Your customers are already asking AI. You're not, yet.

Do people in Bulgaria already ask AI instead of Google?

This one surprised me when I started digging. ChatGPT took off in Bulgaria in the same week it took off in America, the first week of December 2022, and Bulgaria has only ever been a couple of months behind since. It's not just ChatGPT either. Compared with ChatGPT, Bulgarians look up Gemini far more than Americans do, and Google switched on AI Mode, the version of search you have a conversation with, in Bulgarian on 7 October last year. So the tools are here and people are using them, and you can even see the moment they stopped needing it explained: searches in Bulgarian for "what is ChatGPT" have dropped by about two thirds in a year. Nobody asks what it is anymore. They just ask it things.

Are Bulgarian businesses behind on AI search?

Now look at the other side of the counter. When Bulgarian business owners go to Google to ask how to show up in ChatGPT, or anything like it, the numbers barely register, and I don't mean small, I mean basically nothing. The best clue to how far behind we are is a name change. Google renamed Google My Business to Google Business Profile at the end of 2021, Bulgarians only started searching for the new name regularly at the end of 2025, four years later, and the old name still gets around two thousand searches a month here. I'm not having a go at anyone. Most business owners are busy running the actual business, and that's exactly why nobody has told them yet.

What happened in America first?

America shows us what's coming, because it has already been through it. Until late April 2025 hardly anyone there searched for "AI SEO". Then it exploded, peaked around September, and it has been falling ever since, from about 9,900 searches a month in February this year to 5,400 in September. The quick fixes went the same way. llms.txt, the little file everyone was told to add for AI, peaked in May and June this year and is fading, mostly because almost nothing was reading it. What's growing now is people asking how they can tell whether any of it is working: searches for "AI visibility" have more than tripled in a year, and "how to rank in ChatGPT" went from about 90 a month to 320. So the order went panic, then tricks, then measuring, and it took them roughly eighteen months.

When will Bulgarian businesses start caring about AI search?

I'm not putting a date on the calendar, but if America is the guide, Bulgarian customers have now had the tools for about a year, and the business side always follows. My call is that sometime in 2027 Bulgarian business owners start asking these questions in real numbers, and it will come in the same order, first someone selling them a trick, then the penny dropping that they need to know whether it actually works. We check the Bulgarian searches every week now, so when they start moving I'll come back and mark it here, right or wrong.

Who is selling AI search tricks in the meantime?

The selling has already started, before most businesses have even asked the question. In America there's a whole script for it now: a cold email telling you your business is missing from ChatGPT, a guaranteed fix, a screenshot as proof, sent from a company nobody has heard of with a "top experts" list that has itself at number one. Here's the thing about that screenshot. We asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity forty Sofia business questions, three times each, all on the same day. ChatGPT put the same business first less than half the time and Gemini about a third of the time. Same question, same day. So a screenshot of you at number one proves you were number one once, for one person, on one go, and that's what they're selling you. Even the tools built to track this don't agree with each other: give three of them the same questions and you get three different answers, and some charge up to a thousand dollars a month for it. And since 15 May this year Google treats trying to rig its AI answers as spam, so the clever trick can get you pushed down or thrown out. Anyone guaranteeing you a place in an AI answer is either lying or doesn't understand what they're selling, and I honestly don't know which is worse. I've already seen offers here that tie a business in for twelve months on this. A year, for something nobody can measure the same way twice. Ask what you'll actually see each month, and if the answer is a screenshot, walk away.

Ask what you'll actually see each month, and if the answer is a screenshot, walk away.

What should a Bulgarian business do before the wave hits?

The boring stuff, which happens to be the stuff that works. Find out what your customers actually ask, not the keyword but the real question, and answer it properly on your own site, in plain words, the way you'd answer it across the counter. Get your Google Business Profile complete and keep it matching your website, because it's one of the main places Google's AI reads about a local business. Get other people talking about you, in reviews, in the local press, a client mentioning you, because when AI quotes something it's mostly quoting other people, not you talking about yourself. And once a month, check how often the AI tools name you across lots of questions, never just one. Do it now while it's quiet, and when Bulgarian businesses wake up to this you'll be the one already there, not the one buying the screenshot.