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 — the engines constantly name retailers outside the set, from Flip.ro to Decathlon.

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 the methodology and in the limitations section, 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.

Resources · AEO

Who sells the laptop when the customer asks an AI?

We put 18 real purchase questions to the 5 major AI engines, on a single day. 86 of the 87 answers name a major retailer — so it is not presence that separates the market, it is position in the list.

Original study · WebsemEpisode 36 August 202614 min

Dan Cristian AlexandrescuWebsemORCID 0009-0007-1994-6700Published: 6 August 2026

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.

AI answers analysed

18 questions × 5 engines, a single run

378

brand mentions counted

13 retailers tracked

86/87

answers naming a major retailer

exactly one answer names none

249

distinct domains cited

across the 87 analysed answers

— In short

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.

Download the raw data (CSV)All files and charts

This is the third study in our series on the AI visibility of Romanian brands, after the luxury jewelry study and the book market study. The same method — a panel of brand-free questions, run across 5 engines, with positions, citations and sentiment measured systematically — applied to the most concentrated of the three markets.

— 01 · Methodology

How did we measure electronics retailers' visibility in AI engines?

We measured the visibility of 13 electronics and IT retailers inside the answers of 5 AI engines, using a fixed panel of 18 purchase questions, in Romanian, from Romania, in one complete run.

— The measurement protocol

The study protocol
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

Each of the 18 questions was put to each of the 5 engines, in a single run — 90 queries. Google returned no AI Overview for 3 of them, which leaves the 87 answers analysed.

The 5 engines: ChatGPT (OpenAI) · Google AI Mode (Google) · Google AI Overviews (Google) · Perplexity (Perplexity AI) · Google Gemini (Google).

The questions cover the real purchase territories of electronics and IT: a laptop for university, PC components, phones in instalments, a large TV, a washing machine, a professional camera, open-box products, IT equipment for a company, extended warranty, return conditions, Black Friday, electric scooters. Nine are transactional, nine commercial. The full list is below.

Three design choices, stated openly

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.

— What the study does NOT measure

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.

An important limit, stated up front: we track 13 retailers, not the whole market. Retailers outside the set — Flip.ro, Decathlon, TrotiBike, ReBoxed — appear constantly in the answers; we see them in the citations, but we do not count their brand mentions. The rest of the limits, in section 09.

— 02 · The ranking: who gets the customer

Which electronics and IT retailers in Romania are most visible in AI answers?

378 brand mentions across 87 answers. Visibility = the share of the 87 analysed answers in which the retailer appears.

Generalist retailersSpecialist shops

01eMAG82 · 94.3%
02Altex76 · 87.4%
03Flanco48 · 55.2%
04evoMAG47 · 54.0%
05PC Garage44 · 50.6%
06Media Galaxy42 · 48.3%
07Vexio11 · 12.6%
08F649 · 10.3%
09ITGalaxy8 · 9.2%
10Cel.ro5 · 5.8%
11Quickmobile3 · 3.5%
12iStyle2 · 2.3%
13Amazon1 · 1.1%

Brand mentions · the percentage = share of the 87 answers analysed · Websem study, August 2026

The full leaderboard of the 13 tracked retailers, by mention count across the 87 analysed answers
#	Retailer	Type	Mentions	Visibility	Share of mentions
1	eMAGemag.ro	generalist marketplace	82	94.3%	21.7%
2	Altexaltex.ro	generalist retailer	76	87.4%	20.1%
3	Flancoflanco.ro	generalist retailer	48	55.2%	12.7%
4	evoMAGevomag.ro	online IT & electronics shop	47	54.0%	12.4%
5	PC Garagepcgarage.ro	online IT shop	44	50.6%	11.6%
6	Media Galaxymediagalaxy.ro	generalist retailer	42	48.3%	11.1%
7	Vexiovexio.ro	online IT shop	11	12.6%	2.9%
8	F64f64.ro	photo & video specialist	9	10.3%	2.4%
9	ITGalaxyitgalaxy.ro	online IT shop	8	9.2%	2.1%
10	Cel.rocel.ro	generalist marketplace	5	5.8%	1.3%
11	Quickmobilequickmobile.ro	online phone shop	3	3.5%	0.8%
12	iStyleistyle.ro	Apple specialist	2	2.3%	0.5%
13	Amazonamazon.de	international marketplace	1	1.1%	0.3%

Visibility = % of the 87 analysed answers · share of mentions = % of the 378 mentions recorded across the 13 tracked retailers

The market has three tiers

Two leaders — eMAG and Altex — named in over 87% of the 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.

This table does not tell the whole story

The distance between third and sixth place is six mentions. Across 87 answers, four retailers are effectively tied. Stopping here, one would conclude that the market has two leaders and a homogeneous middle. That conclusion would be wrong: the table measures whether a retailer appears, not what happens to it when it does.

