Share of search in the Indian market

The method transfers. The term list does not, and a brand measuring Indian demand with an English-only keyword set is reading a fraction of its market.

Four things make Indian search demand different enough to change how the measure is built. None of them is exotic, and all of them are routinely missed by tracking set up from a global template.

Transliteration and Hinglish

A large share of queries are Hindi or another Indian language typed in Roman script. People search “sasta” alongside “cheap”, “ghar” alongside “home”, and brand names get spelled several ways. If your term list contains only the English spelling of your brand and category, you are counting a subset and comparing it against competitors whose names happen to transliterate more consistently.

The fix is unglamorous: collect the variants from your own Search Console data, where the real spellings appear, and build the set from what people actually type.

Regional language volume is growing faster than English

Devanagari and other script queries are a growing share of total volume, and in several categories they now dominate outside the metros. A measure that excludes them will show a brand looking healthy in English while losing the larger market. Track at least the two or three languages that matter for your geography, as separate lines rather than merged.

Festive seasonality is not a trend

Indian category demand is shaped by a festive calendar that moves year to year, so a simple year-on-year comparison will mislead whenever the dates shift. Compare like periods relative to the festival rather than to the calendar date, and smooth over a full year before declaring anything about the trend. The same discipline applies to wedding seasons, exam cycles and the monsoon in the categories they govern.

Discovery does not start on Google alone

For a growing share of buyers the first search happens on a marketplace, on YouTube, on a quick commerce app or inside a messaging thread. Search engine volume still works as a comparative measure across brands, because the bias applies to everyone in the set, but it understates total demand. Where marketplace search share is available, it is worth tracking alongside, especially in D2C.

What to do with it

Build the term set from first-party data, include transliterations and the main regional languages, compare festive periods to festive periods, and read the series annually. Then use it for the thing it is good at: telling you whether interest in your brand is growing faster or slower than interest in the people you compete with, which is the argument in share of search as a leading indicator.

How large and how multilingual is India's search audience?

The IAMAI and Kantar Internet in India report put active internet users at 886 million in 2024, with rural users, at about 488 million, outnumbering urban users. The same report found that 98 percent of internet users accessed content in Indic languages. That is the scale argument for everything above: a share of search built on English spellings alone is measuring a minority of the market's searching.

What does it show in Indian categories?

We built it for nine categories in the Colleviate Share of Search Index, with the method and data published. Three readings show why the measure earns its place in India. Groww has led Zerodha in stockbroking search every month since September 2025. Birla Opus went from no measurable search interest to 11.0 percent of decorative paints, ahead of two long-established brands. And in mobile networks, BSNL briefly led prepaid recharge searches in July 2024, the month the private operators raised tariffs, which is a reminder that a spike needs a cause before it is read as a trend.

How do you build an Indian term list?

Start from your own data, not a keyword tool. Export the queries from Search Console that include your brand and your competitors' names and read them: the transliterated spellings, the Hinglish phrasings and the misspellings your buyers actually type are all there. Group the variants of each name into one term, test each term's related queries in Google Trends to make sure it means what you think, and add regional-language forms for the states that matter to you.

Then decide what search engine data cannot see. If your buyers start on a marketplace or a quick-commerce app, track your position there separately and read both together. Our India index publishes its term list and every exclusion, which is the standard worth holding your own tracking to.