Home insurance in Ireland: who the AI recommends

How often the AI mentions each insurer

Start with raw share of voice: across the LLM answers our scans surfaced and the sources they cite, here's the volume of mentions per brand. Bars are coloured by type - risk-carrying underwriters in terracotta, brokers and comparison brands in green. As of June 2026 the shape is clean: the carriers own the top of the board, the intermediaries sit underneath. If you sell a brand, this is the metric that tracks how big you already are.

The telling result is at the very top. Zurich leads on 264 mentions - even though Zurich Insurance plc redomiciled to Germany in 2024. Brand memory outlives the corporate paperwork: the models still read Zurich as a front-rank Irish home insurer. Behind it, five more carriers cluster tightly, and only then do the brokers appear. Volume, in other words, is a brand-size mirror - a challenger won't out-shout the incumbents here. The interesting story starts when you stop counting mentions and read what's being said.

Warmth doesn't follow volume

Re-rank the same ten brands by sentiment and the board turns over. The warmest-spoken-of names are RedClick (+0.219), the Generali-owned direct brand, and An Post Insurance (+0.216) - both near the bottom on volume. The two biggest underwriters by mentions, AXA and Allianz, sit dead last on warmth. Unlike raw volume, sentiment is winnable - it moves independent of how big you are, which is exactly why it's worth watching.

The mechanism is in the sources. Every insurer's own site reads positively - that part is table stakes. What separates the warm from the merely loud is the earned layer. Allianz's sentiment is dragged down by Reddit (−0.16) and a run of BBC travel-insurance complaints (−0.29); its most negative quote is a Reddit thread about a stalled claim - "5 days and counting and they are delaying at every opportunity." The smaller, warmer brands live on friendlier channels - An Post on Instagram, FBD on a +0.46 Facebook footprint. The takeaway for a marketer: the models read your reputation off the channels you don't own.

An LLM's verdict is only as good as the pages it reads

The scans map every mention back to its source, and the split tells you who's writing each brand's story. The pattern: the underwriters lean on their own sites and the national press; the brokers live far more on social - higher-reach, but also where a single sour thread sets the tone.

The brokers are far more exposed to social: 123.ie draws 51 of its 175 mentions from social, and its Reddit footprint runs negative (−0.33) - exactly what pulls a high-reach brand's warmth down. Owned channels are defendable; the forum layer is earned, and it's where sentiment is won or lost.

The numbers above are a snapshot - these keep moving

Everything above is dated June 2026. The two graphs below are the living version: they re-draw straight from our platform every time a fresh weekly scan lands, so you can watch the board shift - who's gaining share of voice, whose warmth is recovering. Each line has two points today and fills out one per week from here.

Ask "best home insurance Ireland" and the board flips again

Mentions measure the whole conversation. But the commercial question is narrower: when an engine answers a specific buyer query, whose site gets cited? We ran six buyer queries - "best home insurance Ireland," "cheapest home insurance Ireland," and the like - across Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity, for 18 answer sets. Counting how many each brand is cited in turns the volume table on its head.

AXA is the standout collapse. Third on raw mentions (246), it's cited in just 2 of 18 buyer-query answers - all that brand volume simply doesn't convert into being named when someone asks who to insure with. The mirror image is the broker Chill, cited in 12 of 18, the most of anyone: the engines lean on comparison and aggregator pages for "best / cheapest" questions. Alongside the brands, the most-cited domains were chill.ie (12), bonkers.ie (12), compareinsurance.ie (10) and insuremyhouse.ie (6) - the comparison surface is what gets quoted, while the carriers barely get a look in. For a brand, that's the whole game: "best home insurance Ireland" is won on the aggregators the models trust - and being the biggest name won't get you there.

Watch the citations move - live

That snapshot won't hold still - between our first two runs, Chill slipped from 12 to 10 and FBD from 5 to 2. The graph below re-runs those same six buyer queries every week and tracks how often the top four brands get cited, so you can see the AI's idea of "best home insurance Ireland" evolve in real time.

There's no official ranking, so the models improvise

Here's the structural reason the aggregators win. Ireland publishes no official home-insurance league table - the Central Bank's claims database covers motor and liability, but there's no household report. With no authoritative ranking to cite, an answer engine falls back on the next-best corroborated surface: comparison sites, the CCPC and the national press. That's precisely the citation pattern above.

It also means the AI often names one brand while a different company carries the risk: AIB home insurance is underwritten by AXA; Bank of Ireland by Intact or FBD; An Post compares Aviva and Allianz; 123.ie is underwritten by Intact; and RedClick sits with Generali. If you're a carrier hidden behind a retail brand, the models may be recommending your product under someone else's name - and the stakes are climbing: home premiums rose +9.1% in 2023 and Aviva estimates Irish homeowners are underinsured by ~€39bn. Buyers are leaning on AI for a higher-stakes decision than ever, guided by whichever sources the engine happened to trust — and as most brands have no monitoring in place, they often don't know what those sources are saying about them.

Volume follows brand size. Being recommended is earned.

For any brand, the lesson is clean. Raw mention volume tracks how big you already are — the same pattern holds in the AI mortgage-lender league table, where the pillar banks dominate by volume but the challengers win on warmth. - Zurich leads the AI for the same reason its name outlived its move to Germany, and you won't out-shout the incumbents. But the two metrics that actually move a recommendation - sentiment and citation on buyer queries - are not size-locked. RedClick and An Post prove it on warmth: near-last on volume, first on sentiment, because their earned footprint is positive. Chill proves it on citations: a broker cited more than any carrier, because it lives on the comparison surface the models trust. And AXA proves the inverse - third on volume, all but invisible (2 of 18) when a buyer actually asks. That gap is a content-and-citation problem you can fix.

If you want to know what the AI says about your brand - where you're loud, where you're liked, and which sources are writing your verdict for you - that's exactly what a Baseline mention scan measures.

Run a mention scan on your brand