By the next Indian general elections in 2029, the Gen Z voters block (18 to 32 years), is expected to touch nearly 380 million. This would make it the largest voting block in India demographically.
The question to answer, then, is where does political information, content and engagement rest when you are courting Gen Z. An answer perhaps clearer for brand communication but not so much for political communicators.
The old cliché has never been truer: the medium is the message. For this generation of first-time voters, Instagram — with YouTube and even Snapchat — has become an important channel of information. Add GEO as the new engine of discovery, and the way it all now travels down to the grassroots, and three forces are remaking political communications in India.
Instagram's influence in the 2026 Tamil Nadu state elections
When the DMK blamed Instagram reels for their electoral loss, it was a sign of the centerstage occupied by the video first social media platform in Tamil Nadu elections
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay from TVK used his personal Insta account (19M followers, though the number of followers are contested. Only 44 posts, with engagement rates up to 23.6%) to drive virality through an 85,000-strong fan-club network converted into "virtual warriors," backed by two distinct digital operations: the external strategy consultancy, Voice of Commons and TVK's separate formal IT wing under C.T.R. Nirmal Kumar.
Nupur Bhatnagar, GEO strategist: auditing & building digital authority, explains Vijay's success, "An analysis by Snap Inc. ( Snap Political Adverts Library) mapped Instagram penetration across Tamil Nadu's 38 districts against the 2026 election results — finding that in every district with Instagram penetration above 38%, TVK won the plurality of seats. The party secured 10 of 15 seats in Chennai at 58% Instagram penetration and 5 of 10 in Coimbatore at 49% penetration."
The Tamil Nadu 2026 elections proved that Instagram is no longer a supplementary channel for political communicators — it is the primary battlefield. TVK ran India's first natively digital assembly campaign, and the results were historic. Every rally became a reel, every promise a story, every candidate launched on Instagram before a poster went up. "
Instagram just a channel of information: Harsh Lath, SRCC 2026 batch
What does Gen Z actually feel about all the Insta analysis about their online behaviour? 20-year-old Harsh Lath, a 2026 batch commerce graduate from the iconic SRCC, Delhi University, says, "I see Instagram as a channel of information only, and it might be more advanced, engaging and heterogeneous, but just a medium."
Lath says Instagram may be a source of news, but he does check independent government and media websites for accuracy. An interesting differentiation he makes is that while he may not completely focus on Instagram for national and state politics, it's the main channel for information for the Delhi University students' elections next month.
Dismissing the buzz around Insta elections, he says, "If we look at the history of communication media, we find that every one or two decades, technology advances and changes the medium. It was letters till the late 60s, newspapers and print media till the late 80s (even now), phone calls till the late 2000s and then television and digital media till the last decade and social media now as the major means of mass communication."
This brings us to the second force influencing political communications that has to supplement social media.
The GEO discovery engine
As per Bhatnagar most political communicators are still missing a key part of the strategy, "Instagram's reach can be ephemeral. A reel trends today and disappears tomorrow. WhatsApp networks reach millions but leave no public footprint. Private Snaps, direct messages, closed communities — all completely invisible to AI engines, regardless of how many millions they touch. What comes next is something those playbooks were never built for — and that is GEO, Generative Engine Optimisation.
When a voter today asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or an AI engine (embedded in their favourite social platform) 'who is this candidate' or 'what does this party stand for' — the answer they receive is synthesised from publicly available content and delivered as fact. Not a list of links to evaluate. A synthesised, authoritative answer that feels like truth.
In the hands of someone who understands how AI engines read, interpret, and cite information, GEO becomes a precision instrument unlike anything political communications has had before. It requires mapping thousands of queries, auditing how AI currently describes a political entity, identifying structural gaps in publicly accessible content, and rebuilding a digital footprint so that AI engines don't just find you — they cite you as the authority. This is hours of work, not minutes of posting. It is a craft.
In political communications, the difference between being found and being cited could be the difference between a narrative you own and one that owns you."
Bhatnagar, a millennial shares her process of information discovery, " I am not a news watcher — I don't follow bulletins. Things reach me sideways: a post, a website, a passing claim. I treat that as a lead, never as information.
From there, it's a GEO search engines, which are still the biggest place for me. I put my question to them, read what comes back, and then dig levels deeper — the follow-up question is where the real answer usually is. What surfaces is almost always news media articles rather than social posts, and that's the point. Social media tells me something might be happening; reporting tells me whether it did."
Indian politics is invisible to AI search
Voters are moving from search engines to AI assistants. The answers they get are built only from content those engines can find, read and cite.
When voters ask AI engines about candidates, parties or policies, the response is shaped entirely by publicly indexed content.
Most political messaging circulates in closed groups and forwards — a space AI engines cannot see, index or quote.
Public, structured, citable content is what AI models retrieve. The parties building it now will set the default answer later.
If it isn’t public and citable, it doesn’t exist to an AI engine — and increasingly, not to the voter either.
If you enjoyed this article, you can subscribe for free to our weekly event and subscriber alerts.
We have four email alerts in total - covering ESG, PR news, events and awards. Enter your email address below to find out more: