Where Ireland's Digital Adspend Actually Goes

Irish digital advertising spend reached EUR 1.146 billion in 2025, up 8% on the previous year. Paid search took EUR 345 million of that, and grew 4%. Every other major format grew faster: display 10%, social 12%, video 14%, digital audio 20%, publisher and broadcaster video 22%.

So search was the slowest-growing paid digital channel in Ireland last year. Not shrinking. Just falling behind.

Those figures come from the IAB Ireland and IRM Online Adspend Study, published on 14 May 2026. It is the closest thing Ireland has to an authoritative channel-level picture, and it is worth understanding properly, including one methodological caveat that almost nobody who quotes the headline number mentions.

What the 2025 Numbers Actually Say

Some context on scale. The market was EUR 655 million in 2020, so it has grown at an average of roughly 12% a year across five years. The 8% figure for 2025 is therefore a slowdown against the medium-term trend, not an acceleration.

Display dominates in absolute terms at EUR 735 million, which is 64% of the market. But display is mostly social: EUR 576 million of that total, or 78%, is social spend. If you strip social out, the non-social display market is around EUR 159 million, smaller than paid search.

The Caveat Nobody Quotes

Here is the part that changes how much weight the headline deserves. Google, Meta, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and LinkedIn do not submit data to the study. Their spend is estimated using the researcher's own econometric modelling.

Consider what that excludes. Google is the overwhelming majority of paid search in Ireland. Meta is the overwhelming majority of social. So the two largest line items in the table above, together accounting for something like EUR 900 million of the EUR 1.146 billion, are modelled rather than counted.

That does not make the number wrong. Econometric estimation of platform spend is standard practice across every market that publishes this kind of study, and IRM does the same work for Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. But it means the figure is part census, part model, and the precision implied by writing EUR 1.146 billion rather than roughly EUR 1.1 billion is not really there.

What is directly counted is the contribution from 22 publishers and media owners, 2 ad networks and 7 media buying agencies. That is a solid sample of the Irish-owned media economy. It is not a full accounting of Irish digital advertising.

Worth saying plainly: if you build a board slide claiming Irish digital advertising is a EUR 1.146 billion market and someone asks how it was measured, the honest answer includes the phrase "partly modelled." Better to say that yourself than to have it discovered.

Why Search Growing at 4% Is Not an Argument for Cutting Search

The obvious reading of a 4% growth rate is that search is losing relevance and budget should follow the faster-growing formats. That reading is too quick, for three reasons.

First, paid search spend and organic search value are different things. The EUR 345 million measures money handed to Google. It says nothing about how many commercial decisions in Ireland still begin with a search box. Those two can move in opposite directions, and a slowdown in auction spend can just as easily reflect rising cost efficiency, better negative keyword management, or budget shifting into organic and content work that no adspend study captures.

Second, the slowdown may partly reflect the same thing the click data shows. Irish click-through rates fell 26% across 175 million searches over sixteen months, according to a Friday.ie analysis published in July 2026, while average ranking position slightly improved. If a given search delivers fewer clicks than it used to, paid search inventory delivers less per euro too. A 4% growth rate in that context is not disinterest. It is repricing.

Third, and this is the important one: the study measures paid media only. There is no line item anywhere in it for SEO services, content production, technical optimisation or AI visibility work. Those budgets exist. They are simply invisible to this instrument.

What This Number Is Not

The EUR 1.146 billion figure gets misused constantly, usually as a proxy for the size of the Irish digital marketing services market. It is not that, and the substitution produces badly wrong conclusions.

On the SEO services question specifically, I have to report a gap rather than a number. Across four independent research passes conducted for this piece, no independently audited euro figure for the size of the Irish SEO or AI-visibility services market could be located. Not a small figure, not an estimated figure. None. Anyone quoting you one has either built it themselves from assumptions or taken the adspend total and applied a multiplier.