— 03 · Not who appears, but how far down

What position does each retailer occupy inside the AI answer?

This is the central finding of the study. A first-place mention (“the best shop is…”) and one in sixth place, inside a trailing list, count the same in a mention leaderboard — but not for the customer.

Position 1Positions 2-3Positions 4-7

eMAG

82 appearances

Position 1: 66 (80%)
Positions 2-3: 15 (18%)
Positions 4-7: 1 (1%)

Altex

76 appearances

Position 1: 4 (5%)
Positions 2-3: 67 (88%)
Positions 4-7: 5 (7%)

Flanco

48 appearances

Position 1: 2 (4%)
Positions 2-3: 29 (60%)
Positions 4-7: 17 (35%)

evoMAG

47 appearances

Position 1: 3 (6%)
Positions 2-3: 7 (15%)
Positions 4-7: 37 (79%)

PC Garage

44 appearances

Position 1: 7 (16%)
Positions 2-3: 15 (34%)
Positions 4-7: 22 (50%)

Media Galaxy

42 appearances

Position 1: 0 (0%)
Positions 2-3: 23 (55%)
Positions 4-7: 19 (45%)

How the mention's position is distributed inside the AI answer, for the top 6 shops in the ranking, on the same 18 questions

eMAG is the answer. Of its 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 and so on:

The leaderboard by position-weighted visibility
#	Retailer	Mentions	Weighted visibility	Rank by mentions
1	eMAG	82	7,308	1
2	Altex	76	3,643	2
3	PC Garage	44	1,738	5▲2
4	Flanco	48	1,699	3▼1
5	evoMAG	47	1,310	4▼1
6	Media Galaxy	42	1,248	6
7	F64	9	521	8▲1

Sum of scores across the 5 engines, the 3 August 2026 run. The metric is unbounded and does not read as a percentage.

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 · The five engines do not see the same market

Which retailers do ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI recommend in Romania?

Each retailer's mention rate, per engine — a percentage of THAT engine's answers. Mind the denominators: 18 answers for ChatGPT, AI Mode, Perplexity and Gemini, but 15 for AI Overviews.

Each brand's mention rate on each AI engine, as a percentage of that engine's answers. The denominator is 18 for every engine except AI Overviews, whose percentages are computed against 15 answers, because Google returned no AI Overview for 3 questions.
Brand	ChatGPT(18)	AI Mode(18)	AI Overviews(15)	Perplexity(18)	Gemini(18)
eMAG	94.4%	94.4%	93.3%	88.9%	100.0%
Altex	83.3%	94.4%	93.3%	66.7%	100.0%
Flanco	50.0%	77.8%	53.3%	38.9%	55.6%
evoMAG	61.1%	61.1%	40.0%	61.1%	44.4%
PC Garage	50.0%	50.0%	53.3%	44.4%	55.6%
Media Galaxy	38.9%	50.0%	33.3%	33.3%	83.3%
Vexio	27.8%	5.6%	13.3%	—	16.7%
F64	5.6%	5.6%	6.7%	16.7%	16.7%
Brands / answer	4.3	4.6	3.9	3.8	4.9

The share of each engine's answers that mention the brand · the figure in the header is the denominator: 15 for AI Overviews, 18 for the rest, because Google returned no AI Overview for 3 questions · last row: how many tracked brands fit, on average, into one answer from that engine

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 to the question about IT equipment for companies.

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.

Density differs too: Gemini gathers 89 mentions across 18 answers (4.9 retailers per answer), Perplexity only 69 (3.8). The fewer retailers an engine names per answer, the more each place in the list is worth.

— 05 · Territories: where it is won and where it is lost

In which product categories do specialist shops beat the generalists?

The 18 questions are not equivalent. Some are contested by the whole market; others have a single winner. Under each question: how many answers were analysed, and who appears in them.

