SEO, AI Search & the State of Aussie Business, August 2026

Let's start with Google because it's been a messy few weeks.

Google pushed out its fourth broad core update of the year in early August, and this one is specifically targeting pages with weak originality and thin evidence.

That's the language Google's own guidance is using.

On top of that, publishers and site owners have been reporting volatile rankings and unusual discover behavior through the first week of August, even outside of a confirmed update.

So if your traffic's been jumping around the last couple of weeks, you're not imagining it, and you're not alone.

Here's the bit that matters more though, and it's been building all year.

AI overviews are now showing up in something like fifty-eight percent of search results pages.

And recent data from Ahrefs puts the click-through rate hit for a number one ranking at around fifty-eight percent lower than it used to be.

That is a genuinely brutal number.

If you're only measuring success by rankings, you are measuring the wrong thing in twenty twenty-six.

Rankings without clicks don't pay the bills.

So what do you actually do about this? Two things, and I say this to every client right now.

One, stop writing content that just restates what's already out there.

If Google's AI can summarize it in three sentences, it will, and you lose the click.

You need original data, real case studies, your own numbers, your own opinion, things an AI overview literally cannot lift from somewhere else.

Two, diversify where your traffic comes from.

Some of that lost search traffic is showing up as referral traffic from AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, and early data suggests that traffic actually converts at a higher rate.

So being cited by AI answer engines is becoming its own discipline alongside traditional SEO, not instead of it.

Right.