Google AI Overviews: What Australian Small Businesses Should Actually Do

Work out which bucket your traffic is in

Open Search Console, filter to the last six months, and sort your queries by impressions. Sort them into two piles: questions, and intents. “How do I unblock a drain” is a question. “Emergency plumber Marrickville” is an intent. If the questions pile produces most of your clicks, the ground is moving under you.

Stop measuring blog posts by traffic alone

A post that used to earn 400 sessions a month might now earn 90 while being read by more people inside an AI answer. The post is still doing its job — building the topical authority and entity signals that make you the business a model names — but the metric that used to prove it no longer does. See why your blog gets traffic but no enquiries.

Restructure so you can be quoted

Put a direct 40 to 70 word answer at the top of the page before any preamble, phrase headings as the questions people actually ask, and use tables rather than flowing narrative for anything comparative. This is a rewrite of existing content, not a new content programme, and it is usually the highest-return two days available. The mechanics are in how to structure a page so AI will quote it.

Put the budget where the intent is

If you have been buying cheap top-of-funnel blog traffic, that calculation has changed. The same budget spent on service pages, location pages and comparison content aimed at people ready to act will produce more enquiries than it did a year ago — because competition for those searches has thinned while everyone panics about the wrong thing.

What not to do

Do not delete your informational content; it is doing work you can no longer see directly. Do not block AI crawlers to protect it — that removes you from answers without removing your competitors, as covered in should you block AI crawlers. And do not buy an AI visibility tool before checking whether your entity data is even consistent.