Traffic is down. The phone is quieter. Someone has already suggested rewriting the whole website, and someone else has quoted for a "GEO" retainer. Before any money moves, work out which problem you actually have — because the fix for a ranking drop and the fix for a click-through drop are not the same thing.
This is not a one-off glitch. ABC News reported on 15 October 2025 that Australian businesses relying on Google for customer acquisition were seeing dramatic falls in website traffic as Google shifted search towards AI-generated answers. The Canberra Times was still reporting the same pattern to regional business audiences on 26 May 2026 — local businesses losing customers to AI search results. That persistence matters: owners who cut ad spend or sacked an agency in 2025 and waited for the traffic to return are, on the reporting available, waiting on something that is not coming back in its old shape.
First, check impressions against clicks
Do this before you spend a dollar. Open Google Search Console, go to Performance, set the date range to the longest available comparison, and tick both Impressions and Clicks.
There are three shapes to look for:
- Impressions roughly flat, clicks down. You are still being shown. People are not clicking through. This is a click-through collapse, not a ranking loss. Rewriting pages to "rank better" is solving a problem you do not have.
- Impressions down and clicks down together. You have lost visibility. That is a more conventional problem — technical, content or competitive — and worth a proper diagnostic.
- Impressions up, clicks down hard. Often means you are appearing for broader informational queries that are now being answered on the results page.
Then filter by query type. Split "who are we / what is X" style informational queries from commercial ones — "emergency plumber Braddon", "bookkeeper for tradies Geelong". Informational queries are often the first to bleed, since those are the questions an AI answer can settle on the results page — but check your own split rather than assuming it. If your commercial queries are holding, the business is in better shape than the traffic chart suggests.
Also check Search Console's Pages report for crawl and indexing errors while you are in there. Some traffic falls are self-inflicted and have nothing to do with how search results are presented.
Raw traffic is now the wrong number
If the sessions that disappeared were people who were going to read one page and leave, losing them costs nothing. The sessions that survive are frequently further along — they have already had the basic question answered elsewhere and arrived to check whether you are the right business.
So change the reported number. Track enquiries per session (or calls per session, bookings per session) rather than sessions. Work out:
- enquiries per month, by source
- enquiries divided by sessions, tracked month over month
- cost per enquiry, if you are running ads
A site going from 4,000 sessions and 40 enquiries to 2,400 sessions and 44 enquiries is not in trouble. It looks like a disaster on a traffic graph. Plenty of businesses have panicked at the graph and cut the channel that was still working.
If calls are not tracked, this week is the week to fix it. A dedicated tracking number, or at minimum a consistent question at the point of first contact — "how did you find us?" — logged in the same place every time.
Make sure the systems can actually read your site
Answer engines cite pages they can fetch and parse. A surprising number of sites have quietly made themselves uncitable:
- Aggressive bot blocking. Firewall rules, bot-mitigation plugins and blanket robots.txt disallows added by a developer years ago. Review what is blocked and decide deliberately, not by accident. This is a genuine business decision — some publishers block crawlers on purpose to protect content. Just make sure it is a choice, not a leftover.
- JavaScript-only rendering. If your key content, service list, pricing or contact details only appear after client-side JavaScript runs, assume some systems will not see it. Test by viewing the page source, or disabling JavaScript in your browser, and checking whether the important text is still there.
- Content locked in images or PDFs. Service areas, opening hours and prices sitting in a graphic are invisible as text.
- Contradictions across the web. Old addresses, dead phone numbers, two versions of your trading name. Inconsistency gives any system a reason to cite someone else.
For local trades and services, the lever is usually not the homepage
If you sell locally, the practical work sits mostly off your website.
Google Business Profile. Categories correct and specific. Services listed individually. Service areas accurate. Hours current, including public holidays. Photos recent. Questions answered by the business, not left to strangers.
Reviews — volume and recency. A steady trickle of recent reviews reads differently to fifty reviews from 2022. Build asking into the job: at handover, on the invoice, in the follow-up message. Reply to all of them, including the bad ones, briefly and without argument.
Third-party sources. The pages that get cited about a local business are often not owned by that business. Directories, industry association member listings, local news, chamber of commerce pages, supplier "find an installer" pages, licensing registers. Getting listed accurately in ten of those is unglamorous, cheap and durable. It also survives whatever the next presentation change is.
Your own pages, but specific ones. One clear page per service and per suburb you genuinely serve, with real detail — what is included, what it costs or how pricing works, how long it takes, what the customer needs to have ready. Direct answers, stated plainly, near the top of the page. Padding out an 1,800-word page to hit a word count does nothing.
What to be sceptical about
Nobody has a settled playbook here, and anyone claiming a guaranteed citation rate is guessing. Note also that there is no verified Australian figure for what share of AI-answer citations goes to local small business websites — if a proposal quotes a percentage, ask which named study it comes from and read it before agreeing to anything.
Sensible questions for any provider pitching on this:
- What will you measure, and can it be seen in Search Console or a call log?
- Will enquiries be reported, not just impressions and "visibility scores"?
- What is the minimum term, and what happens if enquiries do not move?
One more thing worth doing regardless: reduce single-channel dependence. An email list of past customers, a habit of asking for referrals, and knowing your repeat-purchase rate are all worth more now than they were when organic search was reliably filling the pipeline.
Do this week
- Pull the Search Console impressions-versus-clicks comparison and write down which of the three shapes applies.
- Set up enquiry tracking so enquiries per session can be reported next month.
- Test whether the site renders without JavaScript, and check robots.txt and any firewall bot rules.
- Update Google Business Profile categories, services and hours; ask the last ten customers for a review.
- List ten third-party sites that mention businesses like the business in question, and get accurately listed on the ones that are free.
Then hold off on the big rebuild until the diagnosis is in. Most of the money wasted on this problem is spent fixing the wrong one.
Sources
- ABC News — How businesses are adapting to Google's pivot to AI in search (15 October 2025)
- The Canberra Times — Canberra businesses are losing customers to AI search: here's what to do about it (26 May 2026)