At the Macedonian E-commerce Association, we believe that advancing e-commerce goes beyond national borders. Alongside organizing the E-commerce Conference, we actively collaborate with leading regional events and organizations to bring valuable knowledge, global trends, and networking opportunities closer to the Macedonian e-commerce community.
One of our long-standing regional partners is SERP Conf., a conference dedicated to SEO, AI, and search marketing. As part of our collaboration, we spoke with Nikola Minkov, Founder & CEO of Serpact, about how AI is reshaping search, what the arrival of Google Shopping means for businesses in our region, and how small companies can increase their visibility in the age of AI.
1. Let’s start with the question on everyone’s mind: how does an AI model actually decide which business or product to recommend? What can a small business influence?
Well, let’s answer this like an SEO: It depends. It can be frustrating for readers to see this, but let me be clear: the context matters enormously.
There are many factors, some highly technical, but let me explain it simply.
First, let’s explore the relevance of the content. If someone asks about, for example, “sustainable fashion” – a concept that matters a lot to Gen Z – the AI checks which sites have the strongest semantic correspondence with that idea. Then it “weighs” (let’s use this word) how often a site or piece of content is cited by other authoritative sources, whether there are links, and in what context those citations appear.
It can boost businesses’ content to appear in AI systems if the texts are formulated with key terms, written in clear sentences that connect to both a broader and a narrower category, the main messages are placed at the very beginning of every text, and counterexamples are also added. AI systems like clear, well-structured passages that can be easily summarized, cited, or transformed into direct answers.
So, treat your first 100 words as your own Google AI Overview: give the definition, explain the result, and address the topic, audience, and outcome right away, then always close any data or example with a clear conclusion. That is the difference between being a “fact collector” and being cited as an expert. And AI systems love cited materials.
At my agency, we have a tool that lets us verify every stated fact. The development and refinement of this technology took over 20 months. We have been deploying it across our global client base, with outcomes that exceed our expectations. It is now available to the audience.
In the new reality, one of the key SEO responsibilities is to ensure that a business’s products, services, and brand name are consistently associated across authoritative and trustworthy sources, so AI systems and search engines can discover these signals clearly. In my opinion, this is the way small businesses can compete with giants – by being more relevant, more consistent, and more focused on their specific niche.
Of course, there are a lot of technical specifics too. And this is also a part of our conference SERP Conf. This year in Sofia, we partnered for the second year in a row – thank you for this. We have two more editions coming this year – in Rome and Vienna and I invite everyone who is interested in SEO, AI & E-commerce to come and learn from speakers like Aleyda Solis, Martin Splitt, Dan Petrovic, and more.
2. So, if relevance and citations are the currency, what should a business actually do to get picked up and quoted as a source by these AI systems?
This is where strategy becomes practical. AI models are built to satisfy genuine user intent, so the businesses that directly and clearly answer the questions their customers actually ask are the ones that get surfaced.
Whether we talk about Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, or other AI search experiences, these systems tend to favor recognized authorities in their industry. This means businesses should aim to have their brand mentioned, referenced, and linked from trustworthy sources in their field. To do this, businesses should publish original research, real data, firsthand expertise, etc. A small North Macedonian producer who publishes honest, specialized knowledge about their craft becomes the kind of authoritative source AI wants to quote.
3. How do you actually measure whether all this effort is working?
There is currently no officially validated way to measure this. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, etc. – none of them provide official metrics or APIs for measuring brand visibility. The reasons are mostly commercial and competitive. (No company wants to reveal exactly how its models work, or hand competitors a roadmap, right?)
What does exist are independent platforms that can show visibility into some AI models – helping businesses understand their traffic, the orders that originate from these sources, and the resulting turnover.
4. For an online merchant, the bottom line is sales. On average, what percentage of orders now come from AI recommendations?
No official data on this either.
But last December, right after Cyber Week 2025, Salesforce reported that AI agents had influenced $67 billion in orders worldwide, roughly 20% of everything sold at the time. Given the speed of adoption, this is unlikely to be a one-time peak, but the exact post-Cyber Week growth still depends on the market and category
The exact share generated directly from AI recommendations can’t be officially measured, but the tools we’ve built to track this show the numbers swing wildly by industry. Our internal data shows boosts in revenue for products like clothes, tech, accessories, etc. But nothing works better for niche products (AI is fantastic for this)
Not long ago, we at Serpact announced that one client of ours made a staggering 6-figure revenue from AI quotations. Now almost all of our clients are getting orders from AI and we see their revenue growing with at least 7%. And with Google now rolling out its own AI shopping assistant, this trend will only continue to grow. I say this with confidence, not just optimism, because the SaaS products we are developing now help us track the full user journey, from AI-assisted discovery to conversion — so the data is visible on the dashboard.
5. Speaking of Google, Google Shopping is now arriving in our region, and that is a start; more countries can join soon. What does that mean for small Macedonian businesses specifically?
This is exactly why I’m so glad to be speaking to your audience right now. The arrival of Google Shopping is a significant development for our region.
In a nutshell, this gives local businesses a first-mover advantage before auction density rises and the competitive season begins.
What do I mean? A small merchant who localizes their product feeds properly, in your currency and language, and builds quality data from day one, will be the one surfaced to buyers with real purchase intent.
I’ll also share that we at Serpact are preparing something new and genuinely exciting in exactly this direction, so I’d encourage your audience to follow us closely for what’s coming. Because in my view, there are no boundaries for e-commerce anymore – only businesses that prepare for this opportunity, and those that wait.
6. Finally – let’s talk more about the SERP Conf. expansion. You mentioned that you will have more editions this year – tell us about that.
SERP Conf. has grown from a strictly Bulgarian event into a conference now with editions in Austria and Italy. In the Eternal City, our first edition will be on the 16th of October. The Austrian capital will welcome us for the third time on 2 & 3 November.
But for each event, we are expecting professionals from more than 20 countries. The format is the same – one stage, 4 panels, 2 presentations in each of them, a Q&A session after that.
Our speakers are practitioners who’ve achieved real and applicable results and are ready to share their working tactics with the audience.
And I’m especially happy that for the last two editions in Sofia, we partnered with the Macedonian E-commerce Association. This collaboration proves that professionalism and business always come first when people are ready to embrace big achievements together. Borders, market size, the size of a company – none of that matters. The Macedonian market has a large amount of talent and ambition, and connecting it with the regional and international SEO and e-commerce community is the bridge SERP Conf. was built to create.
So, at the end of this interview, I’m turning to every small and medium business reading this: the tools are becoming more accessible, the playing field is leveling, and the community is opening up to you. Go, take advantage!
