Aanchal Bhatia is the founder of Rank in AI Overview, a small India-based team that studies how brands get cited in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and other AI answer engines. She writes SEO content for clients across healthcare, education, ecommerce and real estate, and that work led her straight into the question every client now asks: why does a page rank on Google but never show up in the AI answer above it? The team is three people. Aanchal runs research and content, one partner handles SEO and another handles the technical side. They publish their own data instead of recycling other people’s studies, including a 90-day look at their GA4 traffic where visitors from AI assistants stayed 9.4 times longer than Google organic visitors. The aim is simple: help small businesses get named in AI answers without an enterprise budget.
Company: Rank In AI Overview
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Aanchal Bhatia: I’m Aanchal Bhatia, founder of Rank in AI Overview. We’re a team of three based in India. I handle the research and the writing, one of us does SEO, and one of us does all the technical work.
The whole thing came out of my client work. I write SEO content for businesses in healthcare, education, ecommerce, real estate, and the same question kept coming up. A page would rank fine on Google, and then the AI answer sitting right on top of the results would name someone else. Nobody could tell them why.
So that’s what we work on now. We help businesses get mentioned in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and the other AI tools people actually ask questions in. We also try to publish our own numbers instead of quoting the same three studies everyone else does. We tracked our own site’s traffic for 90 days, and people who came in from AI assistants stayed around 93 seconds. Google organic visitors stayed under 10. That gap is a big part of why I think this matters for small businesses, not just big brands.
What was the moment you realized that complexity was holding your company back, and how did that shift your approach to product, operations, or strategy?
Aanchal Bhatia: Honestly it was when I looked at our own blog properly. We had dozens of articles, and almost all of them summarised someone else’s research. They were well written and well sourced, and they were pretty much invisible. Then I ran a small test on six topics where we rank well on Google. We got cited by AI zero times out of six. The one time ChatGPT did pick us up, it was for a page with one specific number in it, and it cited us right next to Semrush.
That changed how I think about all of it. AI tools don’t reward the most thorough page. They lift one clear sentence with a fact in it. So we stopped trying to cover everything and started asking one question of every page: what’s the one line here worth quoting?
Can you share one specific example of something you simplified (a product feature, process, pricing model, or customer experience) that delivered outsized results?
Aanchal Bhatia: Our blog had a lot of posts saying nearly the same thing in slightly different words. I think every content team does this without noticing. Google couldn’t tell which one to show, so mostly it showed none of them.
We grouped the overlapping posts, picked the strongest one in each group, moved anything useful from the weaker ones into it, and redirected the rest. That came to 16 posts merged into their best versions. It felt like deleting our own work, but now each topic has one page that clearly owns it instead of four pages splitting the credit.
The bigger result came from the “one hard number” lesson. We’re a tiny site, and the only time ChatGPT cited us, we sat next to Semrush. That came from one stat, not from more content.
How do you systematically identify and eliminate complexity across the organization without oversimplifying in ways that hurt quality or value?
Aanchal Bhatia: Two things. First, a checklist that lives in code, not in someone’s head. One of our team member, who handles all our tech, built a script that checks every draft against our writing rules before it goes live. Nobody has to remember fifteen rules, the script remembers them.
Second, we made one hard rule: research pages only use our own data. That cut a huge amount of work, because we stopped chasing every new study someone else put out.
Where I’m careful is caveats. Simple doesn’t mean leaving out the awkward bits. If a test only covered six topics, I say six, up front, before someone else points it out. Cut the padding, keep the honesty.
What’s the biggest resistance you’ve faced when pushing for radical simplicity, and how did you overcome it?
Aanchal Bhatia: Mostly it came from us. In SEO the instinct is always more: more pages, more keywords, longer guides. Merging posts and redirecting them felt like throwing away hours of work, and there’s a real fear that you lose traffic when you cut.
What got us past it was looking at the actual numbers instead of the feeling. The duplicate pages weren’t bringing in anything worth protecting. Once we saw that the extra pages were splitting attention rather than adding to it, cutting stopped feeling risky. We moved the good bits into the winning post first, so nothing useful was lost, only the repetition.
For other CEOs who struggle with feature bloat, process overload, or confusing customer journeys, what’s the most important principle or first step you would recommend they take?
Aanchal Bhatia: Ask your own question the way your customer would. Literally type it into ChatGPT or Google and see whose name comes back. Not a keyword, the actual messy question a real person asks.
If it’s not you, don’t make another page. Open the page you already have and find the one sentence that answers that question with something specific, a number, a price, a timeline. If that sentence doesn’t exist, write it. Most of the time the fix isn’t adding more, it’s making the one thing you already say clear enough that someone can repeat it.
