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 (AIOs) 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 AIOs 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.
That step is starting to move too, however. An agent can now check availability or make the call, and categories like this are among the first Google has named for agentic calling. The visit becomes the agent’s, but the booking still runs through the builder’s systems. Own those systems, keep the information that proves you are real and reachable accurate, and you keep the transaction, whether a person or an agent completes it.
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. One study across 94 ecommerce brands found that [traffic from AI tools converted 31% higher](https://searchengineland.com/chatgpt-vs-non-branded-organic-search-conversions-470321) than non-branded organic search. Lower volume. Higher intent. That intent now arrives in two forms, human clicks and agents transacting directly, and both need the same thing: a real, current, bookable business.
Local signals
Local signals now carry more weight than they used to. A Perth retailer we work with had several metro stores, all appearing correctly in AI-generated results except one. That location had almost no independent presence online: no dedicated page on the website, no reviews mentioning it by name, no directory listings confirming the address. Google had nothing to confirm the store existed, so it didn’t guess, it simply left it out. An agent hits the same wall: it tries to check availability or complete a booking, finds nothing to act on, and moves on. Building for a human reader and building for an agent are becoming the same job.
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, showing impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, and device. It’s a genuine step forward, though partial: no clicks or query data yet, so you can see that you appeared without knowing whether anyone acted. Until that fills out, reading performance by page type stays the more reliable measure, with transactional pages holding while blog and guide pages decline. Microsoft’s Citations dashboard in Clarity is moving faster still. The brands that understand their AI search performance today will be well ahead of those who wait.
What We’re Telling Our Clients to Do
Here are five things worth acting on now, in the order we’d tackle them.
- Protect your transactional pages, and make them agent-bookable. Service, product, and enquiry pages still convert organic traffic, and increasingly they’re what an agent checks before completing a booking. Rankings, page quality, and conversion rate still come first, and live availability and a contact channel an agent can act on now matter as much. A page that reads well without a bookable system behind it still loses the transaction anyway.
- Build for the research phase. The informational stage of the journey now happens in AI tools, not search results pages. Content that explains why a buyer should choose your brand, written with genuine expertise, is what surfaces in AI-generated responses. This is where answer engine optimisation (AEO) and generative engine optimisation (GEO) thinking becomes practical: not a rebrand of SEO, but an extension of it into the surfaces where research now happens.
- Audit your local and category signals. A complete Google Business Profile with accurate service areas, reviews that mention the suburb or service type, and consistent directory listings are no longer optional extras. They’re the signals both Google and agents use to decide whether your business deserves to rank, and whether it can be booked at all. A well-optimised product, service, or location page sits on top of that foundation. It cannot replace it.
- Reframe your reporting. Connect traffic data to conversion and revenue data before drawing conclusions. Declining informational traffic is not a declining SEO programme. If leads are holding, the programme is working. The audience has changed shape, not disappeared, and it now includes agents.
- Understand the conversation. Your website is no longer the only source of truth about your brand. AI assembles fragments from across the internet, and agents now act on those same fragments when they book, call, or buy. Most of those sources are ones you don’t control. Knowing what they say is the first step to shaping what gets repeated.
Decoding the Algorithm is a Bonfire series on the platform changes that matter for Australian marketers. Browse every post in the series.