Who sells the laptop when the customer asks an AI?
18 brand-free purchase questions · 5 AI engines · 87 analysed answers · 13 tracked retailers · 378 mentions · 249 domains cited as sources
A customer asking "where do I get a good laptop for university" no longer receives ten blue links to choose from. They receive one answer, naming three to six shops, in order. That order is neither neutral nor random — and Romanian retailers are not yet measuring it.
This is the third episode in a series measuring how Romanian markets appear inside AI answers. The first covered luxury jewelry, the second the book market. Electronics and IT is the most concentrated of the three and, for that reason, the most instructive: here the question is no longer "do you appear", because almost everyone appears. The question is how far down the list you appear.
One methodological change from the previous episodes, stated up front: this study rests on a single complete run, not two. It is an accurate photograph of 3 August 2026, not a trend measurement. The weekly volatility section from episodes 1 and 2 is absent here, and the conclusions are phrased accordingly.
In short — what we found
- The market is concentrated, not fragmented. 86 of the 87 answers name at least one of the 13 tracked retailers. Exactly one answer names none. In the book market, 58% of answers named no major brand — the mirror image.
- Position, not presence, separates the players. eMAG opens the list in 66 of its 82 mentions (80.5%). Altex has only 4 first places but 67 second-or-third places. The rest of the market shares positions 4-7.
- The ranking is inherited, not computed. A single listicle — shopilo.ro — is cited in 21 answers, more than the websites of PC Garage or Media Galaxy. One Wikipedia list page is cited in 7.
- Specialists own their territory and get paid for it. F64 appears in all 5 answers about professional cameras and almost nowhere else: 9 mentions produce 40% of the weighted visibility of a retailer with 47 mentions.
- Google declined to show an AI Overview on 3 of the 18 questions — gaming laptop, large TV and cheapest phones, three of the most commercial queries in the set.
- Being named and being cited are different things. 21 of the 47 answers naming evoMAG cite no evomag.ro page at all; in 4 others evomag.ro is cited as a source without the brand being recommended.
- Reddit is the second most-cited non-retailer source in the market: 17 answers, behind the shopilo.ro listicle (21).
- Sentiment is almost uniformly positive: one single negative mention across the whole tracked set.
The raw data, free. Three CSV files — the retailer ranking, the question × brand matrix and the cited domains — are published under CC BY 4.0. Download the data
01 · How did we measure electronics retailers' visibility in AI engines?
Methodology
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Questions | 18, none containing a brand name |
| Engines | ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews |
| Language and country | Romanian, from Romania |
| Run | One complete run, 3 August 2026 |
| Queries issued | 90 (18 × 5) |
| Answers analysed | 87 |
| Tracked retailers | 13 |
| Mentions recorded | 378 |
| Domains cited as sources | 249 distinct |
| Platform | LLM Pulse, no session history, no personalisation |
Three design choices deserve to be stated openly, because they determine what the numbers mean.
No brands in the prompts. No question contains the name of any shop. Everything appearing in this study was named by the engine on its own. The questions are phrased the way a real buyer phrases them: "where do I buy a good laptop for university in Romania?", "where can I buy open-box or refurbished products with warranty?", "which online shop has the best return conditions for electronics?". Ten are transactional, eight commercial.
One mention per answer, per brand. If an engine names eMAG three times in the same answer, that counts as one mention. Otherwise long answers would weigh more than short ones for no good reason.
Denominators are declared, because they are not equal. The 90 queries produced 87 answers: Google did not display an AI Overview for three questions. Overall rates are computed against 87. Per-engine rates are computed against that engine's own answer count — 18 for ChatGPT, AI Mode, Perplexity and Gemini, but 15 for AI Overviews. The monitoring platform reports AI Overview rates against 18; in this dataset they are corrected to 15. The difference is not cosmetic: evoMAG's AI Overviews rate moves from 33.3% to 40.0%.
The main limitation, declared from the start: a single run. The previous episodes showed that these hierarchies move week to week. What follows is true for 3 August 2026 and must not be read as a trend.
02 · Which electronics and IT retailers in Romania are most visible in AI answers?
