuously, so engineering those trust signals moves visibility in weeks, not the months SEO takes.
B2B founders often say their buyers don’t use ChatGPT to find vendors.
They already do,you just probably don’t know it yet. Procurement teams and founders use AI to build shortlists, compare vendors, and sanity-check pricing weeks before any sales conversation. Our B2B legal client saw that 2.5x lead lift precisely because the AI research phase is where the shortlist gets made. If you’re absent, you’re not losing the deal. You were never in it.
What about businesses that run on referrals and word-of-mouth?
In the Google era, referrals had to be your major source, because smaller brands had no realistic shot at rank one. AI search resets that equation: the top recommendation slot is winnable again, and we have put smaller, newer brands there, including a Shark Tank-funded brand now recommended ahead of category leaders. And referrals leak without AI visibility. Every referred buyer verifies you before signing, asking ChatGPT “is this company good?” or “best alternatives to this company”. If AI can’t confirm your reputation, or names a competitor as the better option, the referral dies quietly. We make sure word-of-mouth survives the verification step.
Can’t an in-house SEO team handle this?
Ask them for your ChatGPT visibility score. Most can’t produce one, because SEO tooling measures Google rankings, not AI citations. We know AI search optimization requires more than traditional SEO knowledge. That’s exactly why our team combines IITians and SEO experts, engineering the trust signals AI models read on top of the fundamentals your team already knows. You must have already seen how much the responses change by these AI engines on every new update, keeping the content up to date is also a challenge. Test it yourself: ask ChatGPT for the best providers in your category and see who it names.
How do clients measure ROI?
On two levels, both concrete. Visibility: we track your brand across every major AI engine, prompt by prompt, showing which buying queries you appear in, at what position, against which competitors, before and after. Also Google traffic improvements in terms of clicks and impressions. Revenue: qualified leads from optimization, the number we are accountable for. And movement is fast, because AI models re-evaluate their sources continuously, trust fixes show up in visibility scans within weeks, not quarters. Clients see the same scoreboard we do.
What makes Unveilr different from AEO tools and content agencies?
Tools give you a dashboard of problems and leave the solving to you. Content factories spam low-quality articles that AI models increasingly ignore. We are outcome-driven: our proprietary “Brand Memory” architecture builds a living model of your business, our AI agents fix the technical trust signals models read, and we build authoritative third-party mentions and the answer-shaped content AI actually cites. Our success metric is the client’s: qualified leads, not vanity visibility scores.
To learn more, visit unveilrai.com.
