AI is building your customers' shortlists. Are you on them?

AI is writing your customers' shortlists, drawing on Reddit threads, YouTube videos and press coverage to decide which brands make the cut. Most businesses have no idea whether they're on them.

At our recent Leadership Lunch in London, Mediaworks CTO Daniel Hoggan and Non-Executive Director Kevin Telford mapped out how customers now discover, decide and buy, and how brands can find out where they stand.

One decision, six surfaces, nine seconds

A single purchase can run for ten weeks across six platforms: an Instagram post, two YouTube comparisons, a Reddit thread read at 11pm, a question to ChatGPT, a branded Google search, then reviews and checkout. Nobody chooses a channel along the way. They choose whatever answers the need in front of them.

Ask an AI assistant for the best laptop for a student who edits video and it runs that same sequence in about nine seconds, then hands back a shortlist.

Those shortlists draw on the places buyers already use to vet a brand. In Peec AI's analysis of 30 million citations across the major AI platforms, Reddit ranked first or second on every engine tested, with YouTube also among the most-cited domains alongside press coverage and third-party roundups. The mix varies by platform and changes month to month, but community presence, video and PR now work as search inputs.

The journey didn't get shorter. The part you can measure did.

SparkToro and Similarweb data shows 69.5% of UK Google searches ended without a click in the first four months of 2026, across Google search generally rather than AI alone. Last-click attribution sees only the branded search at the end, measuring the final doorway and missing the weeks of persuasion before it. With WPP Media and Oxford research showing 84% of purchases come from people already leaning towards a brand before they start buying, budgets that follow the dashboard end up defunding the activity that did the persuading.

Much of that persuading happens in the verification search. "New homes near Newcastle" is discovery, won by rankings and site structure. "Is this lot any good?" is verification, settled by reviews, forums and coverage, and AI answers lean heavily on it. In B2B, a supplier can drop off the list before sales hears about the opportunity, because an assistant couldn't find its coverage, accreditations or response times.

How to find out if you're on the list

Start with the buying decision that drives most of your revenue, such as a key product range or service line.

Write the prompts a real buyer would use at each stage: discovery ("best [category] for [need]"), comparison ("[your brand] vs [competitor]") and verification ("is [your brand] any good?"). Run them across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews and Perplexity, and repeat them over several weeks, since a single answer proves very little.

For each prompt, record four things for your brand and two competitors:

• Presence: do you appear at all?

• Position: where do you sit on the shortlist?

• Description: is what the AI says about you accurate and current?

• Sources: which sites does it cite?

The sources usually reveal the most, showing where the answer is built and whether you feature there.

What to fix first

The gaps you find will fall into three groups.

What you own: your site, facts, listings and how machine-readable they are. A property page showing a lone "1" beside an icon means nothing to a model reading raw text, while "1 New Incentive Available" gives it something to quote. B2B suppliers should publish scope, coverage, lead times, accreditations and cost guidance, so buyers don't have to book a meeting to find out whether you belong on the list. These are the fastest fixes.

What you influence: coverage, community presence, and review volume and recency. If AI keeps citing a trade title, subreddit or comparison site where you don't feature, focus your PR and review activity there.

What is simply true: your rating against a rival's, accreditations you don't hold and the quality of what you sell. A four-star brand up against a five-star rival has an operations problem that now shows up as a marketing problem, and that finding belongs with the leadership team.

How we help brands make the shortlist

AI agents will take on more of the buying process over time, from shortlisting to purchase. If your brand can't make the shortlist today, automated checkout won't solve that problem tomorrow.

Mediaworks’ AI visibility assessment runs this audit across your most important buying decisions, with UX and technology support to fix what it finds. To see where your brand stands, speak to our team.