Recently, routing is considered the main problem in MANET due to its dynamic nature. The route discovery and the optimal route selection from the multiple routes are established for the efficient routing in MANET. The major objective of this research is to select the optimal route for packet transmission in MANET. In this paper, four stages namely trust evaluation, route discovery, optmal route selection and route maintanance are elucidated. Initially, the trust evaluation is made by using ANFIS where the primary trust values are evaluated. The next stage is the route discovery scheme, in which the routes are established by Group teaching optimization algorithm (GTA). From the route discovery scheme, multiple routes are found. The optimal route for the transmission is selected with the help of the Adaptive equilibrium optimizer (AO) algorithm. Finally, the route maintenance process is established; if any of the routes fails for the broadcast it immediately selects the alternate optimal route from the multi-zone routing table for efficient packet transmission. The proposed approach is evaluated by various performance measures like throughput, energy consumption, packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, packet loss rate, detection rate, and routing overhead. This result describes that the proposed approach outperforms other state-of-art approaches.