A customer in Pune who wants a physiotherapist used to type “physio near me” and scroll through ten blue links. Today they might ask Google, in Marathi, which clinic nearby treats sports injuries on Sundays, and get a written answer with a few sources underneath.
That is AI Mode, and in India it has grown fast. Google opened it as a Search Labs experiment in English in June 2025, added Hindi in September 2025, and in October 2025 added Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. In March 2026, Search Live, which lets people talk to AI Mode by voice, came to more Indian languages.
Alongside this, a small industry has appeared selling “AEO” and “GEO” (answer engine and generative engine optimisation). Some of it is useful. A lot of it is old SEO with a new name, and some of it is advice Google has explicitly said you don’t need.
So let’s start with what Google itself says.
What Google’s documentation says
Google has a page called AI features and your website, last updated on 10 December 2025 when we checked. The core message is short: there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimisation is needed beyond normal Search best practice.
The page lists what does matter:
- Let Google crawl you. Your robots.txt must allow it, and so must your CDN or hosting. That second part is easy to miss: firewalls and bot-protection settings on services like Cloudflare can block crawlers you never meant to block.
- Make pages easy to find through internal links.
- Keep the important content in text. A price list that only exists as a JPEG on Instagram can’t be quoted.
- Support text with good images and video where they help.
- Make sure structured data matches what is visible on the page.
- Keep your Business Profile and Merchant Center information up to date.
And what you don’t need:
- No new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup.
- No special schema.org structured data for AI features.
There is also a control most people don’t know about. Blocking Google-Extended in robots.txt limits whether your content is used for Gemini training and grounding in other Google products. It is not the switch for AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search, which use Googlebot like regular results. If you block Googlebot, you leave Search entirely.
About llms.txt
You will see agencies selling llms.txt files as the key to AI search. Google’s page says you don’t need AI text files to appear in its AI features.
We do publish an llms.txt on this site. It helps some AI tools and agents read the site quickly, and it costs nothing to maintain because it is generated from the same data as our pages. We don’t expect it to change how Google ranks us, and nobody should sell it to you as if it will.
What Google says about AI-written content
On 1 October 2026 Google updated its guidance on using generative AI content. It says it is critical to fact-check and review AI-generated content before publishing, and that this review covers titles, meta descriptions, structured data and image alt text, since those also appear in Search. Using AI to churn out many pages without adding value can fall under Google’s scaled content abuse policy.
For a small business, the practical reading: AI can help you draft, but a person who knows the business has to check every claim, every price and every line of metadata.
A checklist for Indian businesses
1. Answer the questions your customers actually ask. Look at your WhatsApp chats, your call notes and your Google Business Profile questions. “Do you open on Sundays?” “Is parking available?” “Do you do home visits in Whitefield?” Put those answers on the relevant page in plain sentences. AI answers are built from specific facts, and generic “we deliver excellence” copy has none.
2. Publish the facts that make you different. Your service area, your prices or price ranges, your timings, your turnaround, the brands you stock, the languages you speak. If a competitor’s page states these and yours doesn’t, the answer will lean on theirs.
3. Think about language. If your customers search in Hindi or Tamil, a page in that language is worth considering for your main service. Do it properly: a written translation reviewed by a native speaker, with its own URL, not a translate widget. Start with one page and see whether it gets impressions in Search Console.
4. Fix your Business Profile. Google’s AI features page tells you to keep Business Profile information current, and local answers draw on it. Hours, categories, service areas, photos and recent reviews all matter. Our guide to Google Business Profile basics for service businesses covers the setup.
5. Check your CDN and firewall settings. If you use Cloudflare or a similar service, look at the bot and AI crawler settings and make sure Googlebot is not challenged or blocked. Then use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console to confirm Google can fetch your key pages.
6. Keep structured data honest. If your LocalBusiness or Product markup says one thing and the page says another, fix the markup. Don’t add review stars you don’t show on the page.
7. Show who is behind the business. A real address, a named founder or team, clear contact details, and work you can point to. These help people trust the answer they’re given, and they’re part of what Google’s people-first content guidance asks for.
8. Measure the boring way. Search Console still shows impressions and clicks from Google Search. Track enquiries by source on your side. A UTM builder helps for campaigns you control.
What to ignore
- Promises of “guaranteed placement in AI Overviews”. Google says inclusion isn’t guaranteed.
- Pages rewritten into tiny chunks “for the AI”. Write for people. Clear headings and direct answers help both.
- Buying hundreds of AI-written location pages. That is the scaled content pattern Google warns against.
Where we fit
Our AI search optimisation work is mostly the checklist above, done carefully: crawl access, content that answers real questions, structured data that matches the page, and local signals. For businesses that depend on nearby customers, it pairs with local SEO.
AI Mode changes how answers look. It doesn’t change what earns them: specific, accurate, useful information that’s easy to find. Most small business websites still don’t have that, which is good news if you’re willing to write it.