AI Search
SOUTH MELBOURNE, Australia — 06 October 2026 — UNTMD, a South Melbourne digital marketing agency, says the traffic declines Australian brands are attributing to algorithm changes or seasonal dips are, in most cases, driven by a structural shift in how search engines now handle queries: AI-generated summaries are answering questions before users click anything.
The data is clear and worsening. CTR drops up to 34.5% when a Google AI Overview appears on a query, according to a 2025 Ahrefs study based on 300,000 keywords. In Q1 2026, 25.11% of all Google searches triggered an AI Overview, up from 6.49% in mid-2024. Separately, 60% of all Google searches now end without a single click to any website. On mobile, that figure reaches 77%. The brands most exposed are those with content-heavy sites built around informational queries, where AI Overviews are most likely to appear and least likely to send traffic through.
The compounding problem is that ranking well no longer guarantees being cited inside the AI layer. The overlap between top-10 organic rankings and AI Overview citations collapsed from 75% in mid-2025 to between 17% and 38% by early 2026, meaning a page sitting at position one on a query can be completely absent from the AI summary that appears above it. Most brands are still measuring organic performance by ranking position, which no longer captures whether they are actually reaching the user.
“The brands coming to us with traffic declines are almost always measuring the wrong thing. Rankings look fine because the page still sits at position one. What has changed is that the AI Overview above it is answering the question, and the user never scrolls down. The fix is not a content refresh. It is understanding which queries the AI layer is intercepting and restructuring content to be cited rather than just ranked,” said Maria Kathopoulis, founder of UNTMD.
UNTMD’s SEO and AI search work covers both conventional ranking optimisation and the citation signals that determine whether a brand appears inside AI Overviews, including entity authority, structured content, and answer-layer formatting. The agency manages search strategy for clients across construction, solar, education, health, and direct-to-consumer retail, and publishes quarterly benchmark data drawn from more than $147,000 of managed advertising spend across 20 accounts.
About UNTMD
UNTMD is an Australian digital marketing agency providing integrated strategy, SEO, paid media, content, social media, PR, email, and brand services to growth-stage founders and scaling brands. The agency is based in South Melbourne and led by Maria Kathopoulis.
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