From “Just Google It” to “Just Ask AI”: What That Shift Means for Your Business

For twenty years, “I’ll just google it” was how Australians found a business. These days, more and more of us say “I’ll ask ChatGPT” or “let AI sort it” instead. That habit isn’t a passing trend; it’s already how a large chunk of your future customers make decisions. A recent Australian study found no local business was named at all in nearly half the everyday questions it tested. If your website isn’t structured for AI to read, you’re not slipping down the rankings. You’re being left out of the conversation completely.That conversation is becoming the norm rather than the exception, which is exactly why we need to talk about it.

Here’s what’s changed, why it matters to every industry, and what you can actually do about it this month.

“Google it” is turning into “ask AI”

Think about how often you’ve caught yourself saying it lately: “I’ll just ask ChatGPT” instead of “I’ll google it.” It’s a small shift in language, but it’s tracking a genuine shift in behaviour, and it’s happening fast.

Roy Morgan’s most recent quarterly figures show 58% of Australians aged 14 and over now use an AI tool in a typical four-week period, a figure that sat in the single digits just two years ago. Around 12% of Australians now say an AI tool is their main way of finding information online, more than double the share from a year earlier. Google’s own AI Overviews and AI Mode are already part of everyday search results here, and industry tracking puts AI-generated summaries appearing on somewhere between 15% and 47% of searches, depending on how it’s measured.

This isn’t a generational quirk, either. The habit that used to belong entirely to Google is being shared with, and in some cases handed over to, a chatbot. And once someone starts asking AI instead of typing a search, they rarely go back to scrolling through ten blue links to compare their options themselves.

There’s a name for the discipline that’s grown up around this, if you’ve heard it floating about: GEO, or generative engine optimisation (some people call it AEO, for answer engine optimisation). It’s the quieter cousin of SEO, and it’s about earning a mention inside the AI’s answer rather than a position on a results page. Same goal, getting found, but the rules are different, and most businesses haven’t clocked that yet.

Why that shift actually matters to your bottom line

Here’s the part that should get your attention as a business owner rather than as a spectator: when an AI Overview appears on a Google search, organic clickthrough drops by roughly 60% on that query. But businesses that get cited inside the AI’s answer see around 120% more clicks than those left out.

There’s no polite middle ground here. You’re either the business the AI trusts enough to mention, or you’ve become invisible on that search entirely, no matter how good your old-fashioned Google ranking used to be.

For local, in-person businesses, this isn’t a someday problem. A recent Australian study tested fifty everyday consumer questions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Mode. In 23 of those 50 questions, not one single Australian business was named in the response. Not a plumber, not a cafe, not a tour operator. Nothing. The businesses that did get named typically weren’t the ones with the best product or service. They were the ones whose information existed somewhere structured enough, and consistent enough, for an AI to feel confident repeating it.

What AI actually looks for (and what most websites are missing)

AI tools don’t read a website the way a person does. They look for clear, well-structured, unambiguous signals: What does this business do? Where, specifically? Who is it for? What makes it credible? And is that story told the same way everywhere this business shows up online?

In practice, four things tend to separate the businesses that get cited from the ones that don’t.

Structured data (schema). This is machine-readable code added to your website that explicitly tells search engines and AI tools what they’re looking at (a business, a service, an event, a review, a set of opening hours) rather than making them guess from paragraphs of text. Recent industry analysis found content with proper schema markup, statistics and a clear question-and-answer structure shows 30 to 40% higher visibility in AI-generated answers than content without it. The catch, which almost no one is talking about, is which schema, and that’s where a lot of well-meaning advice is now out of date (more on that next).

Direct, quotable answers. AI tools favour content that states a clear answer early, in plain language, ideally under a heading phrased as a real question. “How much does a kitchen renovation cost in Melbourne?” beats a vague heading like “Our Services.” If your website’s copy was written to sound impressive rather than to directly answer the questions your customers are actually asking, AI has very little to grab onto.

Consistency everywhere you appear. Your business name, address, phone number, service area and core offer need to match, word for word, across your website, Google Business Profile, directories and social profiles. AI systems build confidence in a business by cross-referencing multiple sources, and inconsistency reads as a lack of confidence, sending the AI to a competitor whose details line up instead.

