For more than twenty years, being found online meant one thing: ranking on Google. That era is ending. Millions of people now skip the search box and ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok directly: Which CRM should my startup use? Which hospital in Chennai is best for knee surgery? Which skincare brand suits humid weather?
The AI does not return ten blue links. It gives one confident answer and names a handful of brands. Whether a business appears in that answer now depends on a new measure: AI Discoverability, how easily AI systems can find, understand, trust and recommend a brand. A business with strong AI Discoverability wins the customer's trust before they ever visit a website. A business without it is invisible, no matter how well it ranks on Google.
Blazly, founded and headquartered in Chennai, was built for this moment. As India's first brand dedicated to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), the practice that drives AI Discoverability, Blazly helps businesses in India and around the world get discovered, cited and recommended by AI.
Why AI Discoverability now decides who gets the sale
India is not following the shift to AI-led buying. It is leading it, which makes AI Discoverability an urgent priority for Indian brands.
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64% of Indian consumers use generative AI to guide brand and product decisions, among the highest rates in the world, according to Boston Consulting Group's Global Consumer Radar. AI use for shopping grew 35% between February and November 2025.
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Nearly 30% of Indian consumers now name AI chat tools as their number one channel for discovering products, and 86% say they are likely to let AI guide at least half of their spending decisions, according to Accenture's Consumer Pulse Survey 2026.
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92% of shoppers in India's top eight metros have already used AI while shopping, according to NielsenIQ's Agentic Commerce India 2026 study, conducted in August 2026.
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Globally, 6% of US consumers used AI to help with a shopping or purchase decision in the six months to April 2026, with ChatGPT the most-used tool, according to a survey by Semrush-owned Exploding Topics.
When AI becomes the first place customers discover products, AI Discoverability becomes the first thing a brand must get right. The next customer may never see a search results page. They will only see what the AI chooses to recommend.
A small Chennai team building AI Discoverability for the world
Blazly did not start in a glass tower in Bengaluru or a garage in California. It started with a small, bootstrapped team in Chennai and one stubborn question: why should only companies with 100-person marketing teams be discoverable on Google and in AI answers?
The team first spent more than a year teaching AI to do the work of an SEO strategist, a copywriter and a webmaster in one platform. Then they watched their customers' traffic begin to move from search results to AI chat answers, and saw that AI Discoverability would soon matter more than rankings. The global tools available were expensive, built for large enterprises and designed for the old world of keywords. Small and mid-sized businesses had no way to know whether AI was recommending them, and no way to fix it.
So the team rebuilt Blazly around AI Discoverability. With no outside funding, they built a world-class SaaS product from Chennai that now competes with tools from Silicon Valley. In under a year, Blazly has:
- Launched on Product Hunt in January 2026 and returned with a major release in June 2026
- Joined the HubSpot App Marketplace, with listings in Japanese, Chinese, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and more
- Released a WordPress plugin that brings AI Discoverability tools to one of the world's most widely used website platforms
- Earned users and reviews on global platforms including Capterra, GetApp, Trustpilot and AppSumo
- Won 10,000+ customers all over the world
The platform is designed, built and supported from Chennai, for customers ranging from a local brand next door to an agency on the other side of the world.
The founders
Kadambari Umapathy, Co-founder. Kadambari brings more than ten years of experience in entrepreneurship and leadership, and is an alumna of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. A non-tech founder by background, she taught herself AI, digital marketing, search and AI Discoverability from the ground up. That journey shapes every Blazly product: each one is built for the business owner who wants to be found by AI without having to learn a new technical language. Kadambari leads Blazly's business strategy, international clients and global partnerships.
Jerryton Surya, Co-founder. Jerryton is the young technologist behind Blazly's platform, a builder who creates products. He set out to give small businesses the same search and AI visibility that only large marketing teams could afford, and turned that idea into a complete AI Discoverability, GEO and SEO automation suite. Jerryton leads product and technology, and is known among Blazly's global users for personally running product demos and supporting customers himself.
In their words
Your customer is asking ChatGPT now, not Google. If the AI does not know you, it will not recommend you. AI Discoverability is the new front door of every business, and we built Blazly so that no brand, in India or anywhere else, is locked out of it," said Kadambari Umapathy, Co-founder, Blazly.
People told us a product like this gets built in San Francisco. We built it in Chennai, and today businesses across continents use it to improve their AI Discoverability. That is proof that world-class SaaS can come from anywhere in India," said Jerryton Surya, Co-founder, Blazly.
About Blazly
Blazly is an AI Discoverability and Generative Engine Optimization platform headquartered in Chennai, India. It helps brands get found, cited and recommended across AI answer platforms including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok. Founded by Kadambari Umapathy and Jerryton Surya, the bootstrapped company serves businesses and agencies worldwide. Learn more at blazly.ai.
