I've spent most of my working life on websites. I build them, fix them, and help Irish businesses get found with them. So there's a question I keep coming back to, and it's an uncomfortable one for someone in my line of work: what is a business website even for five years from now?
A lot is changing at once, and not all of it points the same way. But I think it adds up to one clear answer. Your website becomes the home base of your business: the place people and machines go to read about you, act on it, and check that you're real.
Your website has a new kind of visitor
Websites were never built only for people. They were always built for people and for Google's crawler. For twenty years the advice was simple: build for humans and the bots will follow. That worked because Google spent two decades and a fortune learning to read pages designed for human eyes.
The new visitors don't have that head start. When someone in Cork asks an AI assistant for "a good electrician near Douglas", the assistant has to work out, very quickly, who you are, what you do, where you do it and whether you're open. Most AI tools are still surprisingly bad at pulling that out of a page built purely for looks. A beautiful homepage with your phone number inside an image is invisible to them.
So "SEO" is quietly becoming "be readable everywhere". The work hasn't really changed: clear pages, accurate details, clean structure. What changed is that Google is no longer the only reader that matters, and which reader matters most can shift overnight. AI search tools have switched which search index they lean on more than once, with no announcement. You can't control that. You can only make sure every reader gets the same clear, correct story.
Please don't respond by building a second "AI version" of your site. Irish businesses have been here before with separate mobile sites, and the pattern is always the same: the copy drifts out of date, and then it dies. One website, one set of facts, presented in a way both people and machines can read.
A technically sound website is now a choice
Building a technically correct website used to be hard. You needed to know how dozens of standards fit together: structured data, canonicals, sitemaps, accessibility, performance, security headers. Very few people knew all of it, which is why so many Irish sites, including very big ones, get the basics wrong.
That's changing. With experience and good AI tools, getting a site technically right is no longer a rare skill. It's a decision. Plenty of businesses won't make it yet, so for now there's a real advantage in being one of the ones who do. But the bar is rising, and what sets you apart today becomes the minimum tomorrow.
Once the technical side is a given, the questions that matter are the ones no tool can answer for you. Does a website actually matter for your business? And do you have anything real to say on it?
Not every business needs the same website
A good plumber, carpenter or electrician in Ireland who turns up on time and answers the phone is busy all year, website or not. Could a better website bring more work? Probably. Do they want more work? Often not, and that's a perfectly sensible choice. For them, a solid Google Business Profile and a simple, accurate page may be all they need.
For an Irish brand selling beyond its own town, it's the opposite. The website matters more than any shop front on Grafton Street, for a simple reason: there's only one Grafton Street, and your customers are everywhere.
The website becomes a set of doors
A website used to be a set of pages. Increasingly it's also a set of doors that software can walk through. A booking system an assistant can check for a free slot. A product feed an agent can read. Opening hours that don't live only in a PDF menu.
The technology will keep changing. Today there's a standard called the Model Context Protocol that lets AI tools talk to services directly. Something else will replace it. The lasting idea is this: your website is becoming one interface for people and several for machines, and the machine ones don't just answer questions. They take bookings and place orders.
For a restaurant in Galway, that might mean an assistant can confirm you have a table for four on Saturday. For a B&B in Kerry, it might mean availability that's always up to date. None of this needs to happen tomorrow. But a site built on clean, structured information is ready for it. A site built on screenshots and PDFs isn't.
More decisions happen away from your site
This is the uncomfortable one. More and more choices are made somewhere else: in an AI answer, in a chat, in Google's own results. Someone asks "best family-friendly hotel in Westport" and gets three names, without visiting a single website.
Your website doesn't die in that world. Its job shifts. It becomes the official source of truth about your business, the record every other surface draws from. If an assistant recommends you, it's because your home base gave it every reason to. Thin, out-of-date, hard-to-read websites simply won't be recommended.
Being real is the only lasting advantage
Here's what ties it together. Anyone can now generate endless generic content, which makes generic content worth nothing. What can't be generated is being real: real work, real people, real customers who genuinely vouch for you.
And being real is becoming something machines can check. An agent choosing between two suppliers can cross-reference everything in seconds. Does your address match your Google profile? Does your company actually exist in the Companies Registration Office records? Do the reviews hold up? Are the people on your About page real?
Ireland has some useful advantages here. A .ie domain already requires a proven connection to Ireland. Your CRO number, VAT number and registered address are public and checkable. Reviews from real local customers, mentions in local press and listings on Irish directories all add up to a trail that's hard to fake.
You can't build that trail on your own website alone. You need to exist elsewhere and have others vouch for you: local press, your sports club's sponsor page, the business association, happy customers leaving honest reviews. And a genuinely good About page, with your real face, your real story and your real address, might be the most valuable page on your site.
So what should you do now?
The website isn't going anywhere. But its job is changing. The Irish businesses that do well over the next few years will get three things right:
- Technically sound. Fast, accessible, correctly structured, with accurate details. Today it's a choice, and still an edge.
- Easy for machines to read. Your name, address, phone, hours, services and prices in plain text and structured data, consistent everywhere. This is plumbing, and it can be fixed.
- Unmistakably real. Real people, real reviews, a real presence around the web. This is the hard part, and it always was.
If you're not sure where your business stands on any of these, that's exactly what I look at first.
Ciprian Popescu runs WP Dublin and builds WordPress plugins at getButterfly. He has been helping Irish businesses get found online since 2002. More about me.
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