How does AI search find an Irish small business?

By reading and quoting your website. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews for a recommendation, the assistant pulls passages from pages it can reach, writes an answer, and names a handful of sources. If your business isn't on a readable page saying something specific, it can't be quoted.

This isn't only about ChatGPT. Google's AI Overviews now sit above the normal results in Ireland for many searches, so the same rules decide whether you're named there too.

This is different from ranking, and the difference is worth understanding.

Citations versus links

Traditional search runs on links. Another site links to yours, that link passes authority, and Google uses it as one signal among many to decide where you rank. The link is clickable and countable.

AI assistants don't need link authority to decide what to say. They retrieve text, put an answer together, and attribute it. That's a citation: your business named as a source, whether or not anyone ever linked to you.

Two consequences for a small business:

• You can be cited without a single backlink, if your page answers the question well.
• You can have plenty of backlinks and never be cited, if your content isn't specific or self-contained enough to quote.

The catch: a citation often doesn't produce a click. It's your name inside somebody else's answer. Good for being recommended, hard to see in your analytics.

What makes a page quotable

Answer the question in the first sentence. Assistants extract passages, not whole pages. A section that opens with the answer gets used. A section that opens with three paragraphs of throat-clearing does not.

Be specific. Numbers, place names, dates, prices, qualifications. The difference looks like this:

The first sentence gives an assistant nothing to pass on. The second is three facts it can repeat to someone in Glasnevin with a leaking tank.

Make each section stand alone. A retrieved passage arrives without the rest of your page around it. If a paragraph only makes sense after reading the two above it, it's useless out of context. Repeat the subject rather than saying "it" or "this".

Use question-shaped headings. People ask questions. Headings that match the question get matched to it.

Keep your facts current. Prices, opening hours, service areas. An assistant confidently quoting your 2023 prices is worse than not being cited at all.

The technical minimum

Nothing exotic, but these need to be true:

• Your pages must be readable by a crawler: no login wall, no robots.txt blocking, no content that only appears after JavaScript runs
• Your site must load fast
• Your business name, address and phone number must be identical everywhere they appear online
• Structured data (LocalBusiness schema) marking up your business details
• A Google Business Profile, claimed and fully filled in

Google's own guidance on how its AI features use web pages says the same thing in more words: there's nothing special to do beyond a crawlable, useful page.

Some sites now also publish an llms.txt file, a plain-text summary of the site written for AI crawlers rather than search engines. It's an emerging convention rather than a standard, and it costs nothing to add.

A Facebook page fails the first test on its own, which is one reason a Facebook page isn't quite enough for most local businesses.

Why this matters more in Ireland than you'd think

Irish local search is thin. For most towns and most trades, there simply isn't much well-written, specific, current content. The competition for a citation is a handful of directory listings and a few Facebook pages.

That's a low bar. A physio in Cork or a plumber in north Dublin with five genuinely specific pages can be the source that gets quoted for their trade in their area. That isn't remotely true in a bigger market.

Try it yourself

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google and ask for your own trade in your own area: "best plumber in north Dublin", "physio in Cork for a running injury". Look at who gets named and where the answer says it came from.

Three things you'll usually find. The names come from a handful of sources, often a directory or a review site rather than the businesses themselves. The businesses that are named have pages that say something specific. And there's usually less competition than you'd expect.

Then search your own business name and see what the assistant says about you. If it says nothing, or says something out of date, that's the gap this page is about.

What we build in

Every site aisites.ie builds is a static site with nothing that stops a crawler reading the content:

• Plain, fast pages with no plugin stack and no login wall
• Structured data for your business details, added when the site goes live on your own domain
• A sitemap and an llms.txt summary for AI crawlers
• A "what AI sees" view in your login, so you can check and correct the facts the site publishes about you

None of that guarantees a citation. Nobody can promise you one, and anyone who does is selling something else. What it does is remove every technical reason an assistant might skip you.

The part we can't do for you is the specifics. Pages get quoted when they say exactly what you do, where, and for how much, and that has to come from you. Our form asks for it.

What happens next. Tell us about your business. We build the site inside 48 hours of getting your details, you look at the finished site, and you pay only if you want it. €249 for one page, €349 for up to five, then €156 a year, ex VAT. Full details on the pricing page.