Why this matters for an Australian business
The reach is the part people underestimate. Google runs about 94 per cent of the search market in Australia, and it switched AI Overviews on here in October 2024, so the change reaches nearly everyone who searches. When the AI answer picks three sources and yours isn't one of them, you haven't dropped to page two. You're not in the room.
The traffic maths backs this up. Researchers writing in The Conversation reported that the share of news-related searches ending in zero clicks jumped from 56 per cent to 69 per cent in a single year, and that traffic from Google to news sites fell from over 2.3 billion visits in mid-2024 to under 1.7 billion by May 2025. News sites felt it first because they publish the kind of quick factual answers the AI can lift wholesale. Plenty of small-business pages are built the same way.
Regulators are watching, and the honest read is that it's early. The ACCC, reviewing general search yet to be disrupted in December 2024, found that AI hadn't yet reshaped who wins in search:
"While it is too early to say with certainty, with use of AI constantly developing, the impact of generative AI on market dynamics in general search appears limited so far."
That's a fair caution against hype. It also cuts the other way for you as an operator: the rules of who gets quoted are still being set, which is a better time to get in front of them than after they've hardened.
How answer engines actually pick who gets quoted
A normal search engine hands you a ranked list and lets you choose. An answer engine does the choosing. As the RMIT and QUT researchers put it, generative AI-powered search looks across webpages and sources to try to synthesise what they say, then writes one short reply. The same team noted that 43 per cent of AI Overviews still link back to Google itself, so the space left for outside sources is genuinely limited.
That changes what "good content" means. The model isn't rewarding the page with the most keywords or the slickest design. It's pulling the sentence that answers the question most cleanly, from a source it reads as credible, and crediting whoever wrote it. If your page opens with three paragraphs of company history before it gets to the point, the model skips you and quotes the competitor who led with the answer.
What Answer Engine Optimisation actually means
Answer Engine Optimisation, sometimes called generative engine optimisation, is the plain-English version of that idea: writing your pages so an AI can find the answer, trust it, and name you when it repeats it. It borrows a lot from good old SEO, minus the tricks. Three habits do most of the work.
Answer the question first. Put the direct answer in the opening line, then explain underneath. SmartCompany's guide to why your business needs to show up in ChatGPT, not just Google Search makes the point bluntly: the systems favour content that gets straight to the point, so the most useful line belongs at the top of the page, not buried at the bottom.
Be a source worth citing. Real numbers, dated facts, named people, and a clear author beat vague marketing copy every time, because a model leans toward pages it can verify. If you make a claim, back it with something checkable.
Cover the actual questions. List the things customers phone up and ask, then write a straight answer to each. A tidy frequently-asked-questions section on your key pages gives an answer engine clean, quotable material to work with.
None of this is a growth hack. It's the same discipline that makes a page useful to a human, applied so a machine can read it too.
Where to start this quarter
Pick your five highest-value questions, the ones tied to money, and make sure each has one page that answers it in the first two sentences. Add the source behind any figure you quote. Then check your own work: open ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews, ask the question a customer would ask, and see who gets named. If it's a competitor, you've found your list.
Our GEO playbook walks through the on-page checklist step by step. If you'd rather map it against your own site and buyers first, our AI consulting session does exactly that, and the AI software work covers the structured-data and content plumbing underneath. The tooling is optional. Being the clear, honest, quotable answer is not.