AI visibility in Ireland and the UK: the search demand, by the numbers

AI visibility is whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews name a business when someone asks them what to buy. On 4 September we published the US search demand behind it. This post does the same for the UK and Ireland, from a pull on 25 September 2026, and adds the official numbers that explain why the demand exists.^[1][2]

The short answer: the UK searches for AI visibility help in commercial quantities, with advertisers bidding up to USD 92 a click. In Ireland the same searches have barely started. And the reason they exist is measurable: Google says its AI Overviews has over 2.5 billion monthly users, and when an AI summary answers, clicks to websites nearly halve.^[3][4]

Every figure is numbered to a source at the end. The search volumes, difficulty scores and bids are our own pull through DataForSEO, labelled as ours; Google’s user figures are the company’s own.

The UK demand, in one table

Seventeen terms from the same buying conversation: the fourteen from our US table, plus three we added. “KD” is DataForSEO’s keyword difficulty, 0 to 100, a model of how hard it is to reach the top ten organic results, where higher is harder. CPC is what advertisers currently bid, in US dollars. Volumes are monthly averages for September 2025 to August 2026.^[2]

Three things stand out. The bids are high for the volume: USD 10 to 92 a click, the top being ai visibility platform at USD 91.99, which says advertisers expect a valuable customer at the end of the click; a bid is a belief, not a receipt. The modelled difficulty is moderate: from KD 2 for ai seo agency to 49 for generative engine optimization, with ai visibility at 22. And the newest name is rising: ai visibility ran at 110 searches a month in the UK from October to December 2025 and at 210 to 320 a month from February to August 2026, while generative engine optimization fell back from 1,300 to 1,600 a month in September and October 2025 to 590 to 720 from April 2026.^[2]

Ireland: the same terms

In Ireland only ai seo has settled volume, at 170 searches a month (KD 22, CPC USD 26.20). geo seo runs at 50, answer engine optimization at 30, ai seo tool and ai seo agency at 20 each, and nine more terms sit at about 10 a month, the lowest figure Google reports. generative engine optimization, ai visibility and ai brand visibility tools fall below the reporting floor altogether. DataForSEO could score difficulty for only one Irish term.^[2]

Where the demand is: the US, the UK and Ireland

Six terms appear in both of our pulls. The US figures are from 4 September, the UK and Irish ones from 25 September, each a twelve-month average.^[1][2]

On these numbers the United States is the largest market, the UK a real one, and Ireland one where the demand has not arrived yet. A business selling AI visibility from Ireland sells to the first two first.

Why the demand exists: AI answers now sit on the search page

At its May 2026 developer conference, Google reported over 2.5 billion monthly users for AI Overviews, the AI summary at the top of its search results, and over 1 billion for AI Mode, its conversational search.^[3] In a US study of real browsing in March 2025, 18% of Google searches already showed an AI summary, and those summaries took the click.^[4]

A link inside the AI summary itself was clicked on only 1% of the visits that showed one.^[4] So a business can be described to a buyer, or left out, without the buyer reaching its website and without the business seeing it happen. That is the gap an AI visibility report measures.

The people asking, in Ireland and the UK

In 2025, 44.9% of people in Ireland aged 16 to 74 used a generative AI tool, the fifth-highest share in the EU, against an EU average of 32.7%.^[5] In Great Britain, 55% of employees said in mid-2026 that they use AI for work or education.^[6] And the buying those people do already starts online: 88.1% of people in Ireland looked up goods or services online and 95.1% bought something online in 2025,^[7][8] while 28.8% of all retail spending in Great Britain was online in August 2026.^[9]

The national figure: what is lost when businesses are not in the answer

We have been asked what the Irish or UK economy loses when businesses do not measure their AI visibility. Nobody has measured it, and we will not publish an invented figure. A national loss would need two numbers no statistics office publishes: how often AI assistants name Irish or UK businesses, and what share of sales starts with an AI answer. A figure framed as “loss without our tool” would also make our product the cause, and we have no customer results to support that.

