There was a time not so long ago when Australian businesses were in love with Google. The search engine connected them to their customers with an efficiency that's never been seen before.
It just seemed to know what they wanted and when they wanted it, allowing brands to position their websites and advertisements to maximise engagements and clicks.
Now a revolution is underway in the world's most dominant search engine and the corporate world has been left wondering what's happened. E-commerce brands, local tradies and even regular marketing divisions are facing a digital drought. Sweeping artificial intelligence overhauls on Google's main search engine and other platforms mean that users simply aren't clicking through to regular websites as much as they used to. The difference is palpable.
These days, many people go straight to AI to get recommendations for what products to buy or which services to use. This means that many companies that were once considered are no longer receiving the same amount of traffic as they used to. This has resulted in what many people are calling the "zero-click crisis," and it's affecting Australian businesses just as much as anybody else.
According to SEO agency Excite Media, companies need to change their strategy.
Previously, SEO was relatively straightforward. If you were a local business, you would post on Google Maps and hope to get found. In today's world, this is still the case. Many people use Google Maps to look for local services and find the companies they need. The strategy today is all about EEAT, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.
All of these elements need to be in place if a business or service is going to be recommended in AI answers on search engine page results. Part of the value of EEAT is to make firms more transparent, real and trustworthy, which is something that LLMs look for when scraping content to see what to serve to their audiences. If they can survey a highly esteemed and highly regarded firm in a particular area, they will do so.”
Data from digital agencies suggests that the changes in consumer behaviour are significant. Google's AI summaries are now resulting in zero-click rates of upwards of 75% for regular terms, with 4 out of 5 users finding most of what they need directly on Google's home page instead of having to click through to any websites. This means that the surface area where small and medium-sized businesses can attract customers is shrinking.
Google doesn't want to be a yellow pages directory that hands people phone numbers. Instead, it wants to be an assistant that solves people's problems on the spot.
For example, a customer in Australia is experiencing a kitchen emergency: their pipe is leaking. Previously, they would have gone on Google and searched for plumbers in their local area. Now they can just ask the search engine who to call and it will provide them with the phone number and all the details they need. The consumer gets the instant fix and the lucky plumber who was recommended gets the cash. Therefore, the goal these days is to be the company that is recommended by search engines.
In May and June of 2026, the digital transformation of search engine results accelerated significantly. Core algorithm updates powered by the Gemini AI engine changed how web content is evaluated. Instead of presenting all information and search results, the system targets what the industry calls "AI content farms": websites using automated tools to pump out thousands of cheap, generic articles designed to capture traffic.
Across Australia, directory websites and low-tier blogs that dominated rankings suffered historic losses. This meant that anybody looking to use AI to try to accelerate the process of producing quality content on web pages often lost most or all of their organic visibility.
Google's ranking system is pivoting away from simple keyword matching and toward a concept called "information gain." The idea is to provide additional data to consumers so that they learn something new instead of just matching them to their specific keywords. This means that companies that introduce proprietary data or offer genuine human expertise are much more likely to be valuable than those that don't.
Regulations are heating up
Google, though, may be struggling with issues of its own. The European Court of Justice recently rejected Alphabet's final appeal in a landmark antitrust case, setting the company up for a €4.13 billion fine over anti-competitive practices. While the search engine might have a 90% market share right now, its dominance may be limited in the future.
Furthermore, the UK Competition and Markets Authority is issuing mandates to Google to provide more transparent information about how its secretive ranking system works. The goal is to make it fairer for businesses across the globe and in the UK to compete.
Adapting to Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)
The short-term response from many companies is to focus more on AEO (answer engine optimisation) than SEO. To survive in an online landscape where all information seems to be coming from AI, the goal is to become one of the companies that appear in the answers AI provides.
For example, if a customer asks, "Who offers the best plumbing services in Sydney?" The goal of AEO would be for the AI to recommend the company's products and services at some point in the response. This might sound like a simple task, but it very much depends on the consumer's question and their intent. Even slight changes in the question formulation can provide some brands with advantages over others if they are able to better deliver an answer according to LLM criteria.
There's also a recognition that brands have to diversify their touchpoints. Google traffic is narrowing and there isn't the same incentive to use the platform as there was before. Now, a lot of businesses are bypassing Google by using platforms like Reddit or email marketing and it's making such a difference to their bottom lines.
