By Sari Sotkas, marketing director
In brief
Generative AI is no longer a new technology — it is already part of customers’ daily lives. According to Statistics Finland, 23% of the population in Finland uses AI, and according to the Consumer Adoption of AI Report conducted in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia in January 2025, 47% of consumers already use AI search to help them decide when considering buying products or services.
The AI Search Index study: Finnish companies do not show up in the AI searches customers make.
The customer no longer scrolls through lists; they ask directly: what is the best option? And AI answers on the basis of what it can find.
If your company isn’t mentioned, it doesn’t exist from the customer’s point of view. Now is the moment to make sure AI finds your company — and recommends it.
AI search is displacing traditional Google search
Search behaviour is undergoing a major shift. As the Finnish MIT professor Bengt Holmström put it at an AI Finland event in March: “I don’t google at all any more, I just talk to ChatGPT.”
Others besides Bengt have changed their habits. According to Statistics Finland, 23% of Finns used AI in 2024, and the most common reason was looking for information. Young people have adopted AI more widely still: 45% of 16–24-year-olds and 38% of 25–34-year-olds had used it. According to Attest’s Consumer Adoption of AI Report, conducted in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia in January 2025, 47% of consumers already use AI search to help them decide when considering buying products or services.
A traditional search engine offers a list of links; AI gives a direct answer. As a result, a company’s visibility in the results of digital services no longer depends on search engine optimisation alone. A new era has begun: influencing the recommendations generative AI makes.
A competitor arrived quickly, offering clear recommendations instead of links
Google’s journey to becoming the world’s most popular search engine has been unique, and it has dominated online information seeking for over 20 years. Search results have rested largely on Google’s algorithms and commercial visibility — pay and you got a place at the top.
AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, and Perplexity offer direct answers, clear recommendations, and condensed comparisons without the user having to click links, rake through multiple pages, and try to find what they’re after. The experience is more like a conversation with an expert.
This shift is accelerated in particular by information seeking for products and services that are hard to grasp or rarely bought. A customer looking for insurance, banking services, electric cars, home electronics, health services, medicines, or technology solutions increasingly asks AI directly: “What is the best option for me?” The answer may be a competitor’s product or service rather than your company’s. AI services already act as customer service, marketers, and salespeople. If AI does not mention your company’s product or service, the customer is more likely to choose a competitor.
AI Search Index: Finnish companies do not show up in AI searches
In spring 2025, the Finnish company Superlines carried out an extensive AI Search Index study analysing the visibility of Finland’s 100 largest companies in five major language models: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, and Perplexity. The analysis was based on 3,500 Finnish-language questions derived from real Google searches.
The results are clear and worrying:
● Only three companies (Microsoft, Posti, and Karl Fazer) were recommended in more than half of AI conversations.
● The average for the 50 listed companies in the top 100 was 22%
● The retail sector average was 23%
● Industrial companies averaged 20%
● Finance and insurance companies averaged 19%
● 75% of the companies studied get visibility in only 0–30% of results, meaning the AI service often does not mention that company, its products, or its services to the person searching at all
In practice this means most companies fall outside the customer’s consideration and decision-making, because the AI does not even mention them.
What should a company do — how do you get into AI recommendations?
Companies now need to adapt quickly to a new logic of visibility. This is about AI optimisation, or generative engine optimisation (GEO). Where search engine optimisation (SEO) aims at understanding search engine algorithms, GEO seeks to influence the recommendations language models build. You do not get recommended by AI by accident. A company has to influence systematically what kind of information — and how readily usable — the language models find about it.
To show up in AI recommendations, a company should proceed in three stages:
1. Analyse the current state: how does your company show up in AI searches now?
Find out to what extent your company, products, and services come up when AI answers questions in your field.
Use a tool such as Superlines’ AI Search Tracker, or run your own searches on different platforms and with different question patterns.
2. Plan and carry out improvements
Produce AI-friendly content: clear, conversational, and directly answering the questions people ask.
Emphasise expertise, concrete benefits, and clear differences from competitors.
Make sure the content is published in places language models index effectively (your own website, blogs, expert articles, and the forums AI also draws information from).
3. Define ongoing practices and track progress
Build GEO into your marketing and communications strategy comprehensively (covering company information, products, services, employer brand, environmental credentials, investor relations, and so on).
Monitor your visibility on AI platforms regularly and update content to match users’ changing questions.
Train your content team to understand what AI “reads” and “understands” — and why good content has to be genuinely useful.
AI conversations offer an entirely new marketing channel, and now is the time to make use of it.
About the writer
Sari Sotkas (LinkedIn) works as an adviser and specialist at Superlines. Sari has broad experience in marketing and CEO roles across sectors. She helps organisations use data, AI, and new innovations more intelligently.
“I have been using AI and advanced technology in marketing, sales, and improving customer experience since 2009 — back then it required data scientists and carefully defined logic. Now we are at the birth of a new marketing channel: AI conversations, which companies have to learn to make use of.”
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