Mortgages in Ireland: who the AI recommends

How often the AI mentions each lender

This is the hero number: across the LLM answers our scans surfaced and the sources they cite, here is the raw volume of mentions per lender. As of June 2026 the order is unambiguous — the three pillar banks own the top of the board, the two AIB sub-brands sit in the middle, and the non-pillar challengers trail. The bars are coloured by lender type: pillar banks in terracotta, AIB's sub-brands (EBS, Haven) in blue, and the non-pillar challengers (Avant, Finance Ireland, ICS) in green.

The top three are a photo finish: PTSB (306), AIB (305) and Bank of Ireland (298) are separated by eight mentions across the whole field. That tracks the real market — the pillar banks accounted for 92% of new mortgage issuance in the first nine months of 2025 (Irish Times, 1 Jan 2026). Here, at least, share of voice in the AI mirrors share of the loan book. The interesting stories start once you stop counting and start reading what is actually being said.

Loud isn't the same as liked

Re-rank the same eight lenders by sentiment instead of volume and the board flips on its head. As of June 2026 the lender the AI speaks most warmly about is Avant Money (+0.258) — sixth on volume, first on warmth. ICS Mortgages is last on mentions but second on sentiment (+0.188). The pillar banks, for all their volume, sit in the muddy middle. And one of them is an outlier in the other direction.

Bank of Ireland is the standout problem. It draws almost as many mentions as the league leaders, yet its sentiment is barely above zero (+0.005). The scan shows why: its conversation is dragged down by Reddit (−0.22 average) and by independent.ie (−0.30), where the recurring themes are mortgage service delays, mobile-app complaints and the long shadow of the tracker-mortgage scandal. Its owned site and news coverage are positive, but the social and review layer is where the AI is reading its verdict from. Avant, by contrast, is positive almost everywhere it appears — even on Reddit (+0.25) — which is exactly the kind of evenly-warm footprint a model latches onto.

Where each lender's answer comes from

An LLM's opinion of a brand is only as good as the pages it reads. The scans map every mention back to its source, and the split tells you who controls the narrative. The pattern (as of June 2026): the pillar banks lean on their own sites and the national press; the challengers live more on forums — Reddit, boards.ie, askaboutmoney.com. That matters, because earned forum chatter is where sentiment is won or lost, and it is the one channel a marketing team cannot simply publish its way out of.

Two things jump out. First, AIB's own site is its single biggest source (48 mentions) and it is positive (+0.19) — the pillars have invested in being quotable about themselves. Second, for Bank of Ireland the largest single source is Reddit, and Reddit is where its sentiment goes negative; the brand's visibility problem and its sentiment problem are the same channel. The challengers, with smaller footprints, are far more exposed to whatever a single viral forum thread says about them.

Watch the top four move — updates weekly

Everything above is a dated snapshot from June 2026. The graph below is the living version: it re-draws itself straight from our platform every time a fresh weekly scan lands, so you can watch whether the pillar banks hold the top of the board or whether the gap narrows. We track the top four by volume — PTSB, AIB, Bank of Ireland and EBS. Right now each lender shows a single labelled point; the lines fill out one datapoint per week from here.

A closer look at one lender's citations

The mention scans measure the whole conversation; a visibility report measures something narrower — whether a brand actually gets cited when AI engines answer a specific buyer query. We ran one for AIB across Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity. As of June 2026, AIB's site was cited in 12 of 24 mortgage searches (50%), for a visibility score of 17.1. Where it fell silent is the instructive part: AIB wasn't cited at all for "best mortgage for first time buyers Ireland" or "non-bank mortgage lenders Ireland" — two queries that matter enormously in a market where first-time buyers were 60% of 2025 drawdowns (BPFI). (Gemini did not fan out on this run, so we make no claim about its coverage.) Even the lender that owns the most AI volume has obvious, nameable gaps.

The ranking loosely tracks value — loosely

Here is the most useful coincidence in the data. The lender the AI mentions most, PTSB, also happens to hold the market-floor rate — a 4-year fixed at 3.00% (LTV ≤60%), effective January 2026 (bonkers.ie; PTSB). The sentiment leader, Avant Money, is the genuine rate disruptor: a 4-year fixed at 3.20% for high-value loans with no BER required, the sharpest non-bank rate going, after it cut rates and doubled cashback in January 2026 (avantmoney.ie; RTÉ). Meanwhile the two lenders the AI barely mentions are also the dearest: ICS Mortgages sits around 4.8–4.95% fixed and Finance Ireland from 5.75% up past 6.6%, both market-funded and pitched at complex cases rather than rate competition (icsmortgages.ie; financeireland.ie). So AI attention here loosely tracks value — the cheap, widely-discussed banks crowd out the expensive, near-invisible non-banks.

The market shape behind this is worth knowing. The three pillar banks made up roughly 92% of new issuance in the first nine months of 2025, with Avant the largest non-bank at about 6% (Irish Times, 1 Jan 2026). The ownership map is less obvious than the brands suggest: EBS and Haven are both AIB (EBS direct-only through branches, Haven broker-only); Avant is a Bankinter branch as of April 2025; ICS is owned by Dilosk; and Finance Ireland is Pimco-controlled (Irish Times; RTÉ). Switching is surging too — 2025 switcher drawdowns were up about 57% in value year on year to roughly €1.7bn (BPFI Q4 2025), with six in ten switchers going through a broker. The average new Irish mortgage rate was 3.50% at end-April 2026, now only about 0.18 points above the euro-area average (Central Bank). The deals are tightening; the question is whether the AI keeps up.

Volume follows brand size. Everything else is winnable.

For a lender, the lesson of this league table is clean. Raw mention volume tracks how big you already are — the pillar banks lead the AI for the same reason they lead the loan book, and a challenger isn't going to out-shout them. But the two metrics that actually move a recommendation — sentiment and citations — are not size-locked. Avant proves it: sixth on volume, first on warmth, because its footprint is evenly positive even on Reddit. Bank of Ireland proves the inverse: all that volume is wasted when one channel drags sentiment to zero. And the non-banks — ICS, Finance Ireland — have the opposite problem again: well-liked when mentioned, but barely mentioned at all, and invisible on exactly the buyer queries (first-time buyers, non-bank lenders) where they should be the answer. That invisibility is a fixable content-and-citation gap, not a fact of nature.

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

Run a mention scan on your brand