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Search and AI visibility · AEO, GEO and SEO in Ireland
What is AEO, and can customers find your business through AI?
AEO means answer engine optimisation: helping tools such as ChatGPT and Google answer questions about your business accurately. We check what they can find, what they say and which website or business details need attention.
Ask about an AEO audit
A customer might ask for an accountant near Duleek, a clinic in Dublin or a supplier who understands their business. They may read an AI answer before visiting any website. Your services, location and contact details need to be clear wherever that answer draws its information from.
AEO sits alongside ordinary SEO, the work that helps pages appear in search results. It also overlaps with GEO, which looks at how generative AI describes a business. You do not need separate jargon-heavy projects: start with accurate business facts, useful pages and a record of what customers actually see.
Astraeus is based in Meath and Dublin and does this work for owner-run businesses across Ireland, with some clients in the UK. For an Irish business, that means checking how assistants answer questions asked from Ireland, which Irish directories and profiles they draw on, and whether the business facts match across Google Business Profile, Irish listings and the website.
Understand how customers could find you
- 01 / The question“Who can help me nearby?”
A customer asks for a service, a location and what matters to them.
Accountant for a café in Meath? - 02 / The search or assistantThe tools look for useful information
Google Search
ChatGPT
ClaudeYour website, public profiles and other sources can inform what appears. Access and source selection vary.
- 03 / The decisionYour details need to make sense● ● ● yourbusiness.ieWhat you do · Where you work
Who you help · How to enquireThe customer may compare a shortlist before visiting your site or contacting you.
Illustrative journey. Logos identify the products discussed; they do not imply a partnership or that every tool uses the same sources.
Why this deserves your attention
Irish use of AI tools is growing
Ipsos B&A reported that 22% of Irish adults used ChatGPT or other generative AI in 2025, compared with 16% in 2024. That is a rise of 6 percentage points.
Enlarge diagram Source: Ipsos B&A TechScape 2025, page 34. Adults aged 16+; face-to-face fieldwork in June 2025. The survey question asks about use nowadays, not use for finding businesses.
AI answers can change whether people visit a website
In a US browsing study, a traditional Google result was clicked on 15% of visits without an AI summary, versus 8% with one. The comparison is observational; it does not prove the summary caused the difference.
Enlarge diagram Source: Pew Research Center, July 2025. Browsing data from 900 US adults; 68,879 unique Google searches. These figures do not measure movement from Google to another service.
What this means for your business: keep your website useful for visitors, and check whether the answers people read elsewhere describe you correctly. These studies support paying attention. They do not establish how many Irish customer enquiries now come through AI.
Free website check
Check the basics on your website
Enter your homepage or a service page for a quick rating of its basic information. No email needed.
This rates basic website information, not the chance of an AI recommendation. It reads 1 public page and may miss information that loads later. A blocked or unavailable page receives no rating.
What does the rating measure?
Six checks: a title of 10–100 characters (15 points), 1 main heading of at least 5 characters (15), a description of 40–320 characters (10), at least 150 words outside navigation and page furniture (25), an absolute HTTPS canonical address (15), and parseable JSON-LD containing a type or typed graph (20). An explicit noindex or none directive sets the score to 0.
80–100: most website basics detected. 50–79: some website basics detected. Below 50: few website basics detected. These are Astraeus's own rules, not search-engine ranking weights. The check does not validate schema, confirm facts, read robots.txt, check indexing or ask any assistant about your business. It provides a rating rather than a list of fixes.
Your address is sent to Astraeus so the page can be fetched. Query strings and fragments are removed. Submitted URLs and fetched page content are not stored by this checker. Rate-limit counters expire after 1 minute. Use public pages only.
The quick check rates a few signals on 1 page. A fuller AEO audit compares public facts and actual assistant answers, then agrees what to improve. Read what an AEO audit checks.
The sequence
What happens, step by step
- 01
See what appears today
Agree real customer questions and record the answers, business mentions and linked sources.
- 02
Check the business facts
Compare your services, location and contact details across the website and public profiles.
- 03
Agree and make the changes
Prioritise clearer service answers, useful links and accurate information. Confirm the scope and approvals before changes begin.
