NEET UG 2026: With 25 lakh set to take exam, counselling chaos sparks AI-driven solutions 

With nearly 25 lakh students set to appear for NEET UG 2026 on May 3, the pressure doesn’t ease after the exam — it intensifies. Once results are declared, aspirants must navigate a complicated counselling process to secure a medical seat, often described as more daunting than the test itself.

The process stretches from June to October and operates across two parallel systems — state-level counselling conducted by individual states and centralised counselling for the All India Quota managed by the Medical Counselling Committee. Each involves three to five rounds, generating extensive allotment lists and requiring students to interpret hundreds of pages of data while tracking multiple deadlines.

“After months, often years, of exam preparation, students and families find themselves lost in the counselling process with no clear direction,” said Ashok Hegde, Founder of NEET2Seat. “A student who scores 450 or 550 marks has no easy way to know which colleges are within grasp, which college to pick for the preference list, or whether waiting for a later round is worth the risk. The data is all there in government PDFs, but students struggle to make sense of it on their own.”

Highlighting the unpredictability of the system, NEET2Seat analysed three years of allotment data across 500+ medical colleges and found that at nearly one in four All India Quota colleges, cutoff ranks fluctuate by more than 25% year-on-year. This volatility makes reliance on previous year trends unreliable for decision-making.

The lack of clarity has also fuelled a parallel ecosystem of private counsellors and coaching centres, which charge between ₹15,000 and ₹1,00,000 for seat guidance, often based on manually compiled public data.

Positioning itself as an alternative, NEET2Seat offers a freemium AI-powered platform that analyses historical allotment trends to provide personalised college predictions, category-wise insights, and round-by-round counselling strategies. Currently covering Maharashtra, Karnataka, and the All India Quota, the platform plans to expand to more states.

Its offerings include an AI Rank Predictor, College Predictor, College Explorer, AI Choice Filler, and an AI Counsellor, alongside detailed counselling guides tailored to states and reservation categories.

“Every student who clears NEET deserves a fair shot at the right college, not just those whose families can afford a counsellor,” Hegde said. “The allotment data is public. We just made it usable.”