Marketing

Google says no special AI markup is required. So what is an AI SEO agency actually selling? Seven Australian agencies assessed on crawl and index hygiene, structured data accuracy, entity clarity and content architecture.

One metadata tag, added before upload, is now the price of selling a listing image that shows a machine-made person. A New York law with penalties of 1,000 US dollars a breach has set the standard for Amazon sellers worldwide.

Sixteen months ago, Google's AI answer boxes were an experiment most Australians could scroll past without noticing. Similarweb's mid-2026 generative AI landscape report put AI Overviews on more than 40 per cent of US Google searches by May 2026, compared with roughly 15 per cent in January 2025.

ChatGPT handed travel sites a clickable link in 22.6% of its travel answers in May 2026, against a cross-category average of just 6.8%. That is a gap of more than three times the norm, and no single travel brand's domain authority or content volume explains it.

Fake engagement has a price list. X pulled 42,000 accounts that were auto-replying with chatbots, and head of product Nikita Bier said almost all of it was commercial: build a following, then sell it.

Fewer than one in three Google searches now sends anyone to a website. SparkToro's reading of Similarweb browsing data puts the share of United States searches ending without a click at 68.01 per cent, up 7.6 points in two years.

Editing one line on a Google listing can pull a business out of search for weeks. A survey of Google's own product experts found the real danger is not a ranking reset but being pushed back through verification.

Brad Geddes let Google's automatic ad writing loose on three real accounts and watched it shuffle demand rather than create it. Total revenue fell even as the new campaigns looked like winners on their own dashboards.