The ranking: who gets the customer
| # | Retailer | Mentions | Visibility | Share of mentions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | eMAG | 82 | 94.25% | 21.69% |
| 2 | Altex | 76 | 87.36% | 20.11% |
| 3 | Flanco | 48 | 55.17% | 12.70% |
| 4 | evoMAG | 47 | 54.02% | 12.43% |
| 5 | PC Garage | 44 | 50.57% | 11.64% |
| 6 | Media Galaxy | 42 | 48.28% | 11.11% |
| 7 | Vexio | 11 | 12.64% | 2.91% |
| 8 | F64 | 9 | 10.34% | 2.38% |
| 9 | ITGalaxy | 8 | 9.20% | 2.12% |
| 10 | Cel.ro | 5 | 5.75% | 1.32% |
| 11 | Quickmobile | 3 | 3.45% | 0.79% |
| 12 | iStyle | 2 | 2.30% | 0.53% |
| 13 | Amazon | 1 | 1.15% | 0.26% |
The market has three clearly separated tiers. Two leaders — eMAG and Altex — named in over 87% of answers. A pack of four — Flanco, evoMAG, PC Garage, Media Galaxy — tightly grouped between 48% and 55%, separated by one or two mentions. And a long tail below 13%, where the specialists live.
The first counter-intuitive observation: the distance between third and sixth place is six mentions. Across 87 answers, four retailers are effectively tied. Stopping at this table, one would conclude that the market has two leaders and a homogeneous middle.
That conclusion would be wrong. The table above measures whether a retailer appears. It does not measure what happens to it when it does.
03 · What position does each retailer occupy inside the AI answer?
Not who appears, but how far down
This is the central finding of the study.
| Retailer | Position 1 | Positions 2-3 | Positions 4-7 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| eMAG | 66 | 15 | 1 | 82 |
| Altex | 4 | 67 | 5 | 76 |
| Flanco | 2 | 29 | 17 | 48 |
| evoMAG | 3 | 7 | 37 | 47 |
| PC Garage | 7 | 15 | 22 | 44 |
| Media Galaxy | 0 | 23 | 19 | 42 |
The structure of the market becomes visible only here, and it is far more rigid than the ranking suggested:
eMAG is the answer. Of 82 mentions, 66 are in first place. When an AI engine names Romanian electronics retailers, four times out of five it begins with eMAG. That is not a leader's position — it is the position of a default answer.
Altex is the alternative. Only 4 first places, but 67 second-or-third places. Altex almost never opens the list and is almost always the second name. Its position is as stable as eMAG's, but structurally different: it is not the answer, it is the confirmation that a serious alternative exists.
The rest of the market is "the list". Flanco, evoMAG, PC Garage and Media Galaxy share positions 4-7. Media Galaxy has no first place anywhere in the dataset. evoMAG has 37 of its 47 mentions in the 4-7 band — 78.7%.
The effect shows up in weighted visibility, the metric giving 100% to a first-place mention, 50% to second, 33% to third:
| Retailer | Mentions | Weighted visibility |
|---|---|---|
| eMAG | 82 | 7,308 |
| Altex | 76 | 3,643 |
| PC Garage | 44 | 1,738 |
| Flanco | 48 | 1,699 |
| evoMAG | 47 | 1,310 |
| Media Galaxy | 42 | 1,248 |
| F64 | 9 | 521 |
The ranking rearranges itself. PC Garage rises above both Flanco and evoMAG despite having fewer mentions than either — because it holds 7 first places against 2 and 3. And eMAG, with 8% more mentions than Altex, has twice the weighted visibility.
For a retailer measuring its AI presence, that is the difference between a report saying "we are fourth, that's fine" and one saying "we are fourth in presence and fifth in influence".
04 · Which retailers do ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI recommend in Romania?
