Google has 96.6% of India's searches, and an SMB's SEO kit can start at ₹0

01In India, search means Google on a phone

StatCounter’s September 2026 figures put Google at 96.63% of searches in India. Bing had 1.92%, and no other engine reached 1%.¹ The same tracker put phones at 77.3% of web traffic in India that month, desktops at 22.1% and tablets at 0.6%.²

Two consequences follow for a small business. First, the only webmaster console that matters to begin with is Google’s. Second, the page Google judges is the phone version: a site that reads well on a laptop and badly on a 6-inch screen is being judged on the bad version, because that is what three in four Indian visitors see.

02The clicks sit at the top of the page

The original piece quoted a first-page share of clicks without a date. The best dated replacement we found is Backlinko’s analysis of about four million Google results, last updated on 16 April 2025: the first organic result gets 27.6% of clicks, the first three together get 54.4%, and the first result is ten times as likely to be clicked as the tenth.³

The arithmetic for a small site is unforgiving. Ranking on page two for a busy phrase earns less than ranking first for a narrow one. A Pune accounting firm will not reach the first three for “accounting software”, and does not need to: “GST return filing for Pune restaurants” has fewer searches and far fewer competitors, and the person typing it is ready to buy.

For a business that serves one city, the first three results are often not web pages at all but the map listings above them. Those come from Google Business Profile, which is free to claim and edit.¹³ A complete profile with the right category, opening hours, photographs and replies to reviews is the cheapest ranking work a clinic, a dealer or a training institute can do, and it is the one the original piece did not mention.

The original also told readers to build backlinks. The advice holds, with a caution it left out: Google’s spam policies name buying or selling links for ranking as link spam, and a site caught doing it can lose its rankings.¹⁴ For a small Indian business the links worth having are the ones that exist for a reason anyway: the trade association’s member list, a supplier’s dealer page, the local chamber of commerce, a client’s case study, a mention in the city paper. A handful of those is worth more than dozens of links from directories nobody reads, and they cost an afternoon of emails rather than a monthly fee.

03AI summaries now take a share of the click

Google added AI Overviews to Indian search in August 2024, in English and Hindi.⁵ The best independent measurement of their effect is American. Pew Research tracked the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025: 18% of their Google searches produced an AI summary. When one appeared, they clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits, against 15% when none did; they clicked a link inside the summary on 1%, and ended their browsing session on 26% of visits, against 16%.⁴

We would not transfer the US percentages to India one for one; nobody has published an Indian measurement we could cite. The direction is the useful part. A query a summary can answer in two lines, such as a definition, loses clicks. A query that needs a specific price, a local address, a comparison with numbers or a form to fill still sends the visitor on, because a summary cannot complete it.

You can watch this happen on your own site without buying anything. In Search Console’s performance report, compare impressions and clicks for each page over six months. A page whose impressions hold steady while its clicks fall is being shown and answered on the results page; that page needs something a summary cannot carry, or it needs to be retired in favour of one that does.⁶

04The kit: free to start, one paid tool when you study competitors

Everything needed to fix your own site is free. Google Search Console reports the queries that show your pages, the clicks, the average position, and the pages Google could not index or render on a phone.⁶ Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider crawls up to 500 URLs free, which covers most small-business sites; the paid licence is £199 a year on one part of its page and €245 on another.⁷ Ahrefs and Semrush both offer free tiers: Ahrefs’ for data on your own site, Semrush’s at ten reports a day.^{8 9}

What the paid tools add is other people’s data: which phrases a competitor ranks for, who links to them, how their traffic moved. That is worth a quarter’s subscription once your own site is sound, not before. In order:

1. Weeks one and two. Verify the site in Search Console, submit a sitemap, and fix every page it reports as not indexed or failing on mobile. Crawl the site with the free Screaming Frog tier and fix broken links and missing titles.
2. Weeks three to six. From Search Console’s query report, pick ten phrases where you already sit in positions 5 to 20. Rewrite those pages to answer the query outright, with prices and specifics.
3. Weeks seven to twelve. Buy one paid tool for one quarter, study three competitors, and write the pages they rank for and you do not. Cancel or keep it on the evidence.