AI visibility in Czechia, Poland and Austria: what buyers ask an assistant, and why a translated prompt misses all three

One purchase, three questions: Prague, Warsaw and Vienna

Put the same purchase in front of three buyers. A small company needs hosting. In Prague the question that gets typed is closer to "Jaký webhosting je nejlepší pro malou firmu?" In Warsaw it is "Jaki hosting wybrać dla małej firmy?" In Vienna it is "Welcher Webhoster ist für ein kleines Unternehmen in Österreich empfehlenswert?" These are our own illustrations, not survey data, but the differences in them are the real ones.

The vocabulary differs: "webhosting" in Czech, "hosting" in Polish, "Webhoster" in German. The qualifiers differ: the Austrian buyer names the country because German-language answers otherwise default to Germany. The providers the buyer already knows differ, and so do the review sites, the forums and the regulators the assistant will lean on when it builds its answer.

An English prompt, "best web hosting for a small business", translated three times, keeps the English shape of the question and drops all of that. It then measures how an assistant answers a question nobody in those markets asks.

What the research says about language and citations

This is not a hunch. Ki and colleagues tested six models across eight languages in 2025 and found that models "preferentially cite English sources when queries are in English", and that the bias is stronger for lower-resource languages, sometimes at the cost of relevance¹. Park and Lee showed in February 2025 that the retrievers feeding these systems prefer both high-resource languages and the language of the query².

Search engines and AI Overviews in Czechia, Poland and Austria

Czechia

Google held 79.3% of search and Seznam 15.6% in August 2026, on StatCounter's count, with Bing at 3.9%³. Seznam is still a sixth of the market, and it is not part of any AI Overview. We have found no published study of AI Overviews on Czech queries, so for Czechia the click effect below is an assumption borrowed from the neighbours.

Poland

Senuto's November 2025 report covered 17.76 million Polish keywords. AI Overviews appeared on 28.95% of phrases, which carried 14.87% of search volume, and clicks for positions one to ten fell by 19.5% when one appeared⁵.

Austria and the German language

The largest German-language dataset is Sistrix's February 2026 study of 100 million keywords on Google Germany. About 20% of them showed an AI Overview. The click-through rate of position one dropped from 27% to 11%, and Sistrix put the loss at 265 million clicks a month⁴. Austria is a smaller market with the same language and the same product, so we use the German figures as the best available proxy and label them as such.

Google reports AI Overviews in more than 200 countries and territories and 40 languages⁶, and AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly users in July 2026⁷. Czech, Polish and German are all served. The answers exist in each language today, whether or not anyone is reading them on your behalf.

How to write AI visibility prompts per market

1. Start from real questions, not keywords. Support tickets, sales calls and the local forums where the category is discussed. A keyword is what someone types into Google. A prompt is what they say to an assistant, and it is longer, more specific and in their own words.
2. Write them in the language, by a native speaker. Not translated. The prompt should sound like the Warsaw buyer, including the local product names, the currency and the city where it matters.
3. Keep the set fixed per market. Ten to twenty prompts is enough to start. Change a prompt and you have a new series, not a trend.
4. Run them in each assistant separately and store the full answer text. The competitors named in the Polish answers are the Polish competitor set. They will not match the Czech one.
5. Read the citations per market. Which review site, which forum, which vendor page the assistant leaned on in Czech is the list of places your claim needs to exist in Czech.

This is how markets work in GEONALY: each market has its own prompt set, its own competitor list and its own report, and the prompts are written in the market's language. Markets come with the plan; the split is on the pricing page.

What to expect when you compare the three markets

Expect the three reports to disagree. A brand can lead the Czech shortlist and be absent from the German one, because the pages that make the German case for it do not exist. Expect the cited sources to differ more than the mentions do: local review sites and forums in one market, an encyclopaedia or a vendor page in another. And expect the smaller language to be the noisier one, since fewer pages means the assistant's choice rests on fewer sources.

Sources

Published 21 September 2026. If a model or a figure above changes, this line says what changed and when.