Being talked about by others. A striking figure from recent media analysis is that the large majority of what AI tools say about a brand doesn’t come from the brand’s own website at all. It comes from what other credible sources say about it. Reviews, local news coverage, directory listings, chamber and council pages, and industry associations all feed into how confidently an AI will describe your business. This is exactly why every business listing matters, and why, done properly, it’s quietly doing real work for you.

The FAQ twist: why last year’s advice just expired

For a couple of years, the standard advice was: add an FAQ section with FAQ schema and you’ll win those tidy expandable dropdowns in Google. A lot of websites were built on that promise. Here’s the update almost no one has passed on to business owners yet.

As of 7 May 2026, Google retired FAQ rich results entirely. The dropdowns are gone. Not restricted, gone. And Google is removing the related reporting from Search Console through the middle of the year. If you added an FAQ section purely to claim more space in the search results, that space no longer exists.

But here’s the part that separates a knee-jerk reaction from a good strategy: don’t rip your FAQs out. Google has been explicit that it still reads FAQ markup to understand what a page is about, and question-and-answer content is precisely the format AI assistants are built to extract and quote. The tactic didn’t die. It changed jobs. FAQs are no longer a play for a Google feature; they’re a play for comprehension and for getting quoted inside an AI answer.

The practical takeaway: keep genuine, useful FAQs written in your customer’s actual language, make sure the visible answers on the page match any schema behind them, and stop measuring their worth by a SERP dropdown that no longer appears. And critically, don’t lean on FAQ schema alone. The businesses getting cited are the ones marking up the whole picture: their organisation and location details, their individual services, their articles, and the real person behind the brand. FAQ was always one instrument. Now it’s clearly just part of the orchestra.

The invisible details: naming, alt text, and code AI can actually read

This is where most business websites quietly leak visibility, because these are the bits no one sees, which is exactly why they get skipped.

Name your images like they mean something. Every photo you upload has a filename, and most of the time it’s something like IMG_4823.jpg straight off a phone. To a search engine, or a multimodal AI of the kind that now “looks at” images as well as text, that filename is a wasted signal. Compare IMG_4823.jpg with adelaide-wedding-florist-native-bouquet.jpg. One tells the machine nothing; the other tells it what the picture is, what you do, and where you do it, before it has even analysed a single pixel. Rename your images to short, descriptive, hyphenated filenames that describe the actual content, ideally with a location where it’s natural. It costs nothing and it compounds across every image on your site.

Write real alt text. Alt text is the short description attached to an image, originally built so screen readers could describe pictures to people who can’t see them. It still does that essential accessibility job, and getting it right is part of meeting the WCAG standards every business site should, but it’s now doing double duty as one more clear, readable signal that AI and image search use to understand your page. Describe the image plainly and specifically. “Timber deck rebuild on a weatherboard home in Ballarat” beats “deck” every time, and beats an empty alt attribute by a mile.

Make sure your content is actually in the page. Here’s a trap that catches surprisingly polished websites. If your key content, your services, your answers, your credentials, only appears after JavaScript runs in the browser, there’s a real chance AI crawlers never see it. Googlebot will usually render your JavaScript eventually, but many of the AI crawlers doing the citing (the bots behind ChatGPT, Perplexity and others) tend to grab the raw HTML and move on without running scripts. If a bot fetches your page and finds a loading spinner where your best content should be, that content effectively doesn’t exist to it. The fix is technical, but the principle is simple: your most important words should be in the HTML the server sends, not assembled later in the browser. Clean, semantic, hand-built code isn’t just a craftsmanship flourish here; it’s the difference between being readable and being invisible.

Who’s vouching for you

One more signal is climbing the ranks fast: credibility that AI can actually attribute to a real person or organisation. The industry shorthand is E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust), and while it started as a Google concept, AI answer engines are pulling in the same direction.

In plain terms: content that’s clearly attached to a named, real author with genuine experience, a proper byline, a real bio, a consistent professional identity across the web, is easier for an AI to trust and repeat than anonymous copy. If you’re a specialist, say so, show your working, and make sure the person behind the advice is a findable entity, not a faceless “admin.” For a small business, this is an advantage, not a burden: you have a real story and a real expert. Most template-built competitors have buried theirs.

