Google AI Overviews and AI Mode: What They Actually Mean for Your Perth Business

Search stopped being a list of ten blue links a while ago. Most people just did not notice the exact moment it happened.

If you have read anything about this in the last couple of years, you may have seen it called SGE, short for Search Generative Experience.

That was Google’s name for the experiment when it lived inside Search Labs back in 2023.

Google retired that name in May 2024 when the feature went public in the United States as AI Overviews.

Plenty of SEO content still says SGE. If you see it, you are reading something written a while ago.

Here is where things actually stand, and what I think it means if you run a business in Perth.

There are two things now, not one

AI Overviews is the AI-written summary that appears above your normal search results. You type a question, Google answers it, and the usual list of links sits underneath.

AI Mode is a separate, conversational experience for longer or messier questions. You ask, it answers, you ask a follow-up, and it remembers what you were talking about.

These two started as separate features and Google has been steadily stitching them together. In January 2026 clicking “Show more” on an AI Overview began dropping people straight into AI Mode. By May 2026 that had been smoothed out further, so the conversation carries context as people refine what they are asking.

At I/O in May 2026 Google said AI Mode had passed a billion monthly users. Google also said total search volume had hit an all-time high the quarter before, which it has used to argue that AI features are growing search rather than shrinking it. Whether you buy that argument or not, the scale is not in dispute.

What this does to your traffic

The honest answer is that it depends on what people are searching for.

If someone searches a question that can be answered in three sentences, Google will answer it in three sentences and that person will never reach your site. Those searches are gone. There is no clever technique that gets them back.

But those searches were rarely worth much anyway. Nobody who searches “what is a retaining wall” is about to hire a landscaper that afternoon. What has changed is that the top of your funnel got quieter while the bottom of it stayed roughly where it was.

Rand Fishkin’s team at SparkToro put numbers on this recently, and I wrote up what that means for Perth businesses at the time. Worth a read alongside this one.

Being the source is the new being first

An AI Overview has to get its information from somewhere. It cites sources, and those citations are links, and people click them when the summary does not go far enough.

So the goal moved. It used to be ranking first. Now it is being the page Google pulls from when it writes the answer.

That sounds like a whole new discipline. It mostly is not.

Google has said publicly that there are no special requirements for appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode. No extra file to upload, no special markup, no AI-specific tags. Standard search eligibility is the bar. Anyone selling you a product that promises to get you into AI Overviews is selling you something Google says does not exist.

What does seem to matter is whether your page answers a question cleanly enough to be quoted.

What actually helps

Answer the question early. If the page takes four hundred words to get to the point, there is nothing clean to lift. Say the thing, then explain it.

Write about what you actually do. Content that shows real experience holds up better than content assembled from other people’s content. This is the E-E-A-T idea Google has been talking about for years, and AI answers have made it matter more, not less.

Structure it properly. Headings that describe what is under them. Schema markup that is correct rather than just present. A page that loads. None of this is new advice. It is just harder to skip now.

Cover the topic, not the keyword. If you write about paving, write about drainage and edging and what it costs, because those are the follow-up questions people ask in AI Mode. The follow-ups are where the buying decisions get made.

Local search is where this gets interesting

For a local business, this has been less brutal than for publishers, and in some cases better.

AI answers for local queries lean heavily on Google Business Profile data, reviews, and structured information about where you are and what you cover. If someone in Perth asks about a service you provide, the AI is pulling from listings and reviews and location signals as much as from your website copy.

That is a fight a small business can win. You cannot outspend a national brand on content. You can absolutely have better reviews and a more complete profile than the outfit down the road.

If your Google Business Profile has not been touched in two years, that is the first job, well before anything to do with AI.

Is SEO still worth paying for

I get asked this most weeks now, so here is my straight answer.

Less of it works than used to. The easy informational traffic has thinned out and it is not coming back. Anyone telling you otherwise has not looked at their own analytics recently.

What still works is being the business that Google, and increasingly ChatGPT and Gemini and Perplexity, treat as a credible source in your field. That takes longer than it used to and it is harder to fake. Which, if you have been doing this properly for years, is not the worst outcome.

Our case studies show what that looks like over a long run for Perth businesses. Some of those clients have been with us more than a decade.

The short version

The name SGE is dead. AI Overviews and AI Mode are what you are dealing with, and they now flow into one another. Google says there is no secret to getting cited, which means the work is the same work it always was, done properly and aimed at questions real people ask.

If you want to know how your site is currently faring in AI answers for your industry, that is something we check as part of a free SEO review. Takes about a week and costs nothing.