- 04
Check the same questions again
Keep before-and-after evidence and record what improved, what stayed the same and what remains uncertain.
SEO, AEO and GEO side by side
Three overlapping disciplines, one shared foundation. Most SMEs need a sensible blend rather than a separate project for each.
| SEO | AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stands for | Search Engine Optimisation | Answer Engine Optimisation | Generative Engine Optimisation |
| Optimises for | Ranking pages in search results on Google and Bing | Being the extracted direct answer: featured snippets, voice answers and AI answer boxes | Being accurately described and cited when an AI assistant chooses to use the business as a source |
| The buyer is doing | Scanning a results page and choosing a link | Asking a specific question and reading one answer | Asking an assistant for a recommendation or comparison |
| Core work | Technical health, keywords, content quality, links and local signals | Question-shaped content, direct answer passages and carefully matched structured data | Entity clarity, consistent descriptions across sources, evidence assistants can cite |
| Measured by | Rankings, impressions, clicks and organic conversions | Answer inclusion and accuracy for a tracked question set | How assistants describe and recommend the business across repeated baseline checks |
What changes on the site
Answer passages
Self-contained paragraphs that answer specific buyer questions without relying on surrounding marketing copy.
Structured data
Organisation, service, breadcrumb and FAQ schema that matches the visible page.
Internal evidence paths
Links connecting service claims to detailed pages, FAQs, Insights and controlled proof.
Source consistency
Alignment across the website and controlled business profiles, with conflicts recorded for correction.
Crawl access
Sitemaps, canonicals, robots directives and content surfaces checked for accidental blockers.
What Astraeus does not promise
Guaranteed citations
No provider controls which source an assistant chooses for a particular answer.
A fixed ranking
Answer systems do not expose one stable list equivalent to a traditional results page.
Schema as a shortcut
Machine-readable data helps interpretation but cannot compensate for weak or unsupported content.
Instant change
Assistants refresh sources on different schedules and may take time to reflect an update.
The honest boundary
AEO and GEO are young disciplines. We can improve clarity, consistency, crawlability and the evidence available to search engines and answer systems. We cannot guarantee a ranking, and we cannot guarantee that a named assistant will cite or recommend a business for a specific prompt.
Direct answers
Common questions
Do you provide AEO services in Dublin and the rest of Ireland?
Yes. Astraeus is based in Meath and Dublin and works with small and medium businesses across Ireland, remotely or on site. The baseline check is run from an Irish locale, so the results reflect what customers in Ireland actually see.
What does an AEO agency actually do for a small business?
It records how search engines and AI assistants describe the business today, fixes the facts and pages they rely on, adds direct answers to the questions customers ask, and re-checks the same questions over time. The deliverable is a dated before-and-after record, not a promised ranking.
How is AEO different from SEO?
SEO helps pages qualify and rank for searches. AEO also focuses on whether an answer system can identify the business, extract a direct answer and trace the claim to a clear source.
What is GEO, and how is it different from AEO?
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is about how generative assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity describe and recommend a business inside a generated response. AEO focuses on extractable direct answers; GEO focuses on being an accurate, citable source when the assistant composes its own answer. In practice the two share most of their groundwork.
Which assistants does the work cover?
The assessment can sample ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity and Google AI experiences. Availability and output vary by account, location and date.
Will FAQ schema make us appear in AI answers?
No. It can help machines interpret a question and answer, but it does not cause an answer to be selected. The visible content still needs to be accurate, useful and supported.
Do we need an llms.txt file?
Not as an SEO shortcut. Google says it does not use llms.txt for Search ranking or AI features. It can be a small optional index for assistants that choose to read it, but good pages, crawl access and consistent business information matter more.
Can you guarantee a recommendation?
No. Any provider making that promise is claiming control over systems they do not operate.
Does this replace ordinary SEO?
No. Crawlability, good pages, local signals, relevant links and technical health remain part of the foundation.
How is progress measured?
A baseline set of representative questions is recorded, then re-run after changes. The report tracks accuracy, inclusion, cited sources and unresolved inconsistencies.
Find out what AI says about your business
Send your website, the services you want to be found for and the areas you serve. We can agree an AEO audit scope and price before work starts.
Ask about an AEO audit