Digital Nomads HQ

Google Ads Opens Travel Campaigns to Tours and Events

Benjamin Paine — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 01:29:53 +0000

Do you sell tours, attraction tickets or event tickets?

Google Ads just gave you a new campaign type to test.

On July 8, 2026, Google announced that its Search campaigns for Travel beta now covers two new verticals: Things to Do and Events.

Here’s what changed and how to test it properly.

What’s changed?

Quick backstory.

In May 2026, Google launched Search campaigns for Travel at Google Marketing Live.

It bundles the travel ad formats (Travel Promotion Ads, Booking Links and travel feeds) into one Search campaign type, powered by AI Max.

One campaign. One budget. One view of performance.

No more juggling separate formats and splitting budgets between them.

At launch, it was built for traditional travel advertisers (think hotels and flights).
Now Google has extended the beta to Things to Do and Events.

That covers attractions, guided tours, experiences and event tickets.

It’s an open beta, but availability is limited.

Google hasn’t published eligibility rules yet.

Why Google picked these verticals

Think about what selling tour spots or event tickets actually looks like.

Prices change. Availability changes daily. And every purchase is tied to a specific date and place.

That’s exactly how hotel rooms and flights work. Which is why Google built automated travel campaigns for them in the first place.

Until now though, if you sold tours or tickets, you had two options: standard Search campaigns or Performance Max.

Neither was designed for date-based, availability-driven inventory.

This campaign type is.

What you get

Because it runs inside Search campaigns, you get tools the old travel formats missed out on

Full Search bidding suite: Including true target ROAS across all your travel assets.

Keyword and search term reporting: See exactly what people searched before they clicked.

Data-driven attribution: Plus a single performance view across the whole results page.

What’s still unknown

Google announced this in a five-post thread on X.

Not a full blog post.

So plenty of details are missing: eligibility criteria, which countries can use it, feed requirements, and which bidding and reporting features apply to the new verticals.

Expect things to change during the beta.

How to approach it

Don’t rip up your existing campaigns.

Here’s the smarter play:

Check your Google Ads account (or ask your agency) to see if the beta is available to you

Set aside a small test budget

Run it alongside your current Search and Performance Max campaigns

Compare bookings and ticket sales, not just clicks

If the numbers beat your existing mix, scale it. If not, you’ve lost nothing.

Our take

Tourism and events businesses have spent years advertising date-based inventory with generic campaign tools.

This is Google admitting that gap exists.

The beta is limited, details are thin, and features will shift.

But if you sell tours, experiences or tickets, getting in early means you learn the format while your competitors wait for the official rollout.

Want to know if your business is eligible, or need help structuring the test?

Talk to the DNHQ team.

Google Search Console Now Tracks Your Social Media Posts

Benjamin Paine — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:37:43 +0000

Google Search Console just got a big upgrade.

You can now connect your Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube accounts and see exactly how your posts perform in Google Search and Discover.

No website required. No paid tools. 100% free.

Here’s what changed and how to use it.

What’s changed?

Until now, Search Console only worked for verified websites.

That was a problem.

Google keeps showing more Reels, TikToks and YouTube videos in its search results. But you had no way to see which of your posts showed up. Or what people searched to find them.

The new “platform properties” fix that.

You connect a social account the same way you’d add a website. Then Google shows you how that account performs in Search and Discover.
The rollout starts with four platforms: Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube.

(Google first tested this in December 2025. As of July 2026, it’s an official feature.)

What you’ll see

Each connected account gets three reports:

Performance: Total clicks and impressions. Filter by post or search query to see which searches send people to your content. You can also export the data.

Insights: A plain-English summary of recent traffic, your best posts, and how people find your account on Google.

Achievements: Milestones, like passing a new click threshold from Search over 28 days.

Bottom line: it’s the same visibility you get for a website. Now for your socials.

Why this matters for your business

Think about how people find brands today.

They search. And Google increasingly answers with short-form video and social content instead of web pages.

Here’s the problem: Instagram tells you how a post performs on Instagram. TikTok tells you how a video performs on TikTok. Neither tells you what happens on Google.

Now you can see it.

If your TikToks rank for valuable search terms? Make more of them.
If your posts get impressions but no clicks? Fix your hooks and captions.

And if you run a business without a website, this is the first time you can get Search Console data at all.

How to set it up

Three steps:

Open Search Console and go to the property selector
Click “Add property” and choose Instagram, TikTok, X or YouTube
Follow the prompts to connect your account

One catch: Google is rolling this out over the next few weeks.

If you don’t see the option yet, check back soon.

Quick note: this is not the same as Google’s Search profiles (the public creator pages that launched in June 2026). Platform properties are private analytics. Anyone with a social account can use them.

Our take

Most businesses won’t touch this for months.

That’s your opening.

Connect your accounts now and you’ll know which searches surface your content, which formats Google favours, and where to put your content budget. While your competitors guess.
Want help setting it up or making sense of the data? Talk to the DNHQ team.

Google Ranking Factors in 2026: What The Data Proves

Benjamin Paine — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 05:03:04 +0000

TL;DR:

We no longer have to guess. Sworn DOJ testimony and the 2024 Content Warehouse leak revealed what Google’s systems actually track, and some of it contradicts a decade of official messaging.

Ranking is a staged pipeline, not a flat checklist: relevance (