Signalpoint · Research
We asked Google 44 real buying questions and recorded every brand its AI Overview named. A handful of brands are recommended relentlessly. Most are never mentioned at all — including some of the largest names in the country.
When someone searches for skincare or supplements now, Google increasingly answers the question itself — an AI Overview above the results, naming specific products. For a shopper that is convenient. For a brand it is a new shelf, and nobody has published who is on it.
So we measured it. 44 buying questions, run through Google in India, every named brand recorded. The findings are reproducible: search any question below and count for yourself.
Across 23 skincare questions, Minimalist was named in 19 of them — 83%. No other brand comes close, and 26 of the 44 skincare brands we tracked never appeared at all.
| Brand | Named in | Share | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Minimalist | 19/23 | 83% | |
| The Derma Co | 13/23 | 57% | |
| Plum | 10/23 | 43% | |
| The Ordinaryglobal | 5/23 | 22% | |
| Deconstruct | 4/23 | 17% | |
| Dr. Sheth's | 4/23 | 17% | |
| Dot & Key | 4/23 | 17% | |
| Simpleglobal | 3/23 | 13% | |
| Pilgrim | 2/23 | 9% | |
| Re'Equil | 2/23 | 9% | |
| Foxtale | 2/23 | 9% | |
| Cetaphilglobal | 2/23 | 9% |
MuscleBlaze led with 9 of 21 (43%). 18 of 35 tracked supplement brands were never named.
| Brand | Named in | Share | |
|---|---|---|---|
| MuscleBlaze | 9/21 | 43% | |
| Carbamide Forte | 6/21 | 29% | |
| Optimum Nutritionglobal | 5/21 | 24% | |
| Nakpro | 4/21 | 19% | |
| GNCglobal | 3/21 | 14% | |
| Wellbeing Nutrition | 3/21 | 14% | |
| AS-IT-IS Nutrition | 2/21 | 10% | |
| Fast&Up | 2/21 | 10% | |
| OZiva | 2/21 | 10% | |
| Dymatizeglobal | 2/21 | 10% | |
| Avvatar | 1/21 | 5% | |
| MyProteinglobal | 1/21 | 5% |
Every AI Overview cites its sources. The prevailing advice — sold by AEO and GEO agencies at ₹25,000 to ₹3,50,000 a month — is that you publish content, Google cites your site, and Google then recommends you.
We expected to confirm that. We could not.
| Brand | Own domain | Cited | Recommended in |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plum | plumgoodness.com | 12x | 10/23 |
| Deconstruct | thedeconstruct.in | 8x | 4/23 |
| The Derma Co | thedermaco.com | 5x | 13/23 |
| Pilgrim | discoverpilgrim.com | 4x | 2/23 |
| Wellbeing Nutrition | wellbeingnutrition.com | 9x | 3/21 |
| Nutrabay | nutrabay.com | 7x | 1/21 |
| HealthyHey | healthyhey.com | 5x | 0/21 |
Being cited as a source and being recommended as a product are close to independent. The most-recommended skincare brand in our scan had its own site cited once. One supplement brand was cited five times and recommended zero times.
What the numbers do support is narrower and, we think, more useful: a small number of brands are recommended relentlessly, most are never mentioned, and almost no brand in either category appears to know which group it is in.
| Domain | Citations |
|---|---|
| google.com | 39 |
| youtube.com | 21 |
| amazon.in | 15 |
| plumgoodness.comPlum's own site | 12 |
| thedeconstruct.inDeconstruct's own site | 8 |
| nykaa.com | 8 |
| reddit.com | 7 |
| flipkart.com | 6 |
| thedermaco.comThe Derma Co's own site | 5 |
| instagram.com | 4 |
| Domain | Citations |
|---|---|
| amazon.in | 37 |
| healthkart.com | 21 |
| 1mg.com | 15 |
| youtube.com | 15 |
| wellbeingnutrition.comWellbeing Nutrition's own site | 9 |
| nutrabay.comNutrabay's own site | 7 |
| instagram.com | 7 |
| reddit.com | 5 |
| guardian.in | 5 |
| healthyhey.comHealthyHey's own site | 5 |
We said you could check this yourself, so here is everything we asked. Run any of them through Google with India as your region and count the brands named in the answer at the top.
Everything behind this study, as plain CSV. No form, no email required.
signalpoint-aio-study-sep2026.csv — 125 rows: every question, every brand named, whether an AI Overview appeared, how many sources it cited.
signalpoint-aio-sources-sep2026.csv — 413 rows: every source URL Google cited, per question.
We will run your brand against every buying question in your category, show you exactly which competitors Google recommends instead of you, and give you the full archived answers so you can verify every line.
What we will not do is promise to fix it. We have not established what causes a recommendation, and anyone who tells you they have should be asked for their data.
₹15,000 · delivered in 72 hours · founding price, first 10 brands
Request your report