How AI assistants are reshaping brand discovery for consumers

New Delhi: Pulp Strategy has released ‘The GEO Benchmark Index 2025’, a study examining how major AI assistants influence brand visibility, accuracy, and recall across categories. Powered by the company’s proprietary Neurorank system, the report analyses 70 visibility audits covering more than 350 brands, 408,000 prompt simulations, and insights from over 60 CMOs.

According to the agency, the findings point to a widening gap between what brands communicate and what AI models present to users. The study reports that 68 per cent of brands do not appear in category-level AI responses, while more than half encounter factual inaccuracies. It further notes that a large majority of consumer brands see skewed negative sentiment and inconsistent naming across models.

“AI assistants via AI search are now the gatekeepers of demand,” said Ambika Sharma, Founder and Chief Strategist at Pulp Strategy.

“If a brand is missing from AI-generated answers, it is missing from the customer’s world entirely. Its taken us 4+ months and over a 100 conversations with CMO’s leaders across industries to capture nuances and insights coded here. Our biggest learning was that Neurorank is a powerful system which is built for impact in a Ai search world with foggy visibility.”

The report suggests that the shift towards AI-driven discovery is already affecting how consumers and enterprise buyers shortlist vendors, evaluate information, and interpret credibility. It references external data pointing to a sharp rise in traffic from generative platforms to retail sites, accompanied by higher purchase intent.

The GEO Benchmark Index 2025 examines how assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity recall and represent brands across sectors including BFSI, retail, technology, energy, and media.

The research process combined anonymised brand audits, large-scale prompt simulations, senior leadership interviews, and external validation to build a comparative map of how AI engines process trust signals and identify brand relevance.

Structural gaps highlighted in the study include brand invisibility on fundamental prompts, fabrication of capabilities, negative summarisation patterns, and inconsistencies in naming or recognition. According to the report, these issues are often linked to unstructured content, outdated formats, and weak machine-readable signals, rather than performance in the market.

“AI assistants are rewriting how markets understand brands,” Sharma said. “This research shows the reality inside the models, and most brands will not like what they find.”

The report outlines a 30–90 day framework for organisations to improve factual accuracy, reduce hallucinations, strengthen AI-recognised content, and create more consistent cross-model presence. Pulp Strategy has made the full study available on its website and on Neurorank.ai.