The five engines do not see the same market
| Retailer | ChatGPT (18) | AI Mode (18) | AI Overviews (15) | Perplexity (18) | Gemini (18) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| eMAG | 94% | 94% | 93% | 89% | 100% |
| Altex | 83% | 94% | 93% | 67% | 100% |
| Flanco | 50% | 78% | 53% | 39% | 56% |
| evoMAG | 61% | 61% | 40% | 61% | 44% |
| PC Garage | 50% | 50% | 53% | 44% | 56% |
| Media Galaxy | 39% | 50% | 33% | 33% | 83% |
| Vexio | 28% | 6% | 13% | 0% | 17% |
| F64 | 6% | 6% | 7% | 17% | 17% |
Gemini is simultaneously the most generous and the most conservative. It names eMAG and Altex in 100% of answers and Media Galaxy in 83% — yet drops evoMAG to 44% and Flanco to 56%. It is not an engine that cuts the list short; it is an engine that includes generously, from a fixed set of big names.
Perplexity is the most open to the long tail. The only engine naming Amazon, the only one lifting F64 and Quickmobile to 17% and 11%, and the only one dropping Altex to 67%. It is also the engine most likely to answer without naming anyone: the single answer in the entire set that names no tracked retailer is a Perplexity answer about IT equipment for companies, which discusses "wholesale IT distributors" and "large shops" without naming one.
Vexio exists almost exclusively inside ChatGPT (28%, against 0-17% elsewhere). A retailer can hold real presence in one engine and be invisible in the other four.
Google declined three times. AI Overviews did not trigger for the gaming laptop, large TV and cheapest phones questions — three of the most commercial queries in the set. When Google decides a query is too transactional it generates no answer, and every retailer's AI visibility on that question is simply zero.
05 · In which product categories do specialist shops beat the generalists?
Territories: where it is won and where it is lost
The 18 questions are not equivalent. Some are contested by the whole market; others have a single winner.
Questions where the specialist wins:
| Question | Who dominates |
|---|---|
| Where do I get a professional camera or camcorder? | F64: 5 of 5 — more than eMAG (2) |
| Where do I buy PC components for a build of my own? | eMAG and PC Garage 5 of 5; Vexio 4 — its best score |
| Where do I buy an electric scooter or e-bike? | No large generalist dominates; the engines name TrotiBike, ESBI, Maros Bike, BikeXpert, DualStore, Decathlon |
The F64 case is the clearest argument in the whole study. Nine mentions in total — five times fewer than evoMAG — but a weighted visibility of 521, which is 40% of evoMAG's with 19% of the mentions. The explanation is that all 9 mentions are concentrated on its own territory, and there F64 comes first. One owned territory is worth more than ten territories where you are sixth.
The most concentrated questions are the general ones — "which are the best online electronics and IT shops in Romania", "which online shops have good discounts on electronics" — where 5 to 7 of the 13 tracked retailers appear, and always roughly the same ones.
The most dispersed question is the one about electric scooters and e-bikes: only 13 mentions in total across all 13 tracked brands. The engines overwhelmingly prefer specialists, and no large generalist owns the category. It is the only territory in the set where the "official" electronics market barely exists inside AI answers.
06 · Which sources do AI engines cite when recommending an electronics retailer?
Who writes the ranking the AI reads
We inventoried every domain cited as a source: 249 distinct ones. The top 20:
| Domain | Answers citing it | Type |
|---|---|---|
| emag.ro | 50 | retailer |
| altex.ro | 45 | retailer |
| evomag.ro | 30 | retailer |
| flanco.ro | 24 | retailer |
| shopilo.ro | 21 | listicle |
| pcgarage.ro | 17 | retailer |
| reddit.com | 17 | community |
| voucher.ro | 11 | listicle |
| mediagalaxy.ro | 10 | retailer |
| compari.ro | 9 | price comparison |
| itgalaxy.ro | 8 | retailer |
| blackfriday.ro | 7 | listicle |
| wikipedia.org | 7 | encyclopedia list |
| cel.ro | 7 | retailer |
| vexio.ro | 7 | retailer |
| gadget.ro | 6 | media |
| flip.ro | 6 | retailer |
| price.ro | 5 | price comparison |
| cuponescu.ro | 5 | listicle |
| mariuscucu.ro | 5 | blog |
A single article — "Romanian Electronics Shops: Top 6 Compared" on shopilo.ro — is cited in 21 answers. More than PC Garage's website. More than Media Galaxy's website. More than every technology publication in the set put together.
