Harinath Babu
I work on how search engines and AI systems decide which sources to trust and cite.
Eleven years in enterprise SEO. Six of them in healthcare, pharma and life sciences, alongside financial services. Programmes across the US, UK, EU and Japan.
I am Harinath Babu, an SEO and Generative Engine Optimization practitioner based in Hyderabad, India. My work covers how large language models select and cite sources, the technical infrastructure that decides whether an AI crawler can read a site at all, and enterprise search programmes in regulated industries where every published sentence passes through compliance review. I publish what I test, with the numbers included.
What I write about
- Generative Engine Optimization How AI systems choose their sources, what makes a page citable, and how to measure whether a brand appears in AI answers at all.
- AI Search Infrastructure llms.txt, robots.txt, structured data and page structure. The technical layer that decides what a machine can actually read.
- Enterprise and Technical SEO Multi market programmes, hreflang, migrations and search governance inside organisations with many stakeholders.
- GEO for Regulated Industries Healthcare, pharma, life sciences and financial services, where legal and medical review shape what can be published.
- AI Search Experiments Tests I run on my own sites, published with the method and the raw numbers so anyone can repeat them.
Latest writing
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How AI search engines choose which sources to cite
The signals that appear again and again in cited pages, and the ones that turn out not to matter. -
Producing GEO content inside medical review
What changes when every claim on a page needs a reference and a sign off before it can go live. -
What changed after I added llms.txt
Thirty days of crawler logs before and after, on a site small enough to read every line.
What I am working on now
Rebuilding this site as a static, zero JavaScript publication so I can measure how AI crawlers read it without a framework in the way. Running a ninety day study on brand mentions across four AI engines. Writing the first set of articles for each of the five topics above.
Background
I have spent eleven years on enterprise search, most of it on large sites where a single template change affects thousands of pages across several languages. Six of those years were in healthcare, pharma and life sciences, with earlier work in financial services. Both sectors share the same constraint: what gets published is decided by a review process, not by a marketer.
That constraint is what pulled me toward AI search. When a machine summarises your page and cites someone else, the reason is usually structural, and structure is something a regulated team can actually fix. More about my background.