01
Where do I find Black Friday deals on IT products in Romania?
commercialeMAG 5Altex 5Flanco 5PC Garage 5evoMAG 4+6
32 ment.
02
Where do I buy a good laptop for university in Romania?
transactionaleMAG 5Altex 5Flanco 5PC Garage 5evoMAG 3+3
28 ment.
03
Which online shops have good discounts on electronics in Romania?
commercialeMAG 5Altex 5Flanco 5PC Garage 5evoMAG 3+3
28 ment.
04
Which are the best online electronics and IT shops in Romania?
commercialeMAG 5Altex 5PC Garage 5evoMAG 3Flanco 2+5
27 ment.
05
Where do I buy PC components for a build of my own?
transactionaleMAG 5PC Garage 5Vexio 4evoMAG 3Altex 3+2
24 ment.
06
Where do I buy IT equipment for my company, with invoice and VAT?
transactionalevoMAG 4eMAG 4PC Garage 4Altex 3Media Galaxy 3+4
24 ment.
07
Which online shop has the best return conditions for electronics?
commercialeMAG 5Altex 5Flanco 5Media Galaxy 4evoMAG 2+1
23 ment.
08
Which online electronics shop has the best customer reviews?
commercialeMAG 5Altex 5evoMAG 4PC Garage 4Media Galaxy 2+3
23 ment.
09
Which online shop do you recommend for a gaming laptop?
commercialeMAG 4Altex 4PC Garage 4evoMAG 3Media Galaxy 3+2
21 ment.
10
Where can I buy open-box or refurbished products with warranty in Romania?
transactionaleMAG 5evoMAG 4Altex 4Media Galaxy 3PC Garage 2+2
21 ment.
11
Which online shop do you recommend for large home appliances?
commercialeMAG 5Altex 5Flanco 4evoMAG 3Media Galaxy 3
20 ment.
12
Which online shop offers extended warranty on laptops?
commercialevoMAG 4eMAG 4Altex 4PC Garage 3Flanco 2+1
18 ment.
13
Where can I buy a phone in interest-free instalments?
transactionaleMAG 5Flanco 5Altex 3evoMAG 2Media Galaxy 2
17 ment.
14
Where do I buy a large TV at a good price?
transactionaleMAG 4Altex 4Flanco 4evoMAG 2Media Galaxy 2
16 ment.
15
Where do I find mobile phones at the best price online in Romania?
transactionaleMAG 4Altex 4evoMAG 3Flanco 2Media Galaxy 1+1
15 ment.
16
Where do I get a washing machine with delivery and installation included?
transactionaleMAG 5Altex 4Media Galaxy 3Flanco 2
14 ment.
17
Where do I get a professional camera or camcorder?
transactionalF64 5Altex 4eMAG 2Media Galaxy 2Flanco 1
14 ment.
18
Where do I buy an electric scooter or e-bike?
transactionaleMAG 5Altex 4Media Galaxy 2Flanco 2
13 ment.

Brand mentions gathered by each question, across all 5 engines (~5 answers per question) · grey = a practically unclaimed territory

The questions the specialist wins

A professional camera or camcorder

F64: 5 of 5 answers — more than eMAG, which appears in 2. It is the only territory in the set where a specialist holds the first position in every answer.

PC components for a build of your own

eMAG and PC Garage appear in 5 of 5; Vexio in 4 — its best score in the whole study. The category belongs to IT shops, not to home-appliance retailers.

An electric scooter or e-bike

No large generalist dominates. Only 13 mentions across all 13 tracked brands put together. The engines overwhelmingly prefer specialists: 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.

At the opposite pole, the general questions — “which are the best online electronics and IT shops in Romania”, “which online shops have good discounts on electronics” — are also the most concentrated: 5 to 7 of the 13 tracked retailers appear, and always roughly the same ones.

— 06 · Who writes the ranking the AI reads

Which sources do AI engines cite when recommending an electronics retailer?

Engines with live search build their answers from web pages they cite. We inventoried every domain: 249 distinct ones across the 87 answers. The top 20:

retailerlisticlecommunity / UGCprice comparisonencyclopedia listmediablog

01emag.ro50 · 57.5%
02altex.ro45 · 51.7%
03evomag.ro30 · 34.5%
04flanco.ro24 · 27.6%
05shopilo.ro21 · 24.1%
06pcgarage.ro17 · 19.5%
07reddit.com17 · 19.5%
08voucher.ro11 · 12.6%
09mediagalaxy.ro10 · 11.5%
10compari.ro9 · 10.3%
11itgalaxy.ro8 · 9.2%
12blackfriday.ro7 · 8.1%
13wikipedia.org7 · 8.1%
14cel.ro7 · 8.1%
15vexio.ro7 · 8.1%
16gadget.ro6 · 6.9%
17flip.ro6 · 6.9%
18price.ro5 · 5.8%
19mariuscucu.ro5 · 5.8%
20cardavantaj.ro5 · 5.8%

Number of answers in which the domain is cited as a source · the percentage is against the 87 answers analysed · 249 distinct domains in total

One article beats two retailers

The 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.

The flagship question is written from three sources

On “which are the best online electronics and IT shops in Romania”, Perplexity cites 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.

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.

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.

— 07 · Named, cited, or both

What does it mean when a retailer is cited as a source but not recommended?

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.