On the market's flagship question — "which are the best online electronics and IT shops in Romania" — Perplexity builds its answer citing the Wikipedia page List of online electronics and IT shops in Romania, plus shopilo.ro and voucher.ro. Gemini cites listamagazine.ro and the same Wikipedia page. AI Mode and AI Overviews both cite shopilo.ro.
The implication matters more than the number: the order in which retailers appear inside AI answers is not recomputed from scratch by each engine. It is, to a large extent, inherited from five or six listicles and one Wikipedia list. Whoever is missing there, or appears at the bottom, inherits that position across every engine at once.
Reddit is the second non-retailer source: 17 answers, from r/CasualRO, r/roFrugal and r/Romania — threads about open-box products, return policies, and which shop people actually use. That is where the sentiment the engines later summarise as a recommendation is formed.
07 · What does it mean when a retailer is cited as a source but not recommended?
Named, cited, or both
An engine does two different things with a retailer: it names it in the answer and it cites its website as a source. The ratio between the two shows how solid the recommendation is.
| Retailer | Mentions | Citations | Citations / mentions |
|---|---|---|---|
| eMAG | 82 | 50 | 0.61 |
| Altex | 76 | 45 | 0.59 |
| evoMAG | 47 | 30 | 0.64 |
| Flanco | 48 | 24 | 0.50 |
| PC Garage | 44 | 17 | 0.39 |
| Media Galaxy | 42 | 10 | 0.24 |
| ITGalaxy | 8 | 8 | 1.00 |
Two extremes are worth examining.
Media Galaxy: 0.24. Of 42 mentions, only 10 come with a citation of mediagalaxy.ro. In three quarters of cases the engine recommends Media Galaxy because it read about it somewhere else — usually a listicle, or altex.ro, with which it shares a group. That position is not its own and shifts when the third-party article shifts.
ITGalaxy: 1.00. Every time it is named, its own site is cited too. A small retailer, but with a verifiable presence of its own behind every appearance.
The phenomenon has a more instructive inverse. For evoMAG we could measure both directions: of the 47 answers naming it, 21 cite no page on evomag.ro; and in another 4 answers evomag.ro is cited as a source without evoMAG being recommended. In the latter case, a retailer's content informed an answer in which a competitor wins — the clearest instance being the large-TV question, where Perplexity uses evoMAG pages and recommends Altex, eMAG, Flanco and Media Galaxy.
08 · Which retailers does AI recommend beyond Romania's big chains?
The competitors nobody tracks
The 13 tracked brands do not exhaust the market, and the engines demonstrate it constantly. Beyond them, the 87 answers name retailers that appear in no conventional competitive review:
- Flip.ro — 9 answers, on refurbished phones. It would rank eighth in our table, above ITGalaxy, Cel.ro and iStyle.
- Decathlon — 5 answers, exclusively on electric mobility.
- Refurbished specialists — ReBoxed, UsedProducts, CIT Grup, Expert Company, Refurbished.ro, Resellux, MarketOnline.
- Mobility specialists — TrotiBike, ESBI, Maros Bike, BikeXpert, DualStore, Atu Tech, Bimax, Pegas.
- Telecom operators — Orange and Vodafone recur on the questions about phone instalments and return conditions.
The practical conclusion for any retailer drawing up a competitive map: the competitor list inside AI is not the competitor list in the market. A large generalist can lose an entire category to a niche shop it does not consider a competitor and does not monitor.
09 · What are the limitations of this study?
Limitations of this study
We list them in full, because a study that does not declare its limits is not a study.
- A single run, on a single day. This is the principal limitation. Earlier episodes in the series showed that these hierarchies move weekly; here we cannot observe the movement. Everything above describes 3 August 2026.
- 18 questions, not the purchase universe. A different question set would produce different weights.
- 13 tracked brands, not the whole market. As section 08 shows, the engines constantly name retailers outside the set. "Share of mentions" figures are shares of the 13 brands' mentions, not of all possible mentions.
