INSIDE INDIAMART'S FIGHT FOR AI VISIBILITY

Sidelined by bots in the age of AI search, IndiaMART is fighting a legal battle to be discoverable online

- Sakshi Sadashiv [e-mail]

IndiaMART founder Dinesh Agarwal.

Adeem Bari Husain, a frail, wrinkly man, sits leisurely at his home in Seelampur, Delhi, as he slowly types "PVC pipe sellers in Delhi IndiaMART" into his son's laptop. It's a simple query, the kind he has relied on for years, scrolling through listings, calling numbers and shortlisting suppliers the old way.

His 26-year-old son had recently urged him to try ChatGPT, the popular generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.

"Just type it like a Google search," he told his aging father. "You won't have to scroll for hours. You'll get three-four options; pick one," he said.

The results came back quickly. Neat, confident, helpful. Each with a direct link, not to IndiaMART, but straight to the seller's own website. IndiaMART, the platform that had listed them, aggregated them and made them discoverable, was nowhere in the response.

Husain closed the laptop and made his calls. A new ritual, faster than before. No reason to think about what sat behind the answer.

A few hundred kilometres away, in a small industrial unit in Surat, Manoj Shah has been on IndiaMART for six years selling industrial textile machinery. He has never built a website. He never needed to. His IndiaMART listing was his storefront, and his only presence on the internet.

Lately, business has been quieter. "I have not changed my listing," he said. "Earlier I used to get four-five calls a day. Now I get one or two."

He cannot explain why. He has not heard of ChatGPT. He does not know what an AI agent is.

Several other small manufacturers and traders Mint spoke to said the same—inquiries have thinned, with no explanation about what has changed. IndiaMART has been their entire digital existence. But somewhere between a buyer's question and an AI agent's answer, their phones have begun to ring less often.