TLDR; What you need to know:

• AI search is changing how people discover content, but strong SEO remains the foundation because pages still need to rank before they can be quoted in AI answers.

• To improve visibility, make sure your content answers questions clearly near the top, includes specific facts or original data, and demonstrates real expertise through named authors and up-to-date information.

• Focus on what is proven to work; trusted mentions, useful content, site speed and crawlability and avoid wasting time on overhyped tactics like llms.txt or artificial chunking.

For twenty-five years Google answered a question by handing you ten links and letting you do the rest. In 2026, in Australia, that stopped being the default.

Open google.com.au and your question is often answered before you scroll. Google's AI Overviews, the summaries that sit above the classic results, now appear on close to half of all tracked queries, up 58% in a year (BrightEdge, Feb 2026). AI Mode, its Gemini-powered conversational search, passed a billion monthly users and reached Australia in 2026.

And it isn't only Google. ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly users in early 2026 and crossed a billion monthly app users by June. About 37% of people now begin a search in an AI tool rather than a search engine.

Before anyone panics, the honest caveat. Every AI chatbot combined still sends only a tiny slice of referral traffic, and Google sends the overwhelming majority. But the visitors AI does send behave differently, spending roughly 15 minutes on site versus about 8 from Google. Fewer clicks, higher intent. Small today, and growing.

The shift: from ranking to being quoted

The acronyms are multiplying, so let's be clear:

• SEO optimises to rank a page in a list of links.

• AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) optimises to be selected and quoted as the direct answer, in a snippet, an AI Overview or a chat reply.

• GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is the broader game of being cited and recommended across generative engines, and shaping how a model understands your brand.

None of these replace SEO. Google's own position is that AI search still runs on its core ranking systems, an answer layer on top of the foundations, not a new building. Roughly 99% of the URLs that surface in AI Mode also sit in the top 20 organic results. If you can't rank, you won't be quoted.

What's changed is the value of that ranking. 68% of Google searches now end without a click, up from 60% in 2024, and click-through at the top spot more than halves when an Overview appears (Ahrefs, Dec 2025). The pages that lose the most clicks are informational; health, education and research trigger an Overview around 80% of the time. Transactional and "near me" pages are mostly safe.

What actually works on your site

The good news for practitioners is that the playbook is dull and well-evidenced. A Princeton-led study at KDD 2024 tested nine tactics over 10,000 queries and found citations, quotations and statistics lifted visibility by over 40%, clearer language added another 15 to 30%, and keyword stuffing made things about 10% worse than doing nothing.

In practice:

1. Answer first. Put a clear, self-contained answer in the first 40 to 80 words. Engines pull the passage closest to the question, so an answer buried lower down forfeits the citation.

2. Write in questions. Phrase your key headings as the questions people actually ask. Good UX writing that happens to match how engines retrieve.

3. Be specific. "Faster" is invisible. "Loads in under two seconds" is citable.

4. Add your own data. First-hand testing, original numbers, proprietary research. The highest-impact move, and the hardest for a competitor to copy.

5. Show your expertise (E-E-A-T). Named authors, visible "last updated" dates, real first-hand experience. Google's March 2026 core update re-weighted "information gain" to reward exactly that.

6. Earn mentions elsewhere. AI engines lean on Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube, LinkedIn and G2. A 2025 study found a clear bias towards third-party sources over your own pages.

And none of it matters if the site is slow or hard to crawl. Test with PageSpeed Insights, fix what it flags, and submit your sitemap to Search Console.

What's over-hyped

• llms.txt sits at about 10% adoption with no measurable effect on citations, and no major AI company reads it in production yet. Probably not worth your time unless you're curious.

• Schema as a magic bullet. Structured data helps machines understand content and earns rich results, so keep doing it, but controlled studies show it doesn't cause citations. The correlation exists because authoritative sites tend to use schema, not the reverse.

• "Chunking." Google says it doesn't need content broken into tiny pieces. Chunk for genuine readability, not to please an algorithm that isn't asking.

Key takeaways

1. AI search is how Australians search now, so build for it today.

2. It sits on top of good SEO, it doesn't replace it. No ranking, no quote.

3. To get quoted, answer clearly near the top, back it with your own numbers and specific facts, say who wrote it and why they're an expert, and earn mentions on trusted sites.

4. Watch your guide and how-to pages closely. That's where AI is taking clicks. Product and "near me" pages are mostly safe.

5. Don't chase buzzwords. llms.txt and chunking are nice to have at best.

6. Get the basics right. Test with PageSpeed Insights, fix the errors, and set up Search Console on every site so you can see when you appear in AI answers.

None of this is cause for panic, or a reason to ditch what already works. People still want a trustworthy answer with the least effort. The machines reading our sites just reward what good practitioners always have, clarity, evidence and expertise, a little more literally than before.

Written by: Jamie Esterman Crumb & AWIA Board Member

The Australian Web Awards recognise excellence across six core disciplines: Accessibility, Content, Design, Development, SEO, and User Experience. Subscribe to AWIA’s newsletter for 2026 awards updates, AWIA news and accessibility events as they’re released.