Hello and welcome back. I hope your week has been a little less chaotic than mine. I was roped into helping move a kids’ basketball ring the other day: a task that sounds simple until you realise how heavy the base is when it’s full of water. While we were wrestling with the height adjustment, a friend who isn’t the most technological human in the world simply pulled out her phone and asked Siri for the standard Australian under-10s height.

The answer popped up instantly in a neat box at the top of the search results. It was a perfect, convenient little summary powered by Gemini. It struck me then that for all the talk about AI replacing search, we are actually already living in it. We didn’t need to click a single link or read a whole article: we just needed the answer.

We recently hit double digits with episode ten of Raising the Bar, and we spent the hour wading through the ever-changing landscape of AI and Google. It is a topic that can feel a bit overwhelming, but the reality is more of a magic trick than a total destruction of the web as we know it.

Google’s greatest magic trick

For a year now, we have been tracking data across more than 80 of our managed service clients. The question everyone asks is: is Google dead? The answer, quite clearly, is no. Google is still absolutely winning the race.

“Google’s greatest trick: it’s like the greatest magician’s trick ever. So, what’s the hardest thing to change? It’s human behaviour.” – Mel Strutt

We are still going to the Google search bar because habits die hard. The difference now is what happens once we get there. Since late last year, Australian users have been seeing the AI Overview and “AI Mode”. Instead of those classic blue links, we get a beautiful summary. About 20% of that data is pulled exclusively from Google’s own ecosystem: YouTube, Maps, and Google products. It is a massive shift that reduces human choice by presenting a single “correct” answer instead of a list of options.

The rise of the zero-click search

The fundamental issue for business owners is that AI is essentially eating your website traffic. In the old days of SEO, a physiotherapist might write an article on “how to stretch for muscle pain”. People would click the link, stay on the site, and the “quality score” would improve, even if that person never booked an appointment.

Now, the AI Overview just gives the user the exercise instructions directly. You might get a tiny icon as a citation, but almost no one clicks through. Your brand resonance is lost, and your web hits drop. This is why your B2B marketing strategy can no longer rely on broad “how-to” keywords alone.

The attribution nightmare

AI is also making it much harder to figure out where your leads are actually coming from. We call this the “messy middle”.

Take the example of a friend who wanted a “longevity plan”. She went to Claude (a phenomenal AI tool) and got a full breakdown of what she needed. She asked Claude for three brand recommendations for a specific magnesium supplement. Once she had those names, she went to Google, typed the brand name in, and bought it.

On a standard report, that looks like a successful Google lead. In reality, the entire decision was made inside Claude. Because tools like Claude and Perplexity prioritise privacy and don’t sell user data to marketers, we can’t see those mentions or citations in our traditional tracking tools. It is an attribution black hole.

How to win in the AI era

So, what is the play for a Perth business owner? You need to stop chasing broad terms and start focusing on your niche. AI models like Claude cannot be easily manipulated: they look for genuine data, independent review pages, and what the outside world says about you.

We are telling clients to listen to what people ask on the phone or in their enquiry forms. If they are asking about price or contraindications, those are the exact questions they will ask an AI tool. Write long-form articles that answer those specific, high-intent questions.

We are also rolling out a technical change for our clients. It is a simple way to tell AI “this is who we serve and this is who we don’t” to help feed the machine better data.

“Google and traditional search is not dying, but AI is replacing the journey to get to Google.” – Mel Strutt

The big takeaway is that your brand name matters more than ever. AI will handle the research, but humans will still turn to Google to find your specific business name once they’ve made their choice. Make sure you are the one the AI recommends when those long-intent questions are asked.

It is time to refine your marketing strategy to account for a world where the “middle” of the funnel is increasingly invisible.