To get cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews, your pages have to be readable by a crawler, your business facts have to agree everywhere, and your answers have to be specific enough to quote. That work is answer engine optimisation (AEO). We provide AEO services in Dublin and across Ireland, inside a new build or on your current site, as part of our AI-ready website development. The technical groundwork is in our checklist on how to make your website AI-ready.
What is answer engine optimisation, and why does it matter in 2026?
Answer engine optimisation is the practice of making your content the source that ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google’s AI Overviews quote or link to when someone asks a question your business can answer. The answer cites a handful of sources, and the customer may never see a results page, so the aim is to be quoted in the answer.
For an Irish business the stakes are practical. A Dublin buyer asking an assistant “who builds membership platforms in Ireland?” gets a short list of names.
How do answer engines pick their sources?
The public research points the same way.
- They retrieve, then summarise. For most current questions the assistant runs a live search, fetches a handful of pages and answers from the passages it can quote cleanly.
- They favour quotable passages. OtterlyAI, an AI visibility tracker, analysed more than a million citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews (January to February 2026) and found that “reference-grade, easily quotable content” performs best (OtterlyAI, February 2026).
- They need to be allowed in. The same report found 73% of sites had technical barriers blocking AI crawlers, mostly robots.txt rules, CDN restrictions and JavaScript rendering.
How to get cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews
This is the checklist we work through, in rough order of impact.
- Answer questions in question form. Use the question a customer would type as the H2, then answer it in the first two sentences.
- Be specific, sourced and dated. “Our client’s iOS and Android apps are live in both stores” is quotable (ESMA International Network). “We deliver transformative digital experiences” is not. Date anything that can change and link your sources.
- Keep the page fetchable. Serve the main content as HTML in the first response, and check robots.txt and your CDN’s bot rules so the crawlers you want are not blocked.
- Make your entity consistent. Use one business name, phone number, address and description on your site, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, the CRO record and every directory. Nobody has measured the effect on citations cleanly, so we treat it as cheap insurance. Loco Digital was previously known as LOCO Group, and we are still correcting the old name on some profiles.
- Publish an llms.txt, a plain Markdown index of your most useful pages at the root of your domain.
- Say where you are and who you serve. To be cited for questions about Ireland, the page has to say Ireland, name the city where it matters, and refer to Irish rules, grants and prices.
- Keep doing the classic SEO. Fast pages, clean titles, internal links and a sensible sitemap. AI Overviews tend to draw on pages that already rank.
Does structured data help you get cited?
Less than vendors suggest. Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD schema between August 2025 and March 2026, against 4,000 control pages, and measured citations across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and ChatGPT. Their conclusion: “Adding schema produced no major uplift in citations on any platform” (Ahrefs, May 2026). The same authors note that schema still helps rich results, voice assistants, knowledge graphs and entity recognition. Otterly’s report says schema-tagged, quotable pages receive three to five times more citations, but it does not separate the schema from the content, as the Ahrefs test did.
Use Organization on the home page (legal name, alternate names, address, phone, founders, sameAs links), Article on every post with publication and updated dates, and FAQPage only where the visible page answers those questions.
How local relevance helps answer engine optimisation in Ireland
A question about the Grow Digital Voucher, Irish VAT on ecommerce, the European Accessibility Act as it applies here, or what an app costs to build in Dublin is best answered by an Irish page that says so.
An assistant can quote a page stating that the Grow Digital Voucher pays 50% of eligible costs up to €5,000 and excludes bespoke website or software development. A page that says “grants may be available” gives it nothing to quote.
How do you measure AI referrals in GA4?
Most AI assistant traffic used to be buried in Direct or Referral. Reported in May 2026, Google added an “AI Assistant” channel to the GA4 Default Channel Group: sessions whose referrer matches a recognised assistant are grouped there automatically (Search Engine Journal, May 2026). Visits that arrive with no referrer header still land in Direct, so treat the figure as a floor.
Compare the channel’s landing pages with the long conversational queries now appearing in Search Console.
Which AEO services in Dublin are worth paying for?
AEO decisions are cheapest to make while a site is designed and written, and they can be retrofitted to a sound site as a fixed-scope project. Whoever you hire, pay for three things: a question map, rewrites of the pages that bring in enquiries, and measurement of what the assistants send you. Schema on its own is a small part of the job.
On loco.ie the FAQ markup is generated from the questions you can see on the page, so the schema only describes what a visitor can read.
Our digital and AI consulting starts by mapping which questions your customers ask. An assistant that answers your team’s questions from your own documents is a different job: a private AI assistant, built under our AI integration services.