Two Buyer Pools That Barely Touch

The last point in that table deserves its own section, because it is the structural feature of the Irish market that most cross-border planning gets wrong.

Twenty percent of Irish employment sits inside agency-supported firms. Ninety-two and a half percent of exports come from foreign-owned companies. Those are not marginal statistics. They describe an economy where a very large share of commercial activity is conducted by organisations whose head office, and often whose marketing budget, is somewhere else.

Which raises the question every foreign agency selling into Ireland should ask and almost none do: how much of that multinational marketing budget is actually bought in Ireland?

Nobody knows. All four research passes conducted for this piece flagged it as unmeasured. There is no published study of how many EMEA headquarters in Dublin procure search or content services locally versus through a global roster negotiated in New York, London or Singapore. The inference that a meaningful share is centralised abroad is reasonable. It is still an inference, and treating it as a finding would be exactly the kind of overreach this market punishes.

How to Use This in a Budget Conversation

Four things the study genuinely supports, and one it does not.

It supports arguing that Irish media inflation is real and uneven. A market growing 8% overall with video at 14% and connected TV taking 58% of the publisher video segment tells you where competition for attention is intensifying. If your plan holds video spend flat in nominal terms, you are cutting in real terms.

It supports questioning a search-heavy paid mix. Not abandoning it. Questioning it. When the channel you are most exposed to is the slowest growing in the market and the click data shows CTR falling while positions hold, the burden of proof shifts. You should be able to explain why your mix looks different from the market, and "we have always done it this way" is not that explanation.

It supports treating organic as a separate budget line with its own case. Because organic is entirely absent from this study, it also escapes the market comparison that paid media invites. That cuts both ways. You cannot benchmark your SEO budget against a national figure, but nor can anyone use a national figure to argue it down.

It supports segmenting your Irish plan by buyer pool before allocating anything. A campaign built for a domestic small business audience and a campaign built for a Dublin EMEA headquarters have almost nothing in common: different search behaviour, different procurement, different proof requirements, different sales cycle. Building one plan for both produces something that underperforms with each. The Ireland-specific approach we take to this starts from that split rather than treating the country as a single audience.

It does not support a target for what percentage of revenue you should spend on marketing. The study measures aggregate spend, not spend as a share of anything. Converting it into a benchmark ratio requires a denominator the study does not contain.

The Slowdown Worth Watching

One forward-looking note. Study participants forecast 7% growth for 2026, against the 8% delivered in 2025 and the roughly 12% average of the preceding five years. If that holds, the Irish digital advertising market is decelerating for a second consecutive year.

A decelerating paid market alongside falling organic click-through rates is an uncomfortable combination. It means the total volume of attention available for purchase is growing more slowly, while the free route to that attention is delivering less per ranking position than it used to. Neither channel is collapsing. Both are getting more expensive per unit of outcome.

The response that follows from the data is not to move budget from one to the other. It is to add a measurement layer neither channel currently reports: whether your brand is named inside AI-generated answers, with or without a click attached. That visibility does not appear in adspend studies, does not appear in click reports, and is invisible to both instruments above. We deal with the mechanics of measuring it in our GEO service for Ireland, and the general method in our core generative engine optimisation practice.

The broader argument, that discovery has moved upstream of the click and that budgets built entirely on clickable inventory are measuring a shrinking share of demand, is the subject of Found Before They Search. The gated edition is free if you want the framework without a purchase.

Written by Tessar Napitupulu, Founder and CEO of PT Arfadia Digital Indonesia, a member of the Forbes Agency Council, and author of Found Before They Search and Cited or Silent. Arfadia works from Jakarta, Bandung and Bali, and has documented its generative engine optimisation practice since 2023.

Frequently Asked Questions

How big is Ireland's digital advertising market?

