India’s health brands are nearly invisible to AI — and they cannot see it happening

BENGALURU: 42.5 Average score out of 100 across 23 Indian health and nutrition brands — measured on how consistently AI engines name them in response to buyer-intent queries.
A growing share of buying decisions now begins not with a Google search, but with a question to an AI. A shopper opens ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews and asks, “which protein is best for muscle recovery?” The assistant replies with a confident shortlist of brands. If yours is named, you are in the running. If it is not, you were never in the conversation — and unlike a slipped Google ranking, you will never see the customer you lost.

To understand how Indian brands are faring on this new shelf, we measured 23 Indian health and nutrition brands across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews. Each brand was scored in 2026 on how consistently and prominently the three engines named it in response to broad, buyer-intent questions — the queries real shoppers type, rather than searches for a brand by name. The average came to 42.5 out of 100. As a category, Indian health brands are barely visible to the very tools their customers are coming to trust.

A CATEGORY BARELY ON THE SHELF

The spread tells the rest of the story. SuperYou (69), MuscleBlaze (67) and Fast&Up (65) led the field — yet even the leader cleared only 69, meaning no Indian brand has come close to owning AI discovery in this space. Below them, the scores fall away quickly: Nutrabay at 50, OZiva at 46, True Elements at 42, Avvatar at 40. Several well-known names sat surprisingly low — The Whole Truth at 39, Plix at 30, Big Muscles Nutrition at 30 — and the tail trails down to Open Secret at 22. For most of the questions a real buyer would ask, those brands simply did not appear.

The uncomfortable lesson for marketers: a strong product, a loyal following and even an award-winning content engine do not guarantee AI visibility. Being known is not the same as being recommended.

WHY THE GAP EXISTS

The reason is structural. For broad category questions, AI does not lean on a brand’s own website. It leans on third-party proof — independent reviews, “best of” round-ups, community discussions on Reddit and YouTube, and editorial coverage. The brands that ranked highest tended to be the ones already cited across those external sources; the brands that lost were, for the most part, talking only about themselves, on their own pages.

A second, quieter problem compounds it. Many brand websites are not technically readable by AI crawlers — thin or near-blank pages an assistant cannot parse. A site an AI cannot read is a site it cannot cite, and therefore cannot recommend.

A LOSS YOU CANNOT SEE

What makes this shift genuinely dangerous is its silence. In the Google era, a lost ranking was at least visible; you could see a competitor placed above you and respond. With AI, the loss is invisible. A buyer asks, a competitor is named, and you never appear — no impression to track, no click to miss, only growth that arrives slower than expected, for reasons no dashboard quite explains.

AI has quietly become a discovery channel as consequential as search once was. Most Indian brands — and the marketers who steward them — are not yet measuring it, let alone competing on it. The ones that recognise this first, and earn their place in the sources AI already trusts, will own the answer. The rest will keep wondering where their customers went.

NOTE: Akash Singh is the founder of Pallix, an AI visibility platform for Indian brands. The views expressed in this column are personal and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them.