AI search visibility for Australian small businesses

Between 43% and 48% of Google searches now show an AI Overview first (Similarweb and Semrush estimates, July 2026). That answer sits above the map pack and above the ten blue links. If it names three local businesses and you are not one of them, most people never scroll.

The same shift is happening off Google entirely. People ask ChatGPT for a plumber in their suburb, or ask Perplexity which local firm handles a specific job. Those engines are not showing a list of options with your ad next to it. They give one short answer with a handful of names in it.

The businesses being named are rarely the biggest. They are the ones whose information is easiest for a machine to read and hardest to get wrong. That is a fixable problem, and it is cheaper to fix now than after your competitors have three years of answer pages behind them.

Every engagement starts the same way: I ask the engines about you, in the words your customers would actually use, and record what comes back. Then I work out why.

The audit is only useful if someone does the work. I do the work. Technical corrections go in first — server-rendered text, clean heading structure, valid structured data describing your business, your services and your service area. Then the profile: categories corrected, services listed properly, hours and photos brought up to date, common questions answered in the profile itself.

Then content. I rewrite your homepage so the first hundred words say plainly who you are, where you work and what you do. After that I publish answer pages: one page per real question, written from your own expertise. I interview you, you talk, I write it down in your words. No generic AI filler, because engines are increasingly good at spotting it and customers were always good at spotting it.

Nothing here is a trick. There is no scheme to game a model. It is the unglamorous work of making true information about your business easy to find, easy to parse and hard to contradict.

Once a month you get a short report. It shows the same set of questions asked of the same engines, with the answers you got last month next to the answers you got this month. Where you are named, you see it. Where a competitor is named instead, you see that too, and you see what they have that you do not.

The report also lists what went live that month, what is queued for next month, and anything I found that needs a decision from you. It runs to about two pages. You should be able to read it standing at a work ute with a coffee.