Author · Technical SEO · AI Search
Rohit Kunal
Technical SEO Specialist, researcher and founder of IndexCraft. 13+ years working across enterprise SEO, Core Web Vitals, analytics, AEO, GEO and AI-search visibility.
The short version
Rohit Kunal is a technical SEO specialist in Bengaluru and the founder of IndexCraft. He has 13+ years in enterprise SEO, and these days most of his time goes into AI search: how Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini decide which sources to cite.
He has published three research papers on SSRN covering zero-click behaviour, AI citation patterns, and what publishers get back from AI platforms.
About Rohit Kunal
Rohit Kunal is the Technical SEO Specialist & Founder at IndexCraft, where he writes about search engine optimisation, web performance, and AI-powered search. He has spent 13+ years working in SEO across enterprise cloud platforms, SaaS products, e-commerce brands, and digital agencies — and most of what he writes here comes directly from problems he has had to solve on the job.
For most of the last decade, Rohit has worked inside large organisations where SEO has to co-exist with product launches, engineering backlogs, and multiple stakeholders pulling in different directions. At a global enterprise technology company in Bengaluru, he spent over seven years on exactly that — keeping search strategy aligned with go-to-market plans, managing SEO through a major corporate acquisition, and building out AEO and GEO frameworks for cloud and virtualisation product lines. Before that, he ran a team of 10+ analysts at a digital agency, handling organic strategy across 100+ active client accounts at once.
Rohit's work tends to focus on the infrastructure that makes SEO actually hold up at scale: crawl architecture, JavaScript rendering, structured data, and page performance. At a pan-India e-commerce brand, he brought Core Web Vitals failures down from 68% to under 9% of indexed URLs in a single quarter — a CDN rollout, WebP image pipeline, and above-the-fold rendering fixes got it there. At a B2B SaaS platform, he grew organic traffic from under 5,000 to over 300,000 monthly sessions over 30 months.
More recently, Rohit has been writing about Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) — the work of getting content cited in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. His guides on these topics have been shared by practitioners across 40+ countries and picked up in several industry newsletters.
Areas of Expertise
Professional Experience
Technical SEO Specialist & Founder
Writes and publishes the long-form guides on IndexCraft — covering Core Web Vitals, GA4, GEO, AEO, AI search, and enterprise SEO. Also handles schema implementation, E-E-A-T, and making sure the site's own technical SEO is actually good.
SEO Manager
Ran SEO across 10+ global product teams at a large enterprise technology company, working closely with product and content on go-to-market timing and search strategy. When the company went through a major acquisition, he managed the SEO side of the consolidation — migrations, redirects, system unification. On the technical side, he built crawl and performance frameworks for cloud and virtualisation product lines, and in later years brought in AEO and GEO work to improve visibility in AI search results.
Earlier roles: SEO Team Leader, Senior SEO Analyst & Project Manager
Started in Patna managing a small SEO team, then moved through agency roles in Kolkata and Bengaluru. Highlights: led 10 analysts across 100+ active client accounts, fronted new business pitches for international retail and software clients, and more than doubled organic traffic for a B2B SaaS product.
Research & Academic Profiles
Rohit Kunal publishes research on search engines, Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), AI search, zero-click behaviour, and the changing role of citations and visibility in generative search. So far that adds up to three preprints on SSRN: how AI answers change clicks, which sources AI engines cite, and what publishers get back from AI platforms.
A structured review of evidence from January 2023 to September 2026 on how Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude change the way brands and publishers get found.
Which sources AI search engines actually cite, built only from published data covering 2024 to 2026.
What AI platforms take from publishers and what they send back: crawl-to-referral ratios, blocking and licensing deals, and the traffic AI referrals really deliver.