MUMBAI: NeuGenM.AI today published the first AI (GEO/AEO) Performance Audit of India’s Top 100 brands and launched The NeuGenM Signal, a suite built to make brands visible in AI-driven discovery. The audit found that while 99.2% of these brands are cited when searched by exact name, only 12.4% surface when consumers ask AI engines for a recommendation within their category — and not one brand scored higher than a ‘C’ grade.
The finding points to a structural blind spot. Legacy brand equity still protects India’s leaders in direct, branded searches. But in the category-led discovery that increasingly happens inside tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude — where consumers ask for the best option rather than a brand by name — those same leaders are largely absent, ceding ground to nimbler, AI-optimized competitors at the exact moment purchase intent peaks.
“India’s biggest brands are optimized for consumers who already know they exist, and erased for everyone still deciding. Search rewarded the brand that owned the page. AI rewards the brand that becomes the answer. That shift is happening now — and right now the category race is wide open, because no one has won it yet,” said Beerajaah Sswain, Managing Partner and Chief Digital & E-commerce Officer at NeuGenM.AI.
The audit is built on NeuGenM’s proprietary Consumer State Signal Framework (NCS2M), which measures visibility the way consumers actually behave across discovery, research, and purchase, rather than by technical rankings alone. Because no Top 100 brand has yet cleared a strong grade, NeuGenM argues that the first movers who repair their AI blind spot now will train the models to cite them, building an “algorithmic moat” that becomes progressively harder and more expensive for competitors to breach.
The NeuGenM Signal addresses the gap through two capabilities. Signal GEO audits, repairs, and amplifies a brand’s presence across the AI knowledge layer, so it is cited, referenced, and recommended when its category is queried. Signal Ads — powered by a partnership with Thrad, an LLM ad-infrastructure and inventory network — places brands directly inside live AI conversations at the peak of purchase intent.
“For two decades, advertising chased attention across pages and feeds. The AI conversation is the first surface where a consumer states their intent out loud, at the very moment they’redeciding. Signal Ads lets a brand show up in that moment as a genuinely useful answer — which is exactly where the next decade of demand will be won or lost,” said Andrea Tortella, Co-Founder, CEO Thrad.
