Every week now I get a version of the same question from Irish business owners: do I need to do something different because of AI? The honest answer is yes, a bit — and far less than the people selling "GEO packages" would like you to believe.
Here is what the evidence actually supports, what is being oversold, and what I would do if it were my business.
What has genuinely changed
This part is real and worth taking seriously. When Google shows an AI Overview above the results, far fewer people click through to anyone's website.
Pew Research found that users clicked a result on 8% of visits to a search page with an AI summary, compared with 15% on pages without one — roughly half. Ahrefs measured a 58% drop in click-through rate on the top-ranking page for queries showing an AI Overview.
So the same ranking position earns fewer visits than it did two years ago. That is not a prediction. It has already happened, and if your traffic has drifted downward while your rankings held steady, this is probably why.
The uncomfortable part. Some of your best informational content may now be answering people's questions without them ever reaching your site. You still get the credit. You do not get the visit.
What is being oversold
An industry has appeared almost overnight — GEO, AEO, LLMO, "AI visibility" retainers. Some of it is thoughtful. A lot of it is old SEO in a new jacket, with a couple of genuinely useless additions bolted on.
The llms.txt file
This is the clearest example, so it is worth being specific.
The pitch is that you publish a file at /llms.txt telling AI models what your site is about, and they will understand and cite you better. It gets recommended constantly and sold as a deliverable.
Ahrefs checked. They looked at 137,210 domains in May 2026 and found that 97% of published llms.txt files received zero requests in the month. Not "low impact" — the files were simply never fetched. Of the small share that saw any traffic at all, only about 1% of requests came from the AI retrieval bots behind ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Google's John Mueller has compared it to the keywords meta tag — a site owner asserting what their own site is about, which is exactly the kind of self-declared signal search engines learned to ignore two decades ago.
It costs almost nothing to publish, so I am not going to tell you it is harmful. But if someone is charging you for it as an AI SEO service, you are paying for a file nobody reads.
"Guaranteed" AI citations
Nobody can guarantee that ChatGPT will mention your business. There is no submission form, no index you can pay into, and the answers vary between users and change between model updates. Treat a guarantee here the same way you would treat a guaranteed number one ranking.
What the evidence actually supports
The awkward truth for anyone selling a brand new discipline: the things that make you visible in AI answers overlap almost entirely with the things that made you visible in search.
- Ranking well conventionally. Content that already ranks in organic search is disproportionately what gets pulled into AI Overviews. Google is synthesising from results, not from a separate AI index you can optimise into directly.
- Answering the question early and plainly. A clear, direct answer near the top of the page is easier to quote than one buried under six paragraphs of preamble.
- Being specific and citable. Concrete figures, named sources and quotable statements get picked up more readily than vague claims. Princeton researchers testing generative engine optimisation found citing sources, adding statistics and including quotations produced measurable visibility gains.
- Structured data. Proper schema helps machines parse what a page is and who wrote it. It was worth doing before and it is worth doing now.
- Being a real, identifiable business. A named author, a genuine About page, consistent details across your site and your Google Business Profile. AI systems lean on the same trust signals search does.
- Freshness. Tools that search the live web at query time — Perplexity especially — favour recent content. Dated pages get passed over.
If that list looks like ordinary good SEO, that is the point. The delivery surface changed. The fundamentals did not.
What is genuinely new
Three things I would call actually different, rather than rebranded.
- You should check what AI says about you. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity what they know about your business and your category. It takes ten minutes and it is the only way to find out whether you are absent, described wrongly, or being outshone by a competitor. Most Irish businesses have never looked.
- Traffic is worth less per ranking, so conversion matters more. If fewer visits arrive from the same position, the visits you do get have to work harder. Effort that used to go into chasing more traffic is often better spent on the page they land on.
- Being quotable is now a content goal. Writing so a machine can lift a clean, correct sentence about you is a real consideration. It happens to make the page better for humans too.
What this means in Ireland specifically
Two things make the Irish picture a bit different from the doom you read in US publications.
First, local intent is more resilient. "Emergency plumber Cork" or "dentist open Saturday Limerick" still produces a map pack and a phone call. AI Overviews trigger most on broad informational queries — the "what is", "how do I", "best way to" searches. If your customers find you through local, ready-to-buy searches, your exposure is lower than the headline numbers suggest. Your local SEO and Google Business Profile remain the priority.
Second, the Irish market is far less contested. Plenty of Irish businesses in competitive sectors have never published anything genuinely useful about what they do. The bar for being the clearest, most citable source on "how much does X cost in Ireland" is startlingly low. That is an opportunity in AI answers and in ordinary search at the same time.
What I would actually do
- Ask the three main AI tools about your business and your category. Write down what they get wrong.
- Check Search Console for pages where impressions are steady but clicks have fallen. That is your AI Overview exposure, in your own data.
- Take your three most valuable pages and put a clear, direct answer in the first hundred words.
- Add real specifics — prices, timeframes, numbers, named sources. Vague pages do not get quoted.
- Make sure your author and business information is real and consistent everywhere.
- Fix conversion on the pages that still get traffic. This is the highest-return item on the list and the one people skip.
Notice what is absent: no new retainer, no separate AI SEO product, no llms.txt.
Common questions
Is AI SEO a real thing or just a rebrand?
Mostly a rebrand, with a genuine shift underneath it. The tactics are largely existing SEO fundamentals. What changed is that the same rankings now produce fewer clicks, which changes where effort is best spent.
Do I need an llms.txt file?
No evidence says it helps. Ahrefs found 97% of them are never even requested. Publish one if you like — it is nearly free — but do not pay for it as a service.
How do I get ChatGPT to recommend my business?
There is no direct submission route. You improve your odds by being a genuinely findable, well-described, conventionally well-ranked business with specific, quotable content. If you want paid placement instead, that is now a separate product — see ChatGPT ads in Ireland.
Has my traffic dropped because of AI?
Possibly. The tell is impressions holding steady while clicks fall on informational pages. If both fell, it is more likely an ordinary ranking problem.
Should I stop doing SEO?
No — the opposite. Ranking conventionally is the main route into AI answers. Abandoning search to chase AI visibility means giving up the thing AI visibility is built on.
The short version
AI has changed the value of a ranking, not the way you earn one. Be a real business, answer questions clearly, publish specifics worth quoting, keep the local fundamentals tight, and make the traffic you still get convert.
If someone is selling you something more complicated than that, ask them for the evidence. If you want a straight read on where your site actually stands, get in touch.
I've spent the last four years working with owner-led businesses in Cork and across Ireland — first in-house at a fast-growing Irish ecommerce brand, then agency-side running teams, and now independently. I write about what I actually see in client accounts, not what's fashionable this quarter.
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