By Niamh Kelly
Publication Date: 2026-08-15 21:27:00
Three very different AI products now fight for the same query: the question you’d have typed into Google five years ago. Perplexity AI answers with cited sources and a live web crawl. ChatGPT answers with the broadest feature set and 900 million weekly users behind it, according to OpenAI’s own February 2026 disclosure. Grok answers from inside X, pulling real-time posts into its replies while xAI absorbs regulatory heat over its image tools. Picking between them in Ireland in 2026 isn’t just about which chatbot writes better prose. It’s about pricing tiers that range from free to $200 a month, context windows that differ by a factor of 20, and GDPR exposure that varies sharply between the three companies.
