How people actually make decisions in 2026
Here's a simple thing worth sitting with. When someone wants to find a good digital marketing agency in Odisha, or a reliable B2B content writer, or an authentic Indian handloom brand — they don't start by typing into Google and clicking the first result. They ask around. They check communities. Increasingly, they ask an AI tool.
Google AI Overviews now handles 40–60% of informational queries before the user ever clicks a link. ChatGPT has grown from 400 million to 800 million weekly users in under a year. Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude are all fielding the same kind of "recommend me a good X" questions. These tools synthesise answers from multiple sources — and they heavily favour community discussions, third-party mentions, and structured, specific content over brand-owned marketing copy.
Reddit accounted for roughly 24% of all AI citations on Perplexity in January 2026. Domains with strong Quora and Reddit presence are around four times more likely to be cited by AI systems than those without it. This isn't speculation — it's measurable. And most Indian businesses have zero presence in these channels.
"If you are not the cited source in an AI answer, you are not the option. This is the zero-click reality — and it's already here."
— Artisan Creatives, The Zero-Click Reality
Two separate problems, one connected strategy
Forum Marketing and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) sound like different things. They're really two sides of the same problem: your brand's credibility in the places that aren't your own website.
Forum Marketing is building genuine presence in the communities where your buyers actually talk — Reddit threads, Quora answers, niche LinkedIn groups, industry-specific forums. Not spam. Not fake reviews. Real, useful participation from someone who actually knows the subject. When done right, it generates the kind of third-party credibility that Google and AI tools use as trust signals.
GEO — or Generative Engine Optimisation — is structuring your owned content so AI tools can extract, cite, and recommend it when a buyer asks a relevant question. It requires specific things: named authors, original data points, self-contained statements that an AI can quote, and schema markup that makes your content machine-readable. It's an extension of good SEO, but with a different target. You're optimising for an AI's retrieval system, not just a search ranking.
Both require the same underlying asset: content that is specific, authoritative, and clearly associated with a real entity — your brand, your people, your domain.
What we do
Forum presence and community participation
We identify the specific communities where your buyers research decisions in your category. Then we build a genuine presence there — answering questions helpfully, contributing original perspectives, referencing your brand or content only where it's directly relevant and genuinely useful. The goal is to be the voice in the room that people trust, not the brand that shows up to sell.
For Indian brands, this includes relevant Reddit communities (r/india, r/IndiaInvestments, r/startups, and category-specific ones), Quora topics, LinkedIn niche groups, and industry-specific communities where your specific buyers actually participate.
AI citation structure — GEO and AEO
We audit your existing content for AI extractability and restructure it for citation. That means turning vague paragraphs into specific, standalone claims with named sources. Adding FAQ sections with self-contained answers. Implementing structured data markup that tells AI tools exactly what your page is about and who wrote it. Writing new content with original data anchors — the kind of specific, quotable observations that AI systems preferentially surface.
This is not a separate content strategy from SEO. It sits alongside our SEO work and is included in the content we produce for the Atelier and client pages. Every piece of content we write is built to perform in traditional search and in AI answer systems.
Entity building — making your brand legible to AI
AI tools build a picture of your brand from multiple sources: your website, your LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Wikipedia, media mentions, and community discussions. Inconsistencies between those sources confuse the retrieval system and reduce citation frequency. We run an entity audit — checking how your brand is described across platforms, fixing inconsistencies, and building the cross-platform presence that AI tools need to confidently reference you.
This includes optimising your LinkedIn presence, ensuring your brand description is consistent across all directories and third-party platforms, and building the external mention footprint that AI systems read as a credibility signal.
Measuring AI visibility
Traditional analytics don't track AI mentions. Google Analytics can't tell you that ChatGPT cited your article 200 times last month. We set up manual monitoring — running your target queries through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews monthly, tracking citation frequency, and measuring how your brand is framed in those responses. This is a new discipline and the measurement tools are still catching up. We use the best available methods and are honest about what we can and can't track right now.
"Domains with strong community presence on Reddit and Quora are cited by AI systems at roughly four times the rate of those without it. Community isn't a nice-to-have anymore. It's an algorithm signal."
Why this matters more for Indian brands than most
Indian search volumes for many B2B and professional services queries are smaller than their Western equivalents. Ranking #1 in traditional search might mean 50 visits a month rather than 5,000. In that environment, AI citation matters proportionally more — because a single citation in a ChatGPT answer to a relevant question can reach an audience that the equivalent Google ranking never would.
Indian B2B buyers, in particular, are increasingly asking AI tools for vendor recommendations. A procurement manager shortlisting digital marketing agencies, a founder looking for a B2B content partner, a heritage brand owner researching how to take their business online — these are exactly the queries that GEO targets, and Indian businesses are almost uniformly absent from the AI answers to them.
That gap closes slowly and then fast. The brands that build AI visibility in 2026 will be significantly harder to displace in 2028. The ones that wait will find the gap has become structural.
How it connects to everything else we do
Forum Marketing and GEO aren't standalone activities. They extend the same content authority strategy that runs through our SEO, B2B Content, and Content Management work. The Human-in-the-Loop methodology — human-written, human-verified content with specific claims and named authors — is what makes content AI-citable in the first place. Automated, generic content gets summarised away. Specific, opinionated, human-signed content gets cited.
If you're already building content with us, GEO is an extension of that work. If you're starting from scratch, Forum and AI Marketing is increasingly where we'd suggest starting — because the compounding effect of community presence and AI citation starts early and accelerates over time.
Ask ChatGPT who's the best digital marketing agency in Odisha. Then ask us how we got there.
Forum Marketing and GEO are the most uncontested opportunity in Indian digital marketing right now. Almost nobody is doing it well. If you want to start, let's talk.