---
title: Known, Not Recommended
description: Discover how AI influences vendor selection and why online mentions matter more than your website in shaping buyer decisions.
image: https://ifekete.com/hubfs/Felix-Gonzalez-Torres-22Untitled22-Portrait-of-Ross-in-L.A.-1991-The-Art-Institute-of-Chicago.webp
---

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# Known, **Not Recommended**

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Do you usually compare the vendors or pick from the ones that show up?

Until we analyze the process of how choosing works we are not aware of it. Here is the catch: you have a careful part of your thinking which only judges the options the fast thinker part hands it, and the fast part isn't weighing, but fetching everything.

Now we have built tools to do the fetching for ourselves.

Ask a chat tool to describe your company and it will probably get it right. [Victorious](https://victorious.com/podcast/q2-2026-quarterly-search-report/) tested 175 brands this summer across legal, healthcare, SaaS, finance and retail, on eight different AI systems. Asked directly about a company, the machines described it accurately about 96% of the time.

Then came the question a buyer actually asks. Best tool for this. Who should I be looking at.

89% of those same brands never came up at all.

Recognised, and never named. Two different things, and only one of them pays.

[G2](https://learn.g2.com/g2-2026-ai-search-insight-report) surveyed 1,076 software buyers in March. AI chat is now the single biggest influence on shortlists, and 69% said it pushed them toward a vendor they weren't expecting.

So where do the names come from?

Victorious pulled nearly 50,000 citations out of those answers. 99.99% of them pointed somewhere other than the brand's own site. The strongest predictor of getting named was how many other pages on the web mention you. Under 2,000 mentions, a brand got named 3% of the time. Above 30,000, 64%.

Which means your homepage is not in this fight.

You can spend Saturday rewriting your hero section and it will not change what gets suggested to a buyer on Monday.

It decides something else. Every one of those mentions is a person repeating a sentence. A reviewer with a text box to fill. Someone answering a question in a meeting you will never sit in. They don't quote your page, they repeat whatever they still remember of it, and what they remember is shorter and flatter than anything you ever approved on a call.

So the test isn't whether your sentence reads well on screen. It's whether it survives being said out loud, from memory, in a hurry, by someone who doesn't work for you.

Three clauses won't survive that. "Flexible" and "enterprise-ready" won't either. Nobody repeats an adjective.

Ask one customer what they said about you the last time your name came up. Write it down exactly as they said it.

Featured image: Félix González-Torres – **Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)**, 1991, Candies individually wrapped in multicolor cellophane, endless supply. Dimensions vary with installation; ideal weight 175 lbs, installation view, The Art Institute of Chicago, photo: [CC BY 2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)  by [mark6mauno](https://www.flickr.com/people/mark6mauno/)

![István Fekete](https://145572396.fs1.hubspotusercontent-eu1.net/hubfs/145572396/Fekete_Istvan.webp)

[**István Fekete**](https://ifekete.com/blog/author/istvan-fekete)

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