Sandeep Amar

I help brands grow their audiences on native and social platforms, using organic growth strategies across search (Google and LLMs), social (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram), and digital PR. As founder of PDLab, we have developed this expertise. The key ingredients are a working understanding of platform algorithms, strategic alignment to the algos, technology changes, quality content creation and placement. Over the last 20 years, my work has brought more than 275 million new users to 75+ websites and apps.

I also work as a Senior Consultant to McKinsey & Company on digital growth. Through PDLab, I have helped brands turn around their digital businesses with multi-fold audience and revenue growth.

I write, speak, and teach on SEO, AEO, GEO, and the future of search.

Earlier in my career, I led the e-business at Citigroup, was CMO at Times Internet, and CEO of Indian Express Digital and Zee Digital. MBA from FMS, Delhi. Graduate Fellow (Class of 2025), Leadership Institute of Virginia Tech.

Posts by Sandeep Amar

Each new vertical experience in ChatGPT creates a distinct AEO surface with its own eligibility criteria

Most AEO strategies treat ChatGPT as a single surface. Content either shows up in ChatGPT responses or it does not. That view is already outdated. OpenAI is building…
June 1, 2026
Google’s AI Optimization Guide Is Not the AEO Bible. It’s a Press Release!

For two decades, when Google published guidance on Search, the SEO industry treated it as the word of God. That instinct was earned. Google ran the search market,…
May 19, 2026
Where to place canonicals, meta tags and structured data in your HTML, and why order matters

Critical SEO elements must sit early in the HTML document, because Googlebot fetches only the first 2MB of a page. HTML is read top to bottom. Most developers…
May 15, 2026
Why stateless crawling means cookies cannot be a prerequisite for content

If your content requires a session or cookie state to render, Google may not see it. A lot of modern sites assume the visitor arrives carrying state. A…
May 12, 2026
Why Server-Side Rendering Still Matters for SEO in a JavaScript-Heavy Web

There’s a question that keeps surfacing in SEO and development circles: does Google actually need you to server-side render your pages, or can it handle JavaScript just fine…
May 11, 2026

Posts by Sandeep Amar

Each new vertical experience in ChatGPT creates a distinct AEO surface with its own eligibility criteria

Google’s AI Optimization Guide Is Not the AEO Bible. It’s a Press Release!

Where to place canonicals, meta tags and structured data in your HTML, and why order matters

Why stateless crawling means cookies cannot be a prerequisite for content

Why Server-Side Rendering Still Matters for SEO in a JavaScript-Heavy Web