Press · Mint
Amazon to Meesho race to crack LLM-powered shopping as AI reshapes ecommerce
Mint on India's marketplaces re-tooling for AI search - naming us (then Asva AI) among the startups brands turn to for it, eight months before ChatGPT Ads reached India.
What the piece covers
Mint reports Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Ajio and Meesho re-optimising their catalogues so assistants - not just shoppers - can read them, as buyers begin placing orders from ChatGPT and Claude without opening a marketplace app.
The framing is the one our whole thesis rests on: AI answers surface at most about three options, so the long tail of search results that still earned traffic on Google simply stops existing. As CUTS International's Sohom Banerjee put it in the piece, "If you are not in the answer, you do not exist for that user."
Mint names us directly - "Bengaluru-based Asva AI" - as one of three startups providing generative engine optimisation and LLM optimisation to brands, alongside Y Combinator-backed Siftly and Pune-based Consumable AI. A company mention rather than a quote, and under the pre-rebrand name.
The piece also documents the Indian quick-commerce move into agent surfaces: Zepto's MCP began as an internal experiment by one of its engineers, was published to GitHub and promoted by co-founder and CEO Aadit Palicha, while Tata-owned BigBasket let users shop and pay inside ChatGPT. NPCI piloted a ChatGPT-UPI integration with Razorpay.