Google-First Poland: Field Notes on Where Buyers Start With AI

Live poll results and study data from our Warsaw session on 11 June 2026, plus the three findings that surprised a room full of marketers.

On 11 June 2026 we ran "The Discovery Shift" at Venture Café Warsaw (CIC). One live poll, data from our AI Brand Index Polska 2026 study (46 brands, 17,891 citations, 1,907 unique source domains), and the first public demo of our voice AI consultant. This article keeps the three findings that got the strongest reaction in the room.

Finding 1: Poland starts with Google. Even its favourite AI is Google's.

We asked the room one question before the talk: when you last searched for a product or a service, where did you start?

The result: Google Search 50%, Gemini 25%, ChatGPT 17%, Perplexity 4%, Claude 4%.

Read the top two lines together: 75% of the room starts inside Google's ecosystem. Half of Poland's marketers asked the room have moved to an AI assistant, and the assistant they picked is Google's Gemini, ahead of ChatGPT.

The same poll at our Baltic events splits differently: 51% still start with Google, while 48% open an AI platform first, with ChatGPT alone taking 36%. Poland and the Baltics are moving to the same destination on two different roads. If your market is Poland, your AI visibility work runs through Google's surfaces (AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini grounding) more than anywhere else in the region.

One honesty note: this is a hand-raised room poll, useful as a field signal. The study data below is the measured part.

Finding 2: One screenshot proves nothing. Fifty-four runs prove a pattern.

Most companies still check their AI visibility by asking ChatGPT once and pasting a screenshot into a board deck. We call it the screenshot test, and it produces opposite conclusions five minutes apart.

The fix is counting. We asked the same ice-cream question 54 times across three AI models. Grycan appeared in 46 of 54 runs. Algida appeared in 36. Two different screenshots from those runs would tell two opposite stories, and both would be "true" on the day they were taken.

The rule of thumb we use: five runs to check if you exist in AI's head, fifteen to know who AI is actually pushing, forty when the board needs to defend the number. You can run this yourself in a spreadsheet, or with our free Dice Roller.

Finding 3: Two brands, same freezer, very different engines

AI builds its picture of a brand from parts: the sources it cites when it describes you. We opened two reputation engines side by side, from the Polska 2026 brand data.

Grycan (ARI 80.2) runs on a dense layer it owns and earns: 31% of citations from its own domains, real food-service portals, YouTube, Wikipedia. Algida (ARI 70.9) runs mostly on the long tail: 25.4% of its citations come from domains mentioned a few times each, and no single category dominates.

The row that surprised the room: career and employer portals. Grycan, 0%. Algida, 9.3% of its entire engine, carried by LiveCareer, Indeed and InterviewMe. Nobody in marketing chose those sources, and nobody audits them. We documented this pattern across the full study in AI grounds brands on job boards.

The channel nobody skipped: YouTube

Across all 46 brands and 17,891 citations, here is the TOP 20 of non-owned domains AI cites when describing Polish brands.

YouTube is first with 1,592 citations, and it is the only medium in the study where every single one of the 46 brands appeared. It carries 36.6% of the TOP 20 citation pool. Marketplaces (Ceneo, Allegro, Media Expert) follow. Four of the next fifteen positions are employer-reputation portals, together 460 citations, more than Forbes Polska and Business Insider Polska combined.

The practical reading: a brand with no YouTube footprint is absent from the one channel AI never skips, and in Poland that now matters more than a tier-1 press hit.

What to do with this

Three moves we showed on stage, each shippable in about a developer-afternoon:

1. Tell AI what changed. Google's AI answers weight freshness. Give every page an honest per-page date; a sitemap that stamps everything "today" teaches crawlers to ignore you.
2. Answer questions visibly. Pages that ask the buyer's question out loud and answer it, with matching structured data underneath, are the pages AI can quote.
3. Push, do not wait. IndexNow and Cloudflare's Crawler Hints take pushed URL lists; discovery drops from days to minutes.

Then repeat it. AI visibility is a habit: roll the baseline, read the diagnosis, repair in order, roll again next quarter.

Check your own brand

Run your brand through the free Dice Roller, no sign-up. The full AI Brand Index Polska 2026 methodology and results are in our research library.

Disclaimer: we do not rate company or product quality. We measure brand visibility, narrative and recommendability in AI answers.