AI Search · GEO
When the answercomes from an AI,you are in it or not.
A growing share of research now happens inside an assistant that never sends a click. This page is about what can actually be done about that, and it is also honest about how much of the field is still guesswork.
Straight up
Read this part before you spend anything
AI search optimisation, or GEO, is roughly two years old as a discipline. Nobody has five years of data because there are not five years to have. Anyone selling you a guaranteed method here is selling you a guess with a price attached, and quite a few people are doing exactly that right now.
What is genuinely known is narrower but not nothing. Assistants build answers from sources they can read and from sites they already trust. Being named depends heavily on being mentioned somewhere the model was trained on or can retrieve from, on having pages that state plainly what you do and where you do it, and on the same reputation signals that have always mattered.
Which means most of the useful work here overlaps with good SEO and good content, done with a slightly different reader in mind. I would rather tell you that than invent a new service category with a new fee attached to it.
What the work is
What you are actually paying for.
Pages a model can actually parse
Clear headings, direct answers near the top, claims stated plainly instead of buried in marketing language. A page that opens with three paragraphs about your passion for excellence gives a model nothing to quote.
Structured data that states the facts
Schema markup saying what you do, where you are, what you charge, what you are qualified in. This is the least ambiguous way to tell a machine something, and most Irish business sites have none of it.
Being cited where assistants look
Industry bodies, credible directories, local press, review platforms, and any publication in your sector that carries weight. This is the slowest part and the one that matters most, because a model naming you is usually a model repeating somebody else.
Checking whether it worked
Running the actual questions your customers would ask, across the main assistants, on a schedule, and recording whether you appear. It is manual and slightly tedious. It is also the only direct measurement available at the moment.
Watching the referral side
Assistants do send some traffic, and it shows up in analytics if you set it up to be visible. Small numbers today, worth tracking from the start so you can see the direction.
The limits
What this will not do for you.
There is no placement to buy
No ad slot, no ranking factor list, no submission form. If that changes, and it probably will, I will tell you the day it does.
Attribution is genuinely poor
Someone can read about you inside ChatGPT and then search your name an hour later. That enquiry will look like direct traffic. Anyone showing you a clean revenue figure attributed to AI search is showing you a model, not a measurement.
It is not a substitute for SEO
The overlap is large but not total, and search still sends far more traffic than assistants do. Doing this instead of SEO would be a bad trade today.
Questions
AI Search, asked properly.
For most small Irish businesses, not as a separate project. It is worth doing as part of SEO, because the work overlaps so heavily that splitting it into two invoices mostly benefits the agency. Where it does justify its own attention is if you are in a research-heavy field where people ask long comparison questions before they buy, or if you already rank well and are watching that traffic fall while your rankings hold.
GEO stands for generative engine optimisation, AEO for answer engine optimisation, and in practice people use them for roughly the same work. The terminology is unsettled because the field is new. Do not read much into which label an agency uses.
It is already changing it. Searches that ended in a click now often end in an answer, which is why plenty of sites are seeing organic traffic fall while their rankings hold steady. The searches that still produce clicks are the ones where somebody wants to hire, buy or book, and those are the ones worth owning anyway. So the short answer is that it is shrinking the top of the funnel and leaving the bottom mostly intact.
By running the questions your customers would actually ask, across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, on a schedule, and recording whether you are named and what is said. Plus referral traffic from AI sources in analytics. Both are imperfect. I would rather hand you an imperfect measurement and say so than a confident number I made up.
Where it fits
These are rarely bought one at a time. Most work starts with whichever is most urgent and grows into the others once the numbers argue for it.
Next step
Thirty minutes, and an honest answer.
Tell me what you sell and what a customer is worth to you. I will tell you whether search is worth your money, roughly what it would take, and if the answer is no, what I would do instead.