The four places an SME must now be found

Ten years ago, being found meant ranking well on Google. Today your customer may discover you in a ChatGPT answer, in a YouTube video, or in a Reddit thread you have never read.

In our Swiss-French observatory, which tracks what the assistants cite across ten sectors, Reddit is the most cited site across all sectors, ahead of YouTube. Two platforms where almost no Swiss SME writes anything.

Four surfaces now matter. They do not call for the same work, and they do not weigh the same in every sector.

Web search: Google and Bing

This is the foundation and the best-known part. It stays decisive, including for the assistants: in our corpus, 61.5 % of the pages cited by Google's AI Overview are also cited by another answer engine.

Three moves carry most of the result.

Pick the five pages that carry your revenue. Write 8 to 12 supporting posts around each one and link them all back to it.

Increase trust signals: an identifiable author bio, customer reviews, a visible last-updated date. Among the Swiss pages we analysed one by one, 41 % show a named author and 63 % use structured data.

Improve the mobile experience, where most searches happen.

The assistants: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot

The work resembles search optimisation, with one difference: the assistant composes an answer from several pages and cites only a few of them.

Take a question a buyer actually asks. Then ask the assistant which sub-questions it checks before answering. You get 5 to 10 back. Answer each on a single page, under its own heading.

Then export every site the assistants cite for your 30 most important questions. Look for the rankings and comparisons where a competitor appears and you do not. Then email those editors.

This point is the most profitable and the most neglected. In our corpus, 97.1 % of the citations in an AI Overview come from a third-party site. What the AI says about your company was therefore almost always written elsewhere.

Finally, measure continuously. You cannot fix what you never observe, and an isolated citation proves nothing: 59.3 % of cited pages are cited on a single day.

Video: YouTube

YouTube comes right behind Reddit in our citations. The assistants draw demonstrations, explanations and opinions from it.

Reuse one long-form piece across several platforms rather than producing anew. A client presentation, a webinar or a technical explanation filmed once can serve several times.

Adapt formats that already work on the platform, rather than transposing a corporate video onto it.

Work on visuals and on-screen text. They carry comprehension without sound, and a good share of views happens that way.

Social platforms: Reddit, LinkedIn, X, Instagram, Facebook

This is the least controllable surface, and it weighs the most in our measurements.

Engage in communities in natural ways, without placement logic. A company account that only speaks up to cite itself is spotted immediately, and the result runs against the intent.

Create per platform rather than reposting the same document everywhere. What works on LinkedIn does not work on Reddit.

Reuse formats that have already circulated in that specific community. Each has its codes, and they cannot be guessed from outside.

Where to start

The four surfaces are not worked at the same time, and rarely in the same order across sectors.

Web search and the assistants go together: they largely share the same sources, so the effort counts twice. That is the sensible starting point for most SMEs.

Video and social platforms are justified when your customers really spend time there. That is checked sector by sector rather than assumed.

If you hand this work to a provider, the scope covered is one of the points to clarify. We have listed the six questions to ask before signing.

Method and limits(3)

1. Corpus. Observatory of Swiss-French sources, derived from Repliq's Swiss Atlas: 65,106 citations collected over twelve weeks across 313 sites, on ten sectors of the French-speaking Swiss market. August 2026 edition.
2. The per-engine figures come from Swiss Atlas, 20 April to 12 August 2026, on the same scope.
3. What these figures do not say. They describe French-speaking Switzerland and do not transpose unchanged. The ranking of cited sites varies widely by sector: Reddit's place across all sectors says nothing about its place in yours.

See the sources cited in French-speaking Switzerland→