AI search statistics for India, 2026

How often AI names a company for its own category

• 70% of 1,441 companies (1,081 in India) were not named in any Perplexity answer to the plain buyer question for their own category. 12% were named behind others and 17% at or near the top. (Venoh AI, October 2026, by industry.)
• 91% of marketing and advertising agencies were not named, the highest share of any industry; 57% of real estate and construction companies, the lowest.
• 74% of 835 companies were not named in an earlier cut of the same test. (Venoh AI, October 2026.)

Which sources AI cites instead

• 14.6% of AI answers to 1,048 buyer questions about 365 companies cited the company itself: 19.5% on Perplexity, 12.8% on Claude with web search. (Venoh AI, September 2026.)
• In answers that left the company out, the most-cited sites were learn.g2.com, zapier.com, f6s.com, forbes.com, monday.com and blog.hubspot.com. (Same study.)

How AI-ready B2B websites are

• Of 103 audited B2B sites, 49.5% declared no schema.org structured data at all and only 18.4% declared FAQPage markup. (Venoh AI, September 2026.)
• Companies' own sites were cited in 5.5% of 311 AI answers about their own category, and 89 of 101 companies were never cited. (Same study.)
• We also checked 469 B2B websites for structured data, FAQ content, sitemaps and llms.txt, and how those relate to being cited.

How buyers ask

• Asked in buyers' own words ("how to track if chatgpt recommends my software"), AI named tracking tools far more often than agencies; asked for "an agency", it named agencies. The words of the question decide who is named. (Venoh AI, 40 buyer questions on Perplexity, November 2026.)
• Asked for "affordable GEO services for Indian startups", AI engines often read GEO as geospatial and recommended mapping companies. (Venoh AI, October 2026.)
• 29% of 1,169 B2B decision-makers said they start research on platforms like ChatGPT more often than on Google, and nearly 8 in 10 said AI search had changed how they research. (G2, April 2025.)
• 46% of more than 70 B2B CMOs named unclear KPIs as their top challenge in moving from SEO to AI search. (Modus B2B CMO Pulse 2025.)

About these numbers

Venoh AI's figures come from tests run through each AI engine's API with live web search, read by software and dated. AI answers change from run to run, so each figure is a snapshot of when it was taken. Independent figures link to their source. To quote a number, link to this page or the study it comes from.