The pattern is consistent enough to be recognisable. Rank tracking says position three, same as last year. Impressions are steady or up. Clicks are down, and the phone is quieter. Nothing is broken, so nothing obvious is there to fix.
What has usually happened is that the answer to the searcher's question now appears above the results, or inside a chat assistant, and the searcher never had a reason to click. Google's AI Overviews were rolled out to Australian users during 2024 and expanded through 2025, though the exact Australian availability dates should be treated as unconfirmed and checked against Google's own announcement pages before anyone quotes them. Alongside that, chat assistant use is now large enough that it is worth treating as a discovery channel in its own right. If you want current usage figures for a specific assistant, take them from the provider's own announcements rather than from secondary summaries.
The fix is not one project. It is two, and they work differently.
First, confirm what actually changed
Before changing anything, separate "rankings held, clicks fell" from a genuine ranking loss. Google Search Console is the free tool for this, and according to Google's Search Central documentation it lets you compare impressions against clicks over matched periods. That comparison is the diagnostic:
- Impressions flat or up, clicks down, average position stable. The result is still being shown. Fewer people are clicking it. That is the answer-above-the-result problem.
- Impressions down, position down. This is a conventional ranking loss and the response is conventional too. Do not spend money on a new discipline to fix an old problem.
- Impressions up sharply, clicks flat, position worse. Often means the page is surfacing for broader, less relevant queries. Check the query list before concluding anything.
Do this comparison query by query for the terms that actually generate work, not site-wide. Site-wide numbers hide the ones that matter.
Second, change the dashboard
Impressions and average position were reasonable proxies for demand when a ranking reliably produced a click. They are not any more. A business can be named in an answer, remembered, and then reached directly — and none of that shows up as an organic click.
Watch these instead:
- Branded search volume. Searches for the business name. If the business is being mentioned in answers, this is where it shows up first.
- Direct traffic and typed-in visits. Same logic.
- Calls and form submissions, counted properly, with a record of how each enquiry says it found the business.
- "How did you hear about us?" asked on every quote request. Unfashionable, still the most reliable instrument available to a small business.
If enquiries are steady and only clicks are down, the situation is less urgent than it feels.
The two channels are not the same problem
Most of the advice being sold at the moment treats "AI search" as one thing with one retainer attached. It is more useful to think of it as two.
Being cited in a Google AI Overview is largely downstream of ordinary search fundamentals. The content has to be crawlable, indexed, and clearly about a specific thing. If a page is not indexed, it cannot be summarised. If the page buries the answer under 400 words of introduction, the part that would have been quoted is not there in a quotable form.
Being named by a chat assistant appears to depend much more heavily on material the business does not own — third-party mentions, directory listings, review corpora, industry association pages, local news, and aggregator sites. Be clear about the status of that claim: how assistants choose and cite businesses is not publicly documented by the providers. The split described here is a working hypothesis drawn from observed behaviour, not confirmed mechanics, and it may not hold as the products change. It is useful mainly because it stops you spending a month rewriting a home page to solve a problem the home page does not touch.
So the work splits.
Work that helps on the page (this week)
- Answer-shaped headings. Make the H2 the question a customer actually types, and answer it in the first two sentences underneath. Not "Our Approach to Pricing" — "How much does a split system install cost in Brisbane?"
- State the number. A price range, a call-out fee, a typical turnaround, a minimum job size. An answer engine can only quote a number if the page contains one — "contact us for a quote" gives it nothing to lift. If pricing genuinely varies, publish the range and the variables that move it.
- Name the suburb and the service area in the body text, not just in a footer list of 80 suburbs. Suburb-stuffed footers do not read as an answer to anything.
- One page per service, per area you actually serve. Thin duplicate pages for suburbs you would decline work in do more harm than good.
- Put the answer near the top. Introductions can go below.
- Check indexation. Anything not in the index is invisible to every downstream summary.
Work that helps off the page (this month)
This is the part the agency pitches leave out, because it is not billable in an interesting way.
- NAP consistency. Name, address, phone — identical everywhere. Not "St" in one place and "Street" in another, not an old mobile on a 2019 directory listing. Inconsistent business data is a common and easily fixed reason a business gets described vaguely, or left out entirely.
- Service-area data that matches reality. The radius in the business profile, the suburbs on the site, and the suburbs quoted on invoices should agree.
- Review volume with recency. Twelve reviews from four years ago reads as a business that may have closed. A steady trickle reads as an operating business. Build the ask into job completion so it happens without anyone remembering to do it.
- Be present where the aggregators are. Whatever the two or three dominant comparison, directory or booking sites are in the trade or profession, be listed, complete, and current on them. The reasoning is simple rather than documented: structured, regularly updated listings are the kind of source most likely to be picked up when a business is described somewhere it does not control.
- Earn plain mentions. Supplier pages, local association member lists, trade body directories, a quote in a local news piece. Unglamorous, and it is what changes how a business is described by sources it does not own.
What to be sceptical of
Be wary of anyone selling "GEO" or "AEO" as a wholly new discipline with a new monthly fee, particularly if the deliverables are indistinguishable from an ordinary content retainer. Ask directly: which of the two channels does this work affect, and what will be measured. If the answer is "visibility", it is not an answer.
What to do next
Run the Search Console impressions-versus-clicks comparison this week and find out which of the three patterns applies. If it is the first one, spend the next month on headings, published price ranges and off-site consistency — in that order — and change the reporting to branded search, direct traffic and counted enquiries before the next review. Then leave it alone long enough to read the result.
Sources
- Google — The Keyword blog
- OpenAI — News
- Google Search Central Help — Search Console performance data