My dad sends me “SEO is dead” articles every year. With organic traffic down across a wide range of Australian websites, that kind of material is now writing itself.
Leads, though, are a different story. In many of the accounts where organic traffic is down, leads are holding steady. AI has split search into two experiences: it absorbs the research and comparison phase, while the transaction still runs through the website.
The line between those two experiences is starting to blur, though. Agents can already request a booking, check availability, or call a business on a user’s behalf. What hasn’t changed is what sits behind that agent: a booking system, a calendar, a phone line the business controls. The website visit is becoming optional. Being reachable and transactable is not.
The Change
AI Overviews handle comparison queries 95% of the time and question-based queries 86% of the time. Transactional queries, the ones where someone is close to taking action, trigger AI Overviews just 5% of the time.
For the meantime, AI can answer your research question but stays out of the transaction; that 5% is where your leads still live.
That’s the architecture of the split today, but that 5% only measures how often AI answers a transactional query itself. It says nothing about agents, who carry out the transaction rather than answer a question about it. Agentic booking is a separate, newer shift, and it is already moving into that transactional 5%.
The content that has suffered is content whose job was to inform a decision. The content that has held is content whose job is to enable an action. That holds while a human still does the reading. Where an agent completes the booking directly, the agent becomes the reader, a different kind of traffic loss and a front that is coming.
What Google Is Actually Trying to Do
Google is becoming a destination rather than a gateway. Its goal is to answer as many queries as possible on the results page, sending traffic onward only when the user needs to do something search cannot do for them. A user who gets their answer inside Google never leaves, and one who stays is worth more to Google than one who clicks away to a third-party site.
Who Controls the Transaction
The accounts that lost the most traffic are the ones where buyers spend the journey comparing providers. The ones that held are where the purchase ends in a real-world step: a visit, an appointment, a call.
The website visit is becoming optional. Being reachable and transactable is not.
Take home building. A buyer can get a full breakdown of inclusions, house-and-land options, and price ranges from an AI Overview or ChatGPT before visiting a website. What they cannot do there is book a display home visit or lodge a tender. Those run through the builder’s calendar, tender queue, and consultant’s diary.
The Performance Impact
Traffic quality
Traffic volume is no longer the right primary measure of SEO performance. When sessions fall but leads hold, the channel is still performing. People with questions get their answers inside Google. People ready to act still click through. Lower volume can mean higher intent.
Local signals
Local signals now carry more weight than they used to. A complete local presence — with location pages, reviews and directory listings — gives both Google and agents evidence that a business is real, reachable and bookable.
If nothing online confirms a business location exists, Google and AI agents both skip it.
Reporting
On 3 June 2026, Google introduced a dedicated Search Generative AI performance report in Search Console. It is a genuine step forward, though partial: no clicks or query data yet, so you can see that you appeared without knowing whether anyone acted.
What We’re Telling Our Clients to Do
- Protect your transactional pages, and make them agent-bookable. Service, product and enquiry pages still convert organic traffic. Live availability and a contact channel an agent can act on now matter as much as page quality.
- Build for the research phase. Content that explains why a buyer should choose your brand, written with genuine expertise, is what surfaces in AI-generated responses.
- Audit your local and category signals. Accurate service areas, reviews and directory listings are signals both Google and agents use to decide whether your business deserves to rank.
- Reframe your reporting. Connect traffic data to conversion and revenue data before drawing conclusions.
- Understand the conversation. AI assembles fragments from across the internet, and agents act on those same fragments when they book, call or buy.
Decoding the Algorithm is a Bonfire series on the platform changes that matter for Australian marketers. Browse every post in the series.