AI-driven search changes visibility from “Did we rank?” to “Are we included, cited, summarized, or recommended in the answer?” That matters because customers may now form consideration sets inside an AI response before ever visiting a website. The central debate is whether brands can build a reliable, scalable view of their presence across prompts, platforms, competitors, and customer contexts.
Indian marketing has always thrived on speed and scale. Over the course of 2025, GenAI moved from novelty to necessity. And now we foresee agentic AI and quantum are set to gain momentum in 2026. Today, 51% of marketers plan to invest in agentic AI, a technology that will soon run parts of the workflow on its own across testing variants, optimizing journeys, and reallocating spend with human oversight. And just beyond that curve lies quantum computing, a technology that promises to make even today’s AI look slow.
Fifteen years ago, Jim Lecinski gave marketers a name for the decisive moment in every purchase: the Zero Moment of Truth — the instant a customer turns to a screen to research before they buy. That moment built modern search marketing.
