Something quietly changed in the way people look for a plumber, a bookkeeper or a photographer. They still start with a question — but more and more, they get an answer instead of a list of links. Google puts an AI summary at the top of the page. Someone else opens ChatGPT and simply asks who they should call. Either way, if your business isn't part of that answer, you were never in the running.
This isn't a reason to panic, and it definitely isn't a reason to buy an expensive new tool. But it is worth understanding what's happening, because the practical response is mostly a list of sensible things you probably meant to do anyway.
The click is no longer guaranteed
The clearest evidence we have comes from Pew Research Center, which tracked the actual browsing behaviour of 900 US adults across roughly 69,000 Google searches in March 2025. When an AI summary appeared at the top of the results, people clicked through to a website in 8% of visits. Without a summary, they clicked nearly twice as often — 15%. Clicks on the links inside the AI summary were rarer still, happening in about 1% of those visits.
Pew also found that people were more likely to end their browsing session entirely after seeing a page with an AI summary (26%, versus 16% without one). In plain terms: a chunk of people are getting what they need on the results page and stopping there.
Two details are worth holding onto. First, the effect isn't evenly spread — around 18% of searches in that study produced an AI summary at all, and they showed up far more often for long, conversational, question-shaped searches than for short ones. Second, this is US data about Google specifically. But the direction of travel is the same everywhere, and Australian small businesses are seeing it too.
What those answers are actually built from
Here's the useful part. AI answers aren't magic and they aren't a secret ranking algorithm you need to game. They're assembled from the same public information about your business that a careful human would find — your website, your Google Business Profile, review sites, directories, and pages other people have written about you.
That's becoming more explicit, not less. In July 2026, Yelp signed a deal to license its reviews, ratings and photos to OpenAI, so ChatGPT can pull real local business data into its answers — including its "Request a Quote" feature for local services. Google's summaries lean on the same web everyone else does. The lesson isn't "learn a new platform." It's that the facts about your business now travel further than your website, so those facts need to be right and consistent wherever they appear.
There's a trust angle too. Morning Consult research cited by Yelp found that while 65% of Americans have used AI search, only 15% trust it "a lot" — and 72% think AI platforms should always show where their information came from. People are checking. A named, credible source underneath an answer still matters.
Five things worth doing on your website
None of this requires a rebuild. Most of it is a good afternoon's work.
Answer real questions in plain words. If customers ask "do you service the eastern suburbs?" or "how long does a bathroom reno take?", put those questions and honest answers on your site as actual sentences. Long, question-shaped searches are exactly the ones most likely to trigger an AI answer, and a page that answers the question directly is far easier to quote than a page of marketing adjectives.
Put the boring facts in text, not in an image. Your address, phone number, service area, opening hours and price ranges should be readable text on the page. A beautifully designed graphic with your phone number baked into it is invisible to anything reading your site.
Keep your details identical everywhere. Same business name, same address format, same phone number on your website, your Google Business Profile, your Facebook page and every directory you're listed in. Inconsistency makes a machine unsure which version is true — and unsure information tends to get left out.
Add structured data. This is a small piece of behind-the-scenes code (usually LocalBusiness or Service schema) that spells out your name, location, hours and services in a format built for machines to read. Your web developer can add it in under an hour, and most modern website platforms have a plugin or setting for it.
Keep collecting genuine reviews. Independent corroboration has always mattered, and it matters more when something is deciding which of five local businesses to name. Ask happy customers, make it easy, and never pay for reviews.
Judge it by enquiries, not traffic
If your website visits have drifted down over the past year while your phone still rings about the same amount, that's not necessarily a problem to solve — it may just be the casual browsers dropping away while the serious ones still arrive. The visits that matter are the ones that end in an enquiry.
So change what you watch. Count enquiries, quote requests and calls rather than raw traffic. Ask new customers how they found you and write the answers down; "ChatGPT said to call you" is showing up in those conversations now. And once a quarter, search for your own business the way a customer would — in Google, and in an AI tool — and see what comes back. If the answer is wrong, missing or out of date, you now know exactly what to fix.
The reassuring thing about all of this is how ordinary the work is. Clear pages, accurate details, honest answers to real questions, and reviews from people you've actually helped. That was good practice before AI summaries existed, and it's what makes a business easy to recommend now.
If you'd like a hand working out whether your site is easy to find, easy to read and easy to quote, get in touch with us — we're happy to take a look and tell you plainly what's worth doing.