AI Search
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As search behaviour shifts from traditional queries to AI-led discovery, performance marketing agencies are rapidly adapting their strategies.
For AdLift, a performance marketing and SEO-focused agency acquired by Liqvd Asia last year, the shift toward generative search, AI-driven ad optimisation and SaaS platforms is shaping its next phase of growth.
In a conversation with Storyboard18, Prashant Puri, CEO and Co-founder of AdLift, spoke about the company’s journey from an SEO-focused agency to an AI-enabled marketing platform, the rise of generative engine optimisation (GEO), and how brands are navigating performance marketing across Google, Meta and Amazon.
Edited excerpts:
What led to the founding of AdLift?
Prior to starting AdLift, I spent about eight to nine years driving digital marketing teams in the US with companies like Yahoo, AT&T and eBay. One of the biggest challenges brands faced at the time was measuring a solid return on investment from SEO and organic growth.
Back then, Google commanded the lion’s share of ad dollars. Performance metrics were straightforward on paid channels. You had cost-per-click, customer acquisition cost, and revenue attribution, making it easy to calculate return on ad spend.
But brands struggled to apply the same level of data-driven measurement to SEO and organic growth.
That gap led us to build AdLift as a data-driven performance marketing engine, where the focus was not just on one channel but on driving revenue growth across multiple digital marketing verticals.
Today, a large portion of our clientele continues to be performance- and SEO-driven, with growing demand around AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation).
What kind of clients do you work with today?
Over the last 15–16 years, we have worked with a wide portfolio of clients across industries.
Globally, we have worked with companies like Walmart, Shopify and Airbnb, and startups such as SoFi, which was a startup when we began working with them but is now a publicly listed company.
In India, we work with several large brands across finance, insurance and consumer sectors. These include HDFC Bank, ICICI Lombard, ICICI Prudential, Care Insurance, as well as consumer brands like Titan, LG, Panasonic, Luminous and Max Life Insurance.
We’ve also worked with digital-first companies such as Zomato, OYO and Yatra.
So overall, it’s a fairly diverse mix of finance, D2C, travel and consumer brands.
AdLift was acquired last year. What was the thinking behind that move?
AdLift has been around for over 15 years and we’ve been consistently cash-flow positive. The company was growing at healthy numbers, around 40–60 percent year-on-year growth.
But as an entrepreneur, the question I kept asking was whether we could grow even faster, perhaps triple-digit growth.
That’s where the idea of partnerships came in.
The acquisition by Liqvd Asia allowed us to combine strengths. Liqvd has a strong creative and social media capability, including an AI studio, while AdLift has deep expertise in performance marketing, SEO, AEO and paid media.
From a brand’s perspective, a major challenge today is that they often have to work with multiple agencies for creative, performance and analytics.
By bringing these capabilities together, we are moving closer to becoming a more integrated digital marketing partner for brands.
What major trends are you seeing in performance marketing and organic search?
AI is transforming performance marketing in a big way.
The amount of data that AI can mine and analyse is dramatically improving the speed and efficiency of campaign optimisation.
For example, AI tools today allow marketers to create hundreds or even thousands of variations of an ad, adapting it across languages, geographies and audiences.
Five years ago, creating ads for multiple cities across different vernacular languages would require extensive brainstorming and creative production.
Today, AI can generate these variations in a matter of hours.
On the organic side, we are seeing a shift from traditional SEO toward AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation).
This shift is happening because consumer behaviour is moving from search to discovery.
In 2019, Google controlled about 94 percent of global search query market share. Bing took nearly a decade to reach about 2 percent.
But today, platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini collectively account for around 12–15 percent of discovery traffic, which is gradually reducing Google’s dominance.
Consumers are increasingly going to large language models to discover information, rather than relying solely on traditional search engines.
Are you building AI solutions for brands as part of this shift?
Yes, we’ve launched our own SaaS platform called Tesseract, which is an AI discovery platform.
Brands can input prompts relevant to their industry — for example, “top car insurance companies in India” or “best car insurance for a Maruti vehicle”.
The platform then tracks whether the brand or its competitors appear in responses generated by large language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity.
Essentially, it helps brands track their visibility across AI platforms.
We launched Tesseract about a year ago, soon after the acquisition, and it has become a significant new revenue stream.
Today, over 180 brands across India and the US are using the platform.
We’re proud to say it is a Make-in-India product that global brands are using to track AI visibility.
Are retail media networks such as Amazon taking a larger share of performance marketing budgets?
For D2C brands, performance marketing budgets are largely distributed across Google, Meta and Amazon.
The allocation often depends on the category and average order value.
Meta tends to perform better for higher average order value products, while Google works well for lower average order values.
If a brand sits somewhere in the middle, Amazon advertising often captures a significant share of the budget.
Google also continues to attract a large portion of brand advertising spend because of YouTube, which provides long-form video inventory that platforms like Meta or Amazon cannot fully replicate.
With privacy regulations tightening globally, how important will first-party data become?
First-party data strategies are already critical and will become even more important as privacy regulations evolve.
With cookie deprecation, Apple’s privacy changes and rising ad costs, brands are increasingly relying on owned data.
For many D2C brands, 25–40 percent of revenue now comes from owned channels, including email, SMS and loyalty programmes.
We’re also seeing increased focus on zero-party data, where customers voluntarily share information through tools like quizzes, surveys or preference forms.
This enables brands to deliver hyper-personalised marketing experiences while remaining compliant with privacy norms.
Are you partnering with AI companies such as OpenAI or Anthropic?
Yes, we are already partnering with several AI platforms.
Through the Tesseract platform, we have partnerships with ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and we are currently working on integrating Claude as well.
We believe this ecosystem will not become a winner-take-all model.
Most people already use two or more AI platforms, and in the next few years we may see users interacting with three or four different LLMs regularly.
That is why it’s important for brands to track visibility across the entire AI ecosystem.
Where do you see performance marketing agencies heading in the next five years?
Agencies will need to become extremely data-driven and tool-driven.
Efficiency will be the biggest priority.
Across companies globally, whether it’s Google, Meta or financial institutions like JPMorgan, leaders are asking the same question: How can we do more with less using AI?
AI will not necessarily eliminate jobs, but it will replace roles where people are not using AI tools effectively.
For marketing professionals, the ability to integrate AI into daily workflows will become essential.
How has business growth evolved over the past year?
Following the acquisition and the launch of Tesseract, we have seen a significant jump in new clients.
Over the last year, we have onboarded around 60–70 new brands for services, while about 150 brands have signed up for the Tesseract platform.
Historically, we would onboard around 20–30 clients in a typical year, so this represents roughly three times the usual growth.
Much of this growth is driven by the demand for AI-led SEO, AEO and GEO strategies.
What growth targets have you set for the coming financial year?
Looking ahead to FY27, we are targeting 35–40 percent growth in EBITDA and 70–80 percent growth in top-line revenue.
Are there plans to expand into other markets?
We already have strong operations in India and the United States, which keeps us quite busy.
There are discussions around expanding into Dubai and Singapore, but our immediate focus remains on strengthening our presence in our existing markets.
We are also participating in several international conferences this year, including two large AI-focused events in Miami and Las Vegas, where we will be speaking about AEO and AI-driven search optimisation.
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