SEO still matters. AI has changed what it's for

For twenty-odd years the deal with Google was simple. You published pages that answered people's questions, Google showed them, and some of those people clicked through to your site. SEO was the work of making sure your pages were the ones shown.

That deal has changed. Google now answers a lot of questions itself, at the top of the page, with AI Overviews. They rolled out across Australia in late 2024, and AI Mode, a chat version of search, followed in October 2025. For plenty of questions the answer now sits on Google's page and the click never happens.

What it's done to clicks

The clearest numbers I've found come from Pew Research Center, which tracked the browsing of 900 American adults in March 2025. When a search showed an AI summary, people clicked a normal result in 8 per cent of visits. Without a summary, it was 15 per cent. The links inside the summary itself got clicked 1 per cent of the time.

The more useful part for a B2B supplier is which searches got summaries. Only 8 per cent of one or two word searches did. For searches of ten words or more it was 53 per cent. Questions and full sentences were the most likely to be answered on Google's page.

That's American data from early 2025, so Australia won't match it exactly. The direction is what matters, and it points somewhere specific.

Which searches still send people to you

Think about the two kinds of search that matter to an industrial supplier. One is a question, like "what's the difference between a plate and a shell and tube heat exchanger". The other is commercial, like "plate heat exchanger supplier Brisbane".

The question is exactly what Google likes to answer itself. And honestly, articles written to rank for questions like that were probably doing more for traffic numbers than for sales anyway. The people asking tend to include students, engineers doing homework for someone else, and buyers years off a purchase.

The commercial search is shorter, more specific and far more likely to come from someone ready to talk to a supplier. Those results still show ads, the map, business listings and websites. That's where the money is, and in my view that's where most of your SEO effort belongs.

What SEO is for now

The basics haven't moved much. Google and the AI tools built on it still need to be able to read your site, understand what you sell and where, and trust that you're a real business. What's changed is where the payoff comes from.

The first is winning the commercial searches. That means a page for every product line and service you actually want to sell, written plainly, with the details a buyer checks before calling: capacities, standards, brands, lead times and where you deliver. It also means a complete Google Business Profile with reviews, because on local searches the map often sits above the websites.

The second is being the source the answer is built from. When a buyer asks an AI tool which Queensland suppliers carry a particular brand, the answer comes from what's published. A clear, specific website gives it something accurate. A vague one leaves the gap for a competitor's page or a directory listing.

What I'd stop doing

Stop judging SEO by traffic alone. If your visits dropped after AI Overviews arrived but enquiries from search held steady, you lost readers who were never going to buy. Track enquiries from search, and which of them became quotes.

And go easy on volume. Pumping out thin articles to catch questions is the approach most exposed to AI answers, because long questions are the searches most likely to be answered on Google's page. Google's spam policies also treat pages made mainly to game rankings as abuse, however they were written.

What AI has taken is the part of SEO that brought in casual readers. The part that helps a ready buyer find you and trust you matters more than it did.