- Roughly 5 answers per question. Differences on a single question are noise, not signal. Only patterns repeating across questions are worth reading.
- Mentions are not conversions. We measure who reaches the answer, not who sells. A link between the two is plausible but not measured here.
- Models update continuously. An August 2026 answer does not guarantee the same answer in September.
- A single unpersonalised profile, one country, one language. A user with search history might receive different answers.
- Source type classification (retailer, listicle, community, price comparison) was done by the authors and is, by nature, debatable at the margins.
10 · What does this mean for an electronics retailer in Romania?
Implications
Three implications that follow directly from the data without exceeding it.
Presence is no longer the objective; position is. In a market where 86 of 87 answers name a major retailer, "we appear in AI" is no longer an achievement. The difference between first and sixth place in a generated list is the difference between receiving the decision and receiving a comparison. Any AI visibility report stopping at mention rate misses exactly the variable that matters.
Concentrated territory beats diffuse presence. F64 demonstrates the arithmetic: 9 well-placed mentions on one territory produce 40% of the weighted visibility of a retailer with 47 scattered ones. For a mid-sized retailer the rational strategy is not to compete with eMAG on general questions — it is to identify the categories it can own and own them visibly.
The ranking is written off your website. Five listicles and one Wikipedia page are cited in over 50 answers combined. They are public-relations inventory, not technical SEO, and right now they decide the order in which the market appears. And Reddit — 17 answers — cannot be bought or simulated; it is earned by solving real cases in public.
11 · Frequently asked questions
What does "visibility" mean in this study?
The percentage of answers naming the brand, out of the 87 analysed answers. One answer contributes at most one mention per brand, however many times it is named in the text.
Why 87 answers and not 90?
90 queries were issued (18 questions × 5 engines), but Google did not display an AI Overview for three questions. Those three produced no answer to analyse.
Why are AI Overviews rates computed against 15?
Because AI Overviews produced 15 answers, not 18. Using 18 would systematically underestimate every brand on that engine. The monitoring platform uses 18; the data published here corrects the denominator to 15.
What is weighted visibility?
A metric accounting for the position of the mention: 100% for first place, 50% for second, 33% for third and so on, summed across the five engines. It is unbounded and does not read as a percentage.
How were the 13 retailers chosen?
They are the retailers tracked in the monitoring project that generated the data: Romania's large generalists plus several relevant specialists. It is not an exhaustive list of the market, and section 08 shows explicitly what falls outside it.
Did you use brand names in the questions?
No. None of the 18 questions contains the name of any shop. Everything that appears was named by the engine.
Why a single run, when earlier episodes had two?
Because the study was built on the data available at the time. It is a real limitation, declared in sections 01 and 09, and the reason this episode contains no volatility section.
Can a retailer change its position?
The data shows where position is decided: in the listicles cited as sources, in Reddit discussions, and in whether the retailer has its own pages answering the question the way the buyer asks it. The study does not measure the effect of an intervention — only the state of play.
What does it mean for a brand to be cited but not named?
That the engine used a page from its website as a source of information, but recommended someone else. The content worked for an answer the brand is absent from.
Is the data reusable?
Yes. The three CSV files are published under CC BY 4.0, with attribution. Commercial use is permitted provided the study is cited.
Why are there no sales figures or real market shares?
Because the study does not measure them. It measures presence inside AI answers, and nothing else. Correlation with sales is plausible but not demonstrated here.
The data, deposited publicly
Statement of responsibility
This study measures only the presence of brands inside answers generated by AI engines, on a single day. It does not measure the quality of the retailers, their prices, their service or their sales. "X is the most visible" does not mean "X is the best". Every brand appearing here was named by the engines, not by the authors, and the 13 tracked retailers do not exhaust Romania's electronics and IT market. Mentions are not conversions. All figures can be re-verified from the published raw data, and any error reported will be corrected publicly, with versioning.
Original Websem study · Dan Cristian Alexandrescu · August 2026
Raw data: CC BY 4.0 — DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21821185
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