Ask someone in Dublin how they’d find a solicitor, a garden room builder or a hotel for the weekend, and a few years ago the answer was simple. Google it.
It’s still Google for most people. But more and more of them now open ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot, type a question, and get one answer back. Not ten links. One name.
If that name isn’t yours, you never knew you were in the running.
So what does that mean for SEO in Ireland? Less than the headlines suggest, and more than most agencies are doing about it.
What hasn’t changed
Google is still where most of your customers start. Search “SEO Dublin” or “SEO Ireland” and you’ll find thousands of businesses still asking how to rank. That’s not going away.
And the fundamentals still work. When we look at the clients whose search is growing fastest, it’s the same things every time:
- A fast, healthy site that Google can read without tripping over errors.
- Pages built around real demand. What your customers actually search, not what you call your services internally.
- Authority that’s earned. Links and mentions from sites people trust. Never bought.
Here’s what that looks like in practice. For Shomera, 51 of the 77 terms we track were in Google’s top three by June 2026, with 36 at number one. Organic search now brings in 56% of all visits to the site. No tricks. Just the fundamentals, done properly and kept up.
It’s the same approach that got our SEO work shortlisted at both the European Search Awards and the Digital Media Awards, led by our SEO Manager Talia. In legal, one of the toughest categories in search, the work focused on the searches that actually lead to enquiries, not volume for its own sake.
What has changed
Two new places your customers look. They come with two new acronyms.
AEO, answer engine optimisation. Google now answers a lot of questions itself, at the top of the page. Featured snippets, People Also Ask, and AI Overviews. AEO is about getting your page picked as that answer.
GEO, generative engine optimisation. When someone asks ChatGPT “who’s the best garden office company in Dublin?”, the assistant writes a reply and names a few businesses. GEO is about being one of them.
Here’s the good news. AI assistants lean heavily on the same signals Google does. A site that’s good for Google is most of the way there. You don’t need to start again. You need to close the gap.
What closing the gap looks like
Let the AI crawlers in. Some sites block AI crawlers like GPTBot without realising. If they can’t read your site, they can’t recommend you.
Get your facts straight everywhere. What you do, where you work, how long you’ve been at it. If your website says one thing and your Google Business Profile says another, assistants trust you less. Consistency is everything.
Answer questions plainly. Assistants quote content that answers a question clearly, near the top of the page. Write the way you’d explain it across a table to a customer. That’s also just good writing.
Mark it up. Structured data tells search engines and assistants exactly what they’re reading: your business, your services, your FAQs, your reviews.
Measure it. We track visits from AI assistants as their own channel, next to Google and paid. For one client this year, AI tools sent their first handful of visits in May. Small numbers today. But it’s the first sign of AI search sending real people, and it’s worth watching from the start.
We’ve moved our own reporting the same way. Clients now see their visibility across Google, ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews, not just where they rank for a handful of keywords.
A word on hype
You’ll hear agencies promise to “get you ranked in ChatGPT.” Be careful. Nobody controls what an AI assistant says, and the tools change how they answer all the time.
What you can control is being easy to find, easy to read and easy to trust. That’s what we work on, and we measure it.
AI search isn’t on its way. It’s already here. The question for any business isn’t whether to pay attention. It’s how quickly you get your house in order.
Where to start
- Get the basics right. If your site is slow, broken or thin, fix that first. Everything else builds on it. That’s our core SEO work.
- Check what AI says about you. Ask ChatGPT and Gemini the questions your customers ask. Are you named? Is what they say about you right?
- Close the gap. Crawler access, consistent facts, answer-first content and structured data. That’s our AI search optimisation work.
- Measure both. Rankings and enquiries from Google. Mentions and visits from AI.
And if your website itself is holding you back, it might be time for a rebuild. A fast, well-structured site helps on every front. We cover the options in our guide to Shopify, WordPress and custom code.
The bottom line
SEO isn’t dead. It’s grown. Google still matters most, and the businesses that win there are best placed to win in AI search too.
Want to know where you stand? Tell us what you’re working on. We’ll check how you show up on Google and in the main AI assistants, and then sit down with you to go through what’s worth doing first. Get in touch.