A quick word on what to ignore

Because this space moves fast, it’s also full of shortcuts being sold as silver bullets. The one you’ll hear most this year is llms.txt, a small file you add to your site that’s meant to tell AI tools what to read. The honest picture, if you look at who’s actually using it: adoption sits at roughly one in ten sites, the major AI crawlers overwhelmingly ignore it, and Google has said on the record it doesn’t support it and isn’t planning to. It may become something one day. Right now it’s not where your effort should go. The fundamentals below are, and they’re the ones with evidence behind them.

Part of doing this well is knowing what not to chase. That’s as much a service as knowing what to do.

A 20-minute audit you can do this week

You don’t need a technical background to get a first read on where you stand. Open ChatGPT, Gemini or Google and ask the kind of question your own customer would ask. Not your business name, but the need behind it. Something like “who’s a good [your service] in [your suburb]” or “best [your category] in [your city].”

Then check five things.

1. Does your business appear at all? If not, remember that in 23 out of 50 comparable Australian queries recently tested, no local business appeared either, so you’re not alone, but you are behind the businesses that do show up.
2. Is what’s said about you accurate and current? Outdated hours, an old address, or a discontinued service being mentioned is a sign your information across the web is inconsistent.
3. Who is telling your story on your behalf (Google Business Profile, a directory, a review site), and is that the story you’d actually choose?
4. View your own page’s source (right-click, “View Page Source”) and search it for a sentence from your key content. If you can’t find your actual words in there, they’re probably being added by JavaScript later, and AI may be missing them.
5. Check three of your images. Are they named descriptively, and do they have real alt text? If they’re IMG_xxxx.jpg with blank alt text, that’s free ground you’re giving away.

If the honest answer to any of these is “I don’t know” or “not great,” you’re in good company, and it’s genuinely fixable.

What to actually do about it

This isn’t a rebuild your website problem. It’s a make your existing website legible to machines problem, alongside a few habits worth building into how you manage your online presence generally.

• Mark up the whole picture with schema (your business type and location, your individual services, your articles, and the real people behind the brand), not just FAQs. This is the single highest-leverage technical fix available, and it can usually be done without touching your site’s design.
• Keep your FAQs, but change what you expect of them. Write genuine, useful question-and-answer content in your customers’ language. It won’t earn a Google dropdown anymore, but it’s still one of the cleanest formats for AI to quote you from.
• Rewrite key pages so they answer a real question in the first two sentences, using the actual words your customers use, not internal jargon.
• Name your images and write proper alt text. Descriptive, hyphenated filenames and specific alt descriptions, every image, every time.
• Make sure your content lives in the HTML, not only in JavaScript that runs after the page loads. If AI can’t read it without rendering scripts, assume some of it won’t.
• Audit and align your Google Business Profile, directory listings and social bios so your name, address, phone number and service description match, word for word, everywhere.
• Actively seek reviews and local mentions. Since most of what AI says about you comes from outside your own website, a steady flow of genuine reviews and local press does more for your AI visibility than another page of website copy.
• Put a real name and bio to your content, so your expertise is attributable to a findable person, not “admin.”
• Check back regularly. This isn’t set-and-forget. AI tools update what they know continuously, and so should the information you’re feeding them.

The window is now, not later

We say this to our clients often, and it applies just as much here: the businesses that treated Google Business Profile as a priority in its early years are still benefiting from that decision a decade on. The same pattern is repeating with AI visibility, except it’s moving faster. Australian adoption of AI tools has gone from single digits to well over half the population in around two years. “I’ll ask AI” isn’t a phase we’ll grow out of. It’s replacing “I’ll google it” in real time, and it’s not turning back.

The businesses that get their structured data, consistent listings, clean readable code and clear content sorted in the next few months won’t just be visible sooner; they’ll have a compounding advantage over the competitors still deciding whether any of this matters.

It does. And across every industry we work with, this is one of the few genuine first-mover opportunities left in digital marketing.