The shifting digital landscape, and where buyers look now.
The shifting digital landscape means the surfaces a buyer meets before they meet a property developer, a builder or a specialist firm: a search page that now answers in prose, an assistant that summarises, and a set of links chosen by a system. This note quotes Google’s own published documentation about those surfaces rather than characterising them.
Why this note quotes rather than explains
This change is easy to describe loosely and hard to describe accurately, and a great deal of advice about it names no source at all. So the method here is narrow: where Google has published documentation about how its own features work, that documentation is quoted, and where it has not, nothing is asserted.
The page being quoted is the Search Central guidance titled AI features and your website, last updated on 10 December 2025 and read on 19 September 2026.
What Google says its AI features do
Google says both features may use a query fan-out technique, issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources to develop a response. A single question from a buyer therefore becomes several searches the buyer never types and never sees.
Google also says AI Overviews are only shown when its systems determine that it is additive to classic Search, and as such, often do not trigger. The change is not total, and a firm that rebuilds everything around a surface that often does not appear has over-corrected.
The practical reading of fan-out is that a page answering one narrow question well can be pulled into a response to a broader one. That favours a set of specific pages over a single page that gestures at everything.
What is required to appear
To be eligible as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, and that there are no additional technical requirements.
Stated plainly: the entry requirement is the entry requirement that already existed. A page that a search engine can reach, read and quote is eligible. A page behind a script that never renders text, or blocked in robots.txt, or without a snippet, is not.
Google is also explicit that eligibility is not entitlement: Google’s own guidance says indexing and serving is not guaranteed even for a page that meets every requirement, best practice and policy.
What is not required, which is most of what is being sold
Google’s documentation states that there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary”.
It goes further on the specific products currently being marketed. Google states that you do not need to create new machine readable files, AI text files or markup to appear in these features, and that there is no special schema.org structured data that you need to add.
That sentence is worth holding onto during a sales call. If a proposal’s central deliverable is a new file type or a new markup layer for AI visibility, the platform it is aimed at has published that the file is not needed.
What is required is what was always required
Google’s list of SEO fundamentals for AI features includes making content easily findable through internal links on your website and making sure important content is available in textual form. The rest of the list is equally familiar: allow crawling, give people a good page experience, keep structured data matched to the visible text.
Internal links being named first in that list is the part most relevant to this set of pages. A hub that links to its spokes and spokes that link back is not a trick for a summarising system. It is how a site tells any reader, human or machine, which pages belong together and which is the authority among them.
Which is also the argument for depth over volume. Six pages that answer one question each, linked to each other, are more legible than sixty that answer none.
The pipe underneath the whole thing
Of the total data Australians downloaded in the three months to 31 December 2024, 80 per cent went over the NBN, 16 per cent over mobile services and 4 per cent over non-NBN services. Downloads using mobile services rose 15 per cent over the year, to 2.3 million terabytes in the December 2024 quarter.
Fixed connections still carry most of the volume, and mobile is the fastest-growing share of it. A heavy page is a cost paid disproportionately by the buyer researching on a phone, which is the buyer doing the private research described in evolving buyer behaviour and how property buyers research now.
What a site owner actually controls
Four things, and none of them is new. Whether the content can be crawled and read as text. Whether the pages that belong together are linked to each other. Whether the claims on the page can be checked. Whether the person responsible for the work is named on it.
Everything else on the surface is decided by somebody else’s system, and can change without notice, as the documentation quoted above has itself changed. Building on the four controllables is not conservatism. It is the only part of the ground that stays still.
What the change does to a first visit
When a surface answers in prose and offers a few supporting links, the visit that does arrive is later and better informed than it used to be. The reader has already had the general answer. What they came for is the specific one.
That reverses the usual page order. An introduction restating what the reader already knows spends the visit. A page that opens with the particular, the method, the figure, the caveat, meets the reader where the summary left them.
It also raises the cost of being vague. A page with nothing specific on it has nothing a summarising system can quote and nothing an informed reader stays for, which are the same failure seen from two directions.
What is not claimed here
No click-through rate for AI Overviews appears on this page, and no figure for how much traffic the change has moved. Every number in circulation on that question comes from a private dataset or from a report of one, and none is a dated public source, so none is used.
Nor is any figure given for search market share in Australia. The regulator’s own inquiry reports were not reachable to an automated fetch on the day this was written, so the question is left open rather than filled in from memory.
What to read next
This is the third of three forces. What to do about all of them, in order, is in responding to changing market conditions.
The thesis holding the set together is trust-led marketing for an evolving era. The practice that does this work is demand generation.
Every figure on this page, and where it came from
Each source below was fetched and read on 19 September 2026. Every figure in the text carries the source’s own as-at date in the sentence it appears in. Nothing here was bought, and no figure on this page comes from a client’s data.
| Source | Publisher | Published |
|---|---|---|
| AI features and your website, Search Central documentation | Last updated 10 Dec 2025 | |
| Communications and media in Australia: How we use the internet | Australian Communications and Media Authority | February 2026 |
Get in touchDavid Collins writes the Field Notes. To put this note against your own numbers, get in touch.
This note sits in the Field Notes, under trust-led marketing. The practice that answers the change it describes is demand generation.