What is measured is the money exposed: 95.1% of people in Ireland buy online and 88.1% research online first, and 28.8% of British retail spending is online.^[7][8][9] What can be illustrated, with its assumption on its face, is the click. In the US study, 18% of searches showed an AI summary and those were clicked through 8% of the time, against 15% for the rest. If the searches with a summary would otherwise have been clicked like the rest, which the study does not show, the summaries cost about one website click in twelve across all searches.^[4] That is an illustration of scale for the United States in March 2025, not a measurement for Ireland or the UK, and not a figure in euro or sterling.

What this data does not tell you

Search volume measures interest, not revenue. Cost-per-click measures what advertisers believe, not what customers pay. A low difficulty score says the organic results are reachable, not that reaching them is quick. Google’s user figures are the company’s own statements. And none of it tells you whether any particular tool measures the right thing, including ours: we have published no customer results because we have none to publish.

The numbers on one page

Every figure in this table appears above, with its source.

The method, so you can repeat it

• Volumes and CPC: DataForSEO Google Ads Search Volume, locations United Kingdom and Ireland, language en, pulled 2026-09-25. Twelve-month averages, September 2025 to August 2026, with the monthly series retained; the raw figures are kept on file.
• Difficulty: DataForSEO Labs Bulk Keyword Difficulty, same date and locales. It returned no score for four UK terms and for sixteen of the seventeen Irish ones.
• The US column: our 4 September pull, with its own method in that post.
• Limits worth knowing: Google Ads rounds volumes into bands and can group close variants under one figure, so nothing here is summed; an absent volume means below the reporting floor, not zero; and several UK terms show a spike in September 2025, the same anomaly our US post describes, so the 2026 months are the ones to rely on.

The short version

AI answers now sit on the search page for billions of people and take clicks that used to reach websites. The UK already searches for help with that in commercial quantities, advertisers pay up to USD 92 for the click, and Ireland has barely started. No official statistic measures whether a particular business is named in those answers; a SynectGEO report measures it one business at a time, and the free check asks two AI engines three buyer questions about yours.

The research

Every source was read on 25 September 2026.

1. SynectGEO, AI visibility: what the search data says about a category that barely existed a year ago. Our own pull of US Google Ads search volumes, difficulty and bids through DataForSEO, 4 September 2026, with the method.
2. SynectGEO, search demand for 17 AI visibility terms, UK and Ireland. Our own pull through DataForSEO, 25 September 2026: Google Ads Search Volume and Labs Bulk Keyword Difficulty, language English, monthly averages September 2025 to August 2026, on the method set out in the post above.
3. Google, Google I/O 2026: Sundar Pichai's opening keynote. 19 May 2026. "AI Overviews now has over 2.5 billion monthly active users"; AI Mode "surpassed 1 billion monthly active users". The company's own figures.
4. Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results. Published 22 July 2025. Browsing data from 900 US adults, March 2025, 68,879 Google searches, 18% of which produced an AI summary.
5. Eurostat, Use of generative artificial intelligence tools by individuals (isoc_ai_iaiu). 2025, share of people aged 16 to 74 who used generative AI tools in the previous three months, by country; updated 5 June 2026.
6. Office for National Statistics, Artificial intelligence in UK businesses: 2023 to 2026. Published 20 July 2026. 55% of employees report using AI for work or education (Opinions and Lifestyle Survey, Great Britain, 6 May to 28 June 2026).
7. Eurostat, Individuals: internet activities (isoc_ci_ac_i). 2025, finding information about goods and services online in the previous three months: Ireland 88.07% of people aged 16 to 74; updated 17 April 2026.
8. Eurostat, Internet purchases by individuals (isoc_ec_ib20). 2025, last online purchase in the previous 12 months: Ireland 95.05% of people aged 16 to 74; updated 17 April 2026.
9. Office for National Statistics, Retail sales, Great Britain: August 2026. The proportion of sales made online rose from 28.4% in July 2026 to 28.8% in August 2026.