Brands race to crack the AI discovery code

Financial Express frames the shift from search to conversation as a shelf-space problem: AI assistants recommend a handful of products where Google showed dozens, so a brand that misses the shortlist disappears. It reports ChatGPT at about 20% of Walmart's referral traffic and over 20% of Etsy's, per industry estimates cited in the article, and describes the startups doing for AI what SEO firms did for Google - us among them, spelt Trucommerce.

Our co-founder Umang Chhaparia is the company voice. His two on-record lines are about the blind spot: brands do not know who they are losing to when a competitor is the default recommendation, and they have less control over how AI describes them when it draws on reviews and third-party lists rather than the brand's own messaging. The article also carries, as reported speech, his ITC MasterChef example - top three recommendations across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity within two months of adopting our platform - and our figure that AI assistants account for around 10% of organic traffic for the brands we track, with AI referral traffic up 400-700% over the past year.

The piece lists several clients in its own words; we repeat here only the two already on our case-studies page, ITC MasterChef and Amazon. In print, the Bengaluru edition ran the story on the front page on 29 June 2026, continued on page 11.