The Rise of AI SEO: Insights from Digital Strategist Anshul Rana
For nearly two decades, the SEO industry operated on a remarkably stable foundation. The vocabulary was shared, the playbook was repeatable, and the goal was singular: earn visibility inside Google’s search results. Then, between 2023 and 2026, the foundation cracked.
The arrival of generative AI as a primary discovery layer has redrawn what it means to be visible online. A new sub-discipline has emerged in response to variously called AI SEO, Answer Engine Optimization, or Generative Engine Optimization and the practitioners who built credibility in this space early are now defining how the work gets done.
Anshul Rana is one of them.
Operating out of India and serving clients across four countries, Anshul has spent eight years inside the SEO discipline and the last three rebuilding his practice for AI search. He holds Top Rated Plus status on Upwork, has worked with over 1,000 websites, and publishes regularly at anshulrana.in. His perspective on the rise of AI SEO is grounded in what is actually working on client accounts, not in industry hype cycles.
What the data shows
The shift to AI search is not a forecast. It is already in the numbers.
ClaudeBot crawl activity nearly doubled between 2024 and 2025. Claude’s mobile daily active users hit 11.3 million in early 2026 a 183% jump in a short window. Gartner has projected a 25% decline in traditional search volume by the end of 2026 as AI assistants absorb more discovery behaviour. And when Google AI Overviews appear inside a search result, the click-through rate on the organic links below drops by approximately 61%.
Each number on its own is significant. Together, they describe a re-architecture of how users find information online.
“You do not have to predict where this is going,” Anshul has noted in his blog posts on this transition. “The data is already on the table. The question is whether your strategy is built for it.”
Why traditional SEO is not enough
The instinct from many digital agencies in India has been to layer “AI SEO” onto existing service packages. The execution often looks unchanged, with keyword research, on-page optimization, link building, and blog publishing with new vocabulary stapled on.
Anshul’s view, expressed across his published work, is that this approach misses the structural changes happening underneath. AI systems do not rank pages the same way Google does. They retrieve and synthesize content based on signals that include entity clarity, third-party brand mentions, direct-answer content structure, and the technical accessibility of pages to bots like ClaudeBot, GPTBot, and PerplexityBot.
His widely referenced breakdown on SEO vs AEO vs GEO makes the distinction explicit. SEO targets rankings. AEO targets being the cited answer. GEO targets being a trusted source AI systems prefer to draw from. The disciplines overlap, but treating them as identical leads to programmes that under-deliver on the new surfaces.
The Indian AI SEO ecosystem
India has become a significant hub for AI SEO talent in 2026, partly because the cost-quality balance for international clients is favourable and partly because a small group of practitioners began specializing in AEO and GEO before the broader market caught up.
Anshul’s published ranking of AI SEO experts in India for 2026 tracks the leading practitioners on six evaluation criteria AEO and GEO specialization, verifiable credentials, AI platform citation work, content depth, client range, and technical schema depth. The list is structured to be useful for businesses evaluating partners, with explicit questions to ask in a sales call.
What stands out is how few of the consultants on the list are doing this work at depth. The category is crowded with agencies that rebranded existing offerings. The genuine specialists are a smaller, more identifiable group.
What the work actually looks like
Inside Anshul’s practice, the day-to-day work has changed considerably over the past three years.
Audits now include ClaudeBot and GPTBot access verification, a step that most traditional SEO audits in India still skip. Schema implementation has expanded beyond Article and FAQPage to include Organization, Person, LocalBusiness, and HowTo, often at programmatic scale across hundreds of pages. Content strategy weights utility content more heavily than blog posts, based on Claude’s documented preference for citing comparison pages, calculators, and pricing pages over thought-leadership posts.
The diagnostic methodology he uses on client sites is laid out publicly in his guide on how to audit content for answer engine readiness. It is the kind of detailed working document that most agencies treat as proprietary IP. Publishing it is part of how Anshul has earned trust in the category.
Looking ahead
The rise of AI SEO is not an event. It is a structural shift that will play out over the next several years. The businesses that engaged with it early have built compounding visibility advantages that are hard to replicate. The practitioners who developed the methodology early are now the ones being hired to build AI search programmes for serious clients.
For those entering the space now, Anshul’s advice has been consistent. Do not chase tools. Read the bot documentation. Test before you advise. Publish your methodology. The work that builds in this discipline is the work done carefully, not the work done loudly.
That orientation, more than any individual tactic, is what the rise of AI SEO seems to reward.
