‘LLM Visibility is no Longer Optional’: Boss Wallah CEO Sanju Pillai Weighs in on Growing AI Trends

Ask a friend where to find a good accountant, which laptop to buy, or how to start a small business, and there is a fair chance they will not open a search engine. They will ask an AI assistant. The answer they get will name a handful of brands, and everyone else will simply not exist in that moment.

That is the shift Sanju Pillai, CEO of Boss Wallah Media, has been urging brands to take seriously: “LLM visibility is paramount, and it is no longer optional. Every brand that ignores it is choosing to be invisible to a growing share of its customers. The businesses that treat this as a priority today will own the conversation tomorrow.”

The word that matters most in that statement is “choosing”. Invisibility in AI answers is rarely an accident. It is the default outcome for brands that have not decided to act.

The channel is small today and growing fast

It is easy to dismiss AI discovery because the raw numbers still look modest. A 2026 study from Conductor found that AI referral traffic makes up about 1.08% of all website traffic across the ten industries it analysed. But direction matters more than the starting point. A 13-month analysis reported by Search Engine Land found that AI referral traffic tripled between January and December 2025.

The people arriving from these answers are also unusually valuable. Seer Interactive’s figures put ChatGPT visitor conversion at 15.9%, against 1.76% for organic search. Methodologies differ, and you should treat any single number with care, but the pattern across studies is consistent: someone who has already been told your name by an AI assistant arrives with intent.

Traditional search lets a brand rank on page two and still collect some traffic. AI answers do not work that way. Research from Magenta Associates found that just five brands capture 80% of AI-generated recommendations in a given B2B category. Recommendations also carry weight as one analysis found that the AI’s top pick becomes the user’s top pick 74% of the time.

When the answer is a shortlist of three, being fourth is essentially the same as being absent.

Here is the uncomfortable part. Many brands already appear in AI answers and have no idea. A GoodFirms survey found that only 14% of respondents track AI and LLM citation visibility, even though 43% name AI optimisation as a core 2026 strategy. Intent is running well ahead of measurement.

Measurement is harder than it sounds, because AI visibility is unstable. AirOps research found that only 30% of brands stay consistently visible across AI answers from one session to the next. Visibility here is not a ranking you hold. It is a position you have to keep earning, which is exactly why it rewards the brands that start early.

👉Click here to see how Boss Wallah works with brands and what we can build for you

What actually drives visibility

The good news is that the signals are learnable, and they reward the fundamentals of good brand building.

Being talked about beats being linked to. An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found that brand mentions correlate with AI Overview visibility at 0.664, versus 0.218 for backlinks. The old SEO instinct to chase links is not enough. Models learn who matters from how often, and in what context, a brand is discussed.

Third-party voices carry more weight than your own site. Research cited by GoodFirms shows that brands are 6.5 times more likely to be cited in AI answers through third-party sources than through their own domains. Reviews, interviews, creator content, and press all count.

Video and creator presence matter. In the same Ahrefs work, YouTube mentions showed the strongest off-site correlation with AI visibility, at roughly 0.737. For a business, that is a direct argument for showing up where real people talk, teach, and recommend.

Structure and substance help. AirOps found that content with five to seven statistics earns a 20% higher AI citation likelihood, and another analysis found that 44.2% of LLM citations come from the first 30% of an article. Lead with the answer, back it with evidence, and be specific.

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Why this favours builders, not just marketers

At Boss Wallah, our work sits at the intersection of creators, production, and entrepreneurship, and that vantage point makes one thing clear. The brands that will be recommended by AI are the ones that have earned real presence in the world. Useful content, credible voices, honest customer stories, and a consistent point of view repeated across many places.

That is not a trick, and you can’t buy it overnight. It is a compounding asset. Every well-made video, every expert interview, every clear explainer becomes another data point that teaches a model who you are and when to mention you. This is why Pillai’s warning about the future carries weight. Brands that build this presence now will be the default answer later, while latecomers will have to displace them.

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The conversation is already happening

Every day, questions that used to lead to a search results page are being answered directly, with a short list of brands attached. Your customers are part of that conversation whether or not you are.

The only real choice is whether your brand is in it. As Sanju puts it, the businesses that treat this as a priority today will own the conversation tomorrow. The ones that wait will find that the shortlist has already been written.

Need Videos, Creators, or Regional Content for Your Brand?

Boss Wallah helps brands plan and execute video content at scale, without managing multiple vendors.

We work with companies to:

• Shoot large volumes of short-form videos using real creators and studio setups, suitable for social media, websites, campaigns, and launches
• Adapt the same videos for different languages, regions, and platforms, so one shoot works across India and global markets
• Launch products or campaigns through dozens or hundreds of creators, all managed, tracked, and reported in one system
• Support brands with ongoing content, launches, regional expansion, and performance-focused campaigns

Whether you need videos for a new launch, content for multiple markets, creator-led visibility, or a steady content pipeline, Boss Wallah acts as a single partner handling production, creators, and execution end-to-end.

👉Click here to see how Boss Wallah works with brands and what we can build for you