Tourism Ireland Optimizes Content for AI Travel Answers

Tourism Ireland says information it supplies shapes close to one in five AI-generated answers about Ireland. CEO Alice Mansergh disclosed the figure Thursday at Skift’s Transatlantic Summit in Dublin, according to Skift. The agency is optimizing its online content and promoting smaller regional experiences as AI becomes a more important source of travel inspiration.

The announcement addresses a problem that reaches beyond destination marketing. Mansergh said AI tools left alone repeat familiar recommendations. Tourism Ireland wants those answers to include more of the island’s smaller experiences, with the stated goal of spreading visitors and spending more widely.

For travelers, the distinction matters: a convincing AI itinerary is not necessarily a broad inventory of what a destination offers. Separate research on recommendations for Kerry and Galway illustrates how concentrated those suggestions can become.

What Tourism Ireland’s AI figure measures

The nearly one-in-five figure is Tourism Ireland’s own assessment of how often its information shapes AI answers about Ireland, as reported by Skift. It is a measure of claimed influence over answers, not a share of travelers or bookings.

Skift described the disclosure as unusual in a field where most destination marketing organizations are still auditing what tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini say about them. Few have published a measure of their influence over those responses.

Tourism Ireland’s research also found that the share of travelers naming AI as their primary source of travel inspiration doubled in the past year, according to Skift. That finding helps explain the agency’s attention to the channel, but it should not be read as evidence that most travelers now start with AI.

The measurement details remain important. Skift said it had contacted Tourism Ireland about its methodology; its report does not identify the systems or query set behind the influence figure, or provide the baseline percentage and survey details behind the reported doubling. Both figures should therefore be understood as agency-reported findings rather than independently established measures of the entire AI travel market.

Getting regional experiences into AI answers

Tourism Ireland’s response has been to optimize all of its digital content so generative AI can read it, then track the results, Mansergh said, according to Skift. The content strategy is deliberately regional: examples include sheepdog demonstrations in Sligo and traditional boat building on the Aran Islands.

Those examples give the initiative a more specific purpose than simply increasing mentions of Ireland. The agency is trying to influence which experiences appear once a traveler begins exploring the destination. Mansergh presented that work as a way to counter repetitive recommendations and distribute tourism activity around the island.

The strategy also extends beyond Tourism Ireland’s own material. According to Skift, Mansergh said AI models draw on Reddit, YouTube and Tripadvisor. Her advice to destinations was to decide which associations they want to establish and build reinforcing mentions from other voices across those sources.

That is an important distinction for tourism organizations. Making an official website readable by AI is one part of the approach Mansergh described; having the same destination experiences documented elsewhere is another. The agency’s strategy recognizes that its own website is not the only source informing an answer.

Mansergh also warned against overusing the technology, citing consumer distaste for low-quality AI-generated content, Skift reported. Her position was not simply to produce more material with AI, but to make destination information available to it without losing sight of the audience.

Kerry research shows the recommendation bottleneck

A separate study reported by the Killarney Advertiser gives local context to the repetition problem. AI performance platform Searchable analyzed 2,820 travel queries about Kerry across platforms including ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

According to the newspaper’s account, 75% of AI-generated responses repeatedly recommended the same five destinations: Killarney National Park, the Ring of Kerry, the Gap of Dunloe, Slea Head Drive and the Dingle Peninsula. Killarney National Park appeared in 88% of responses.

At the other end of the findings, 59% of Kerry attractions appeared in fewer than one in ten answers, while 23% were omitted entirely. The report identified St Manchan’s Oratory and the Tullygarran Ogham Stones among the omitted sites.

Changing the wording of a request did not reliably widen the selection. Even when queries explicitly sought lesser-known attractions, the same core group appeared in 51% of responses, according to the Killarney Advertiser.

These findings concern recommendations in the queries tested. They are not evidence of how many travelers ultimately visited those places, nor are they a measurement of Tourism Ireland’s campaign.

Galway shows a similar pattern

Research summarized by Go To Ireland, citing the Galway Advertiser’s Sept. 24, 2026, reporting on Searchable’s study, found a similar concentration in County Galway. The five most frequently mentioned attractions appeared in 87% of general responses analyzed.

Those attractions were Kylemore Abbey, Connemara National Park, Galway’s Latin Quarter, the Spanish Arch and the Aran Islands. The Galway testing involved 2,820 queries across ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Claude, according to Go To Ireland.

Requests for lesser-known places still produced the dominant five in 41% of responses. Meanwhile, 68% of Galway attractions appeared in fewer than one in ten answers, and 15% were never mentioned in the tested queries, the publication reported.

Use the answer as a starting list

For an Ireland trip, the useful response is not to reject the familiar attractions. It is to avoid treating their repeated appearance as proof that the search is complete. The Kerry and Galway findings suggest that asking a chatbot for less-obvious options may not be enough on its own.

A more deliberate approach is to compare that initial list with regional destination information and specialist guides before settling the itinerary. Go To Ireland advocates combining AI assistance with human editorial expertise to move beyond the most frequently recommended places.

Tourism Ireland is trying to broaden the information that reaches travelers at that first planning stage. Whether that produces a wider distribution of visits is a separate question from whether its content appears in answers. For now, the supported change is in how the agency presents Ireland to AI, and how actively it is trying to shape the choices travelers see.