Aanchal Bhatia tests who AI search recommends
Aanchal Bhatia, founder of Rank In AI Overview, helps brands see whether AI search tools recommend them or their competitors. The conversation explains how testing actual searches, publishing original research and building site authority shape the business.
Test real customer questions across AI tools separately, and track the results over time rather than relying on a single check. Strong content also needs site authority, which takes time to build.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
I started as an SEO content writer, writing blogs and web pages for brands across healthcare, education, ecommerce and real estate. Around 2025 I noticed something odd. Pages I’d written were ranking well on Google, but when someone asked ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overview the same question, the brand often didn’t get mentioned at all. Nobody was measuring that properly, so I started Rank in AI Overview to do it.
What makes us different is that we test before we advise. Most agencies selling "AI SEO" hand over a checklist. We run the client’s actual searches through Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Grok, log who gets cited, and work from that. Our own site publishes only first-party research for the same reason. We’d rather show our test data than repeat what everyone else is saying.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
Our first customers came through referrals and partnerships with other marketing agencies. They needed SEO content and strategy done well and on time, and the work kept coming back because it ranked. Today new business comes from three places: – those partner agencies – direct outreach, where we run a free AI visibility audit showing a brand where it does and doesn’t appear in AI answers – press and content, where our own research gives people a reason to find us
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision was going first-party only. In October 2026 we stopped writing articles that summarise other people’s studies, and every piece now carries our own test data. That came from noticing that ChatGPT tends to cite original research, like HubSpot’s surveys, and almost never the blogs that summarise them. If we want to be cited, we have to be the source.
The mistake was assuming good writing would carry a brand-new website. A client blog I wrote for was hitting page 1 in about 10 days. Our own articles were stuck between #75 and #103, and Google ranked our blog index page above them. Same writer, same process. The difference was domain authority, 4 against 26, and two years of ranking history. It taught me that authority and backlinks have to be built alongside content, not after it.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
Two years ago clients asked, "Can you get us to page 1?" Now they ask, "Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitor and not me?" Ranking still matters, but it’s no longer the whole picture, because people get answers without clicking.
The harder part is that every AI engine behaves differently. In one of our studies, Grok reported reading up to 85 pages for a single answer but linked to none of them. For a "dermatologist in Bangalore" question, Perplexity and Grok each named a list of clinics with zero overlap. Even Google’s AI Overview showed us completely different sources for the same question on the same day, depending on how we checked. So we adapted by testing every engine separately and logging everything in a tracker by tool, date and method. We never report "you’re visible in AI" off a single check.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do first: run your own tests. Pick 20 or 30 real questions your customers would type, ask them in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, and write down who gets cited. That one spreadsheet will teach you more than any course. Then start building your site’s authority on day one, because good content on a brand-new domain waits a long time.
Ignore: anyone selling a guaranteed way to "rank in ChatGPT." The engines change too fast and disagree with each other too often for a fixed playbook to hold. Also ignore single screenshots as proof of AI visibility. One check is one moment, not a result.
Thank you to Aanchal Bhatia and the team at Rank In AI Overview for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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