Insights · Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing · 7 min read
The honest answer has changed in the last eighteen months, and most of the advice you will read has not caught up. Here is the current evidence, including the parts that are inconvenient for people who sell SEO.
Ask an SEO agency and you will be told SEO. Ask a PPC agency and you will be told ads. Both will produce a case study. Neither will tell you the thing that actually determines the answer, which is how long you can afford to wait and how much certainty you need.
Let us deal with the mechanics first, then the awkward part.
Google runs an auction every time somebody searches. Six things determine whether your ad appears and where: your bid, the quality of your ad and landing page, the Ad Rank thresholds for the position, how competitive that particular auction is, the context of the search, and the expected impact of your ad formats.
Two features of this system matter more than most advertisers realise. First, you usually pay less than your maximum bid — Google states that what you end up paying "is often less." Second, quality reduces cost: "higher quality ads can often lead to lower CPCs. That means you pay less per click when your ads are higher quality."
One correction worth making, because a great deal of agency material gets it wrong. Google states explicitly that "Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction" and "Quality Score is not a key performance indicator." The 1-to-10 number is a diagnostic. Ad quality is an auction input; the score itself is not. Anyone selling you "Quality Score optimisation" as a product is selling you a dashboard reading.
We went looking for reliable Irish cost-per-click benchmarks. They do not exist in any defensible form.
The most widely cited dataset — 13,474 search campaigns, April 2025 to March 2026, average CPC $5.42 — is US-only, in dollars, and drawn from one American agency's own client accounts. Legal sits at $9.87 per click, dentists at $8.00, home improvement at $8.33. Useful for a sense of proportion; useless as an Irish forecast.
The most-quoted UK page states on its face that it is compiled from "publicly available UK PPC benchmarking data, industry reports, and direct pricing data from UK agencies and freelancers" including "community-sourced data from UK marketing forums." No sample size. No campaign count. We would not put a client's budget on it and neither should you.
Two things we can tell you with confidence. Click prices are not spiralling: the most respected quarterly dataset found Google search average CPC rose just 1% year on year in Q2 2026, with spend growth coming almost entirely from click volume rather than price. And in Ireland specifically, digital ad spend passed €1.146bn in 2025, up 8%, but paid search grew only 4% to €345m — slower than the market, and well behind video.
The only trustworthy cost figure for your business is the one Google's own Keyword Planner gives you for your own terms in your own county. It takes twenty minutes. Do that before believing any published benchmark.
Google is unusually candid about timescales, and it is worth quoting directly rather than paraphrasing:
"Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months."
And on substantive content work: "Some changes can take effect in a few days, but it could take several months for our systems to learn and confirm that the site as a whole is now producing helpful, reliable, people-first content in the long term." If nothing has happened after a few months, Google says, that may mean waiting for the next core update.
Google also says, flatly, "there's no guarantee that changes you make to your website will result in noticeable impact in search results" and "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." Any proposal that promises one is either uninformed or dishonest.
You will find "four months to a year" attributed to Google all over the internet. We checked both the current and legacy pages on 7 August 2026 and the phrase does not appear on either. It seems to be a line Google removed. We are not going to quote a company saying something it no longer says.
This is the section most articles on this topic are missing, and it materially affects the answer.
The strongest available evidence is a pre-registered randomised field experiment by researchers at the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon: 1,065 US desktop users, 68,089 searches, January–February 2026, with participants randomly assigned to see AI Overviews, to have them hidden, or to use AI Mode. The findings:
That is causal evidence, not correlation, which puts it well ahead of anything else published. It agrees in direction with Pew Research Center's independent panel work: 8% of visits produced a click on a traditional result when an AI summary was present, against 15% when it was not.
AI Overviews appeared on roughly 18% of searches in early 2025. By early 2026 that had reached about 41%.
Google disputes the framing. Its Head of Search stated in August 2025 that "total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year." In fairness, that is not quite a contradiction — total volume can hold steady while per-query click-through falls, if total queries grow. But Google published no data, no percentages and no dataset alongside the claim, and until it does, the independent measurements are the better evidence.
The volume argument still favours organic, and by a wide margin. Clickstream analysis found that in the EU roughly 37% of searches produce a click to the open web, against roughly 1.5% producing a paid click. Organic clicks outnumber paid ones by something in the order of twenty to one.
But volume is not the only variable. Here is how we actually advise clients.
First, buying ads does not help your rankings. Google states it plainly: "We never provide special treatment to advertisers in how our search algorithms rank their websites, and nobody can pay us to do so." Equally, stopping ads does not damage rankings. Anyone who implies otherwise is inventing leverage.
Second, both channels land on the same page. If your landing page is slow, unclear or untrustworthy, ads will simply let you discover that more expensively and more quickly. Google's auction actively penalises a poor landing page experience with a higher cost per click. The page comes first either way.
Fix the site. Claim and complete the Google Business Profile. Then run a small, tightly targeted ads budget on your three highest-intent terms — enough to learn what a lead really costs you — while the organic work compounds in the background.
It is not the answer that maximises anybody's retainer. It is the one that gets you data in three weeks and an asset in twelve months.
If you would like the twenty-minute Keyword Planner exercise done on your own terms and county, we will run it and send you the numbers. No obligation attached. Your vision, built to perform.
Google Ads Help: How the Google Ads auction works, About Ad Rank, About Quality Score, About bidding strategies · Google Search Central: SEO Starter Guide, Google Search's Core Updates, What is an SEO expert?, Search Essentials · Google, How Search Works: Ranking results · Agarwal (Indian School of Business) & Sen (Carnegie Mellon), SSRN working paper, posted 3 April 2026, revised 8 July 2026 — pre-registered field experiment, not yet peer-reviewed · Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025 · SparkToro/Datos zero-click studies, 2024 and 2026 · WordStream/LocaliQ 2026 benchmarks (US agency data) · Tinuiti Q2 2026 Digital Ads Benchmark Report · IAB Ireland / IRM Online Adspend Study, May 2026 · Liz Reid, Google, 6 August 2025.
All sources verified live on 7 August 2026. Where a source has a commercial interest in the conclusion, we have said so in the text.
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