Who sells the book when the customer asks an AI? Romania's book market across 5 AI engines

When someone asks ChatGPT "which online bookstore should I use for children's books?", they get one answer, not ten blue links.

So we measured who is inside that answer.

We put 18 real purchase questions to five AI engines — ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews — in Romanian, from Romania, across two complete weekly runs. No question contained a brand name. Every brand that appears was named by the engine on its own.

The result: 180 analysed answers, 247 brand mentions, 21 tracked brands, 422 distinct cited domains.

The headline finding is the one we did not expect.