What Google, Perplexity and Claude recommend when a customer looks for a restaurant or a bakery in Bucharest
What we learned from almost 16 weeks of measurements
There is no stable ranking. From 14 July to 2 November 2026 we asked Google, Perplexity and Claude the same questions, again and again, the way a customer in Bucharest would. Google's AI summary comes and goes, the first place changes at almost every measurement, and the answers rely on a few sources.
How we measured
We fixed 18 questions, worded like a customer would word them and without any company name, for example "What is the best artisan bakery in Bucharest?" or "Where can I find French pastries and cakes in Bucharest?". We asked them in 12 sessions between 14 July and 2 November and noted every time what each engine answered and which sources it used.
The figures cover 278 answers: 97 from Google, 173 from Perplexity (without an account) and 8 from Claude, run automatically and without memory.
What we saw
1. Google's AI summary comes and goes
Sometimes Google shows an AI-generated summary with recommendations above the results. This is how often we saw it:
| Date | Questions with an AI summary |
|---|---|
| 14 July – 7 September (6 sessions) | 0 of 26 |
| 22 September | 1 of 6 |
| 29 September | 9 of 10 |
| 5 October | 7 of 8 |
| 12 October | 0 of 11 |
| 26 October | 16 of 18 |
| 2 November | 17 of 18 |
We do not know why. It looks like a change made by Google, not by the businesses we followed.
2. The first place moves
On the question about artisan bakeries, the first name in Perplexity's answer changed from one measurement to the next in 9 cases out of 10. Across 11 sessions there were 5 different names in first place.
The engines do not agree with each other either. On 1–2 November, for both the Romanian and the English version of the question, two engines out of three put the same name first, and the third put a different one.
3. The sources are few
On the same question, a single local news site appears among Google's results in at least 6 of 10 sessions, and a restaurant guide in at least 5 of 10. It looks like the engines lean heavily on what others have written about a business, not only on its own website.
4. Sometimes there is a stable leader
On the question about who builds websites and AI agents for restaurants and cafés, the same provider came first in Perplexity in 8 of 11 sessions. The data cannot tell us why. It can only tell us that stability exists and that it is not the rule.
What this means for a restaurant or a bakery
- It is not worth chasing a number one spot that keeps moving. It is worth being present in several places the engines read from.
- Complete your Google profile (hours, address, products, photos) and answer reviews.
- Check which local lists and guides feature businesses in your field, and whether you are in them.
- Write direct answers on your website to your customers' questions: where you are, until what time you are open, what you sell, what it is made of.
- Measure the same questions at regular intervals. A single check is a photograph, not a trend.
Limits and transparency
- ChatGPT is not in the figures: we run it from an account with memory switched on, which personalises the answers.
- There were 12 sessions in almost 16 weeks, not one per week. In four sessions Perplexity blocked part of the runs without an account; those questions are excluded, not counted as zero. Running without an account is explicitly recorded from 7 September onwards.
- We ran Google in a browser, from different locations, sometimes from outside Romania. Location and session can influence the result, and we cannot fully separate them.
- The figures about sources are counted from our measurement notes, so they are lower bounds.
Want to see how your business appears for your customers' questions? Write to us at [email protected] and we will do an AI visibility audit.