EUR 1.146 billion in 2025, up 8% from EUR 1.06 billion in 2024, according to the IAB Ireland and IRM Online Adspend Study published on 14 May 2026. For scale, the market was EUR 655 million in 2020, giving an average annual growth rate of roughly 12% across five years. Study participants forecast 7% growth for 2026, which would mark a second consecutive year of deceleration.

Which digital channel grew slowest in Ireland in 2025?

Paid search. It reached EUR 345 million and grew 4%, against 8% for the market as a whole. Display grew 10% to EUR 735 million, social 12% to EUR 576 million, classified 11% to EUR 66 million, video 14% across all formats, digital audio 20% to EUR 23 million, and publisher and broadcaster video 22% to EUR 45 million. Search was the only major format growing at half the market rate or less.

Is the EUR 1.146 billion figure directly measured?

Only partly, and this is the study's most important caveat. Google, Meta, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and LinkedIn do not submit data. Their spend is estimated using IRM's econometric modelling. Since those platforms account for the large majority of paid search and social spend in Ireland, roughly EUR 900 million of the EUR 1.146 billion total is modelled rather than counted. What is directly collected comes from 22 publishers and media owners, 2 ad networks and 7 media buying agencies. The figure is credible but the implied precision is not fully there.

Can this study tell me the size of the Irish SEO services market?

No, and the substitution is a common error. The study measures money spent buying advertising inventory. SEO is a services engagement that buys no inventory at all. Using paid search spend as a proxy for SEO market size conflates a media budget with a labour budget. Across four independent research passes conducted for this piece, no independently audited euro figure for the Irish SEO or AI-visibility services market could be located. Any figure you are quoted has been constructed from assumptions.

Does slow paid search growth mean we should cut our search budget?

Not automatically. Paid search spend and organic search value are separate things, and a slowdown in auction spend can reflect improved efficiency rather than declining relevance. It can also reflect repricing: Irish click-through rates fell 26% across 175 million searches over sixteen months while average position slightly improved, per a Friday.ie analysis published in July 2026, so each search delivers fewer clicks for both paid and organic. What the data does support is shifting the burden of proof. If search is your heaviest paid channel and it is the market's slowest growing, you should be able to explain why your mix differs from the market.

How many people work for multinationals in Ireland?

IDA client companies employed 312,468 people in 2025, up 1.5% year on year with a net increase of 4,726 roles, representing around 11% of total national employment for the fourth consecutive year. The client base spans more than 1,800 multinational operations, including 1,002 United States firms employing 218,567 people. Employment outside Dublin reached 169,967, or 54% of client employment. Separately, the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment reported in February 2026 that Enterprise Ireland, IDA and Údarás na Gaeltachta client companies together employed 554,608 people, around 20% of total Irish employment.

Do multinationals in Ireland buy marketing services locally?

Unknown, and this is one of the largest unmeasured questions in the Irish market. There is no published study of how many EMEA headquarters based in Dublin procure search, content or AI-visibility services in Ireland versus through a global roster negotiated elsewhere. All four research passes for this piece flagged it as unmeasured. The inference that a meaningful share is centralised abroad is reasonable given that 92.5% of Irish exports come from foreign-owned enterprises, but it remains an inference rather than a finding.

Should an Irish marketing plan treat the country as one audience?

No. Ireland contains two commercial populations that behave differently. Domestic Irish business is overwhelmingly small and medium enterprises with micro firms forming the large majority of the base, where budget is decided locally, procurement is informal and local credibility carries most of the weight. The multinational cluster involves formal vendor due diligence, security review and frequently centralised procurement. Different search behaviour, different proof requirements, different sales cycles. A single plan built for both tends to underperform with each.

What does this study not measure at all?

Anything that is not paid media inventory. There is no line item for SEO services, content production, technical optimisation, digital PR or AI visibility work. Those budgets exist in Ireland but are invisible to this instrument. The study also cannot support a benchmark for marketing spend as a percentage of revenue, because it measures aggregate spend without the denominator such a ratio would require. And national aggregates across all sectors say very little about any individual category.