Ghosted by the bot: Why IndiaMART is desperate to be visible on ChatGPT

Mint spoke to said the same—inquiries have thinned, with no explanation about what has changed. IndiaMART has been their entire digital existence. But somewhere between a buyer’s question and an AI agent’s answer, their phones have begun to ring less often.IndiaMART, India’s largest business-to-business (B2B) marketplace, was built on a single premise: helping buyers find sellers.

The platform has enabled discovery for millions of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) for two decades. The company had around 42 million registered buyers, over 124 million listed products and more than 8.3 million registered suppliers as of September, according to its disclosures.But now, the ground is shifting. In part, IndiaMART has only itself to blame, given how it has been faulted year after year by an American federal agency for facilitating the sale of counterfeit goods, including electronics, apparel and, most worrying of all, pharmaceuticals.With AI bots bypassing the platform altogether to avoid legal complications stemming from dodgy listings, IndiaMART faces an existential threat.

And that has led it to take OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, to court.Internally, IndiaMART first noticed something was wrong last October. Their listings were not showing up in ChatGPT responses while competitors—other e-commerce and B2B platforms—continued to appear, two people directly aware of the matter told Mint.The tech team initially looked inward—checking for blockages at their end. Finding none, they sent emails to customer support IDs at OpenAI’s Silicon Valley offices.

The first few responses were automated, AI-generated replies, one of the people said. The first real human response came on 8 November. Ten days later, another response