An AI search engine won’t recommend you for who you are. It recommends the page that answers the question.

Over the past few weeks the Jev model came out, OpenAI answered with its own Decisions API, and then came Dots, Muse from Meta and Grok Bot. Models that are supposed to decide for you, and agents that are supposed to automate half your life. And like everyone else, I immediately started thinking about where to cram it into our product. I spent a few evenings on it, and the vast majority of it did not survive in production.

So I flipped the question. Not what AI will do for us, but what it tells people about us. I asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude twenty ordinary questions. Where to play basketball in Tábor, where there is a free tennis court in Prague, which app shows freely accessible venues. No history, each one in a new chat.

ChatGPT cited us in 15 of 20, Perplexity in 16, Google in 13. For tennis in Prague, the whole answer from both ChatGPT and Google rested on us alone, including the fact that there are 17 courts. In Ivančice, Perplexity listed exactly our counts, 6 workout spots, 4 tables, 2 pump tracks, and sent people to Sportera.cz.

And then volleyball in Hradec Králové. Five engines, zero mentions of us. Not because they didn’t know us. Two questions earlier, four of them had recommended us by name. We simply have no volleyball court on the map there.

An AI search engine won’t recommend you for who you are. It recommends the page that answers the question. In classic Google you can be seventh and a person will still catch sight of you. In an AI answer there is no seventh place. Either you are the source the answer was built from, or you can’t be seen. Claude showed it best. It was the only one that did not cite us once, and when I asked what Sportera is, it pieced the answer together from a six-month-old interview for VUT and the headline of my LinkedIn profile. It knows me, not our pages.

So agents are great for some things, but we have another boring task: filling in the white spots on the map. Each of them is a question AI won’t recommend us for yet.

Do you also test whether AI recommends you?

PS: test it in incognito mode. A logged-in account slips in your own history and location, and the result looks different.