Does your brand show up in AI answers? How GEO works for Swedish companies

Swedes have already switched search box

This is not a forecast. According to Internetstiftelsen's Svenskarna och internet 2025, 39 percent of internet users aged 18–84 use AI tools, and one in three uses ChatGPT. The behaviour is the more telling part: among those who already use AI, just over half — 52 percent — say they turn to AI instead of a search engine. One Swede in five now puts questions to a language model that they would have googled a couple of years ago.

A second source confirms it. SCB's Befolkningens it-användning 2025 found that 3.2 million people — 37 percent of everyone over 16 — had used generative AI tools in the previous three months, rising to 67 percent among 16–24-year-olds. That is the cohort moving into serious spending age, and they begin their research in a chat box.

Why Swedish queries behave differently

Here the Swedish market parts ways with the English-speaking one. Language models are trained on the web, and Swedish is a small slice of that material — English dominates outright, while most other languages trail far behind. The Nordic languages have needed their own efforts, such as the Viking models, precisely because they were underrepresented to begin with.

The effect is measurable. A 2026 study, The Language Blind Spot, examined how AI describes brands across twelve European languages. The conclusion: smaller, local brands get worse and more fabricated answers when they are queried in their own language than in English. The less known the brand, the wider the gap. For a Swedish company that means a question asked in Swedish — exactly how your customers actually ask — is the setting where you run the greatest risk of being invisible or misquoted.

What the models actually read in Swedish

When the Swedish-language material is thinner, the model leans harder on the sources it can find and trust. On Swedish queries Perplexity often cites authorities such as Skatteverket, news sites such as SVT, banks' own pages and established review platforms — as Searchboost among others notes. Reviews in particular are becoming a central data point: the review site Reco argues that verified reviews will be one of the heaviest trust signals in the next search era.

Two things make this hard. First, the platforms disagree with each other. A review of B2B citations by Averi found that only 11 percent of domains were cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity — in practice they see different webs. The same review found ChatGPT accounted for around 63 percent of measurable AI-referred B2B traffic, so where you are cited matters. Second, a mention rarely leads to a click: most times a brand is cited in an AI answer, nobody visits the site itself. The mention — the model saying your name in the right context — is the value, not the traffic.

GEO for Swedish companies, concretely

GEO, generative engine optimisation, is not about tricking the models but about making it easy for them to cite you correctly. Four things carry the most weight on the Swedish market. Write real content in Swedish about what you do, in plain language with clear headings — the model can only summarise what it can read. Add structured data (schema.org) so your organisation, services and reviews become machine-readable. Make sure the facts about you match on the sources the models already trust: allabolag, industry registers, your Google profile and the review sites relevant to your field. And measure — start by asking ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity about your industry in Swedish and reading who they name.

That last step is what separates guessing from knowing. A mention scan runs the queries for you, across several models, and shows in black and white whether you appear, how you are described and who gets named in your place.

Run a mention scan on your brand

GEO in Swedish, briefly