Citations — site used as a sourceMentions — brand named

Domain citations compared with brand mentions, for the brands with the widest gap
Brand	Cited	Named	Diagnosis
Media Galaxy	10	42	recommended without evidence of its own: in three quarters of its mentions the engine names it because it read about it elsewhere — usually a listicle, or altex.ro. That position is not its own and shifts when the third-party article shifts.
PC Garage	17	44	presence resting mostly on third-party sources: 44 mentions, but only 17 answers cite pcgarage.ro.
Flanco	24	48	half of its mentions come with a page of its own cited alongside.
Altex	45	76	recommendation backed by its own content in almost six cases out of ten.
eMAG	50	82	the most cited domain in the market (50 answers) and the most named brand — the two reinforce each other.
evoMAG	30	47	the only case measured in both directions: 21 of the 47 answers naming it cite no evomag.ro page at all, and in another 4 answers evomag.ro is cited as a source without evoMAG being recommended.
ITGalaxy	8	8	always cited when named: every time it appears in an answer, its own site is cited too. A small retailer, but with a verifiable presence of its own behind every appearance.

Left: in how many answers the brand's domain is cited · right: in how many answers the brand is named

Media Galaxy: 0.24an inherited position

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: 1.00a presence of its own

Every time it is named, its own site is cited too. A small retailer — 8 mentions in the whole set — but with a verifiable presence of its own behind every appearance. It is the position a mid-sized retailer can actually build: few appearances, but each one backed by its own content.

— The inverse case, more instructive

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 · The competitors nobody tracks

Which retailers does AI recommend beyond Romania's big chains?

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 · Limitations of this study

What are the 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
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 profile, one country, one language
An unpersonalised profile, with no history. A user with search history might receive different answers.
Source type classification is the authors'
The split into retailer, listicle, community and price comparison was done by the authors and is, by nature, debatable at the margins.

— 10 · Implications

What does this mean for an electronics retailer in Romania?

Three implications that follow directly from the data without exceeding it.

01
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.
02
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.
03
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

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 — the engines constantly name retailers outside the set, from Flip.ro to Decathlon.
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 the methodology and in the limitations section, 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.

— 12 · Data and charts

The data, deposited publicly

Every figure on this page comes from these files. They are published under a CC BY 4.0 licence: you may use, republish and dispute them, provided you cite the source.

— DOI and mirrors

The dataset is deposited on Zenodo under DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21821185, licensed CC BY 4.0. The DOI always resolves to the latest version of the data. This page remains the canonical version of the analysis.

Zenodocanonical data deposit, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21821185, CC BY 4.0
GitHubthe same files, with history and verifiable checksums
Kagglethe three CSV files, with a column dictionary, for direct analysis
Hugging Facedataset card + viewer, for the audience that works with models

Suggested citation: Alexandrescu, D. C. / Websem (2026). AI-engine visibility of Romania's electronics and IT market, August 2026 [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21821185

Raw data

Per-retailer data (CSV)13 retailers × mentions, per-engine rates, citations, weighted visibility, sentiment
Mentions per question (CSV)the 18 questions × the 13 retailers — 234 rows
Top cited domains (CSV)the top 60 of the 249 domains cited

Charts for republication (SVG)

Vector files, with the source written into the chart. Free to use in articles and presentations.

The analysis, republished

dev.torepublication, English version, canonical pointing here

— The Websem AEO study series

This is episode 3. Episode 1, the AI visibility of luxury jewelry, photographed a small, niche market. Episode 2, Romania's book market, measured a fragmented one, where 58% of answers named no major bookstore. Electronics is the exact opposite: 86 of 87 answers name a major retailer. The three episodes use the same method and can be read comparatively — each one's data is deposited publicly, under its own DOI.

Method and responsibility note

This study presents results obtained by automated querying of 5 public AI engines, in one complete run on 3 August 2026, using a fixed panel of 18 questions containing no brand names. All brands mentioned in this material were named by the artificial-intelligence engines, not by the study's authors.

The material is market research and information. It does not constitute an evaluation of the quality of products, services, prices or commercial performance of any retailer, does not express a Websem opinion on these aspects, and has no comparative-advertising purpose. “X is the most visible” does not mean “X is the best”.

The names and trademarks mentioned belong to their rightful holders and are used exclusively for identification, within a factual analysis, in accordance with fair industrial and commercial practice. The 13 tracked retailers do not exhaust Romania's electronics and IT market.

The results reflect the state of the engines on the day of measurement and may change. We received no funding from any analysed brand and no brand saw the study before publication. All figures can be re-verified from the published raw data, and any error reported will be corrected publicly, with versioning.

Contact for corrections: office@websem.ro · Websem · SUPREMIUM GENESIS S.R.L.

Want to know what position your shop occupies inside AI answers? Websem monitors AI-engine visibility for Romanian brands and builds AEO/GEO strategies on data, not intuition — get in touch.

Original Websem study · Dan Cristian Alexandrescu · data collected 3 August 2026 · published 6 August 2026. The study measures AI-engine behaviour, not the quality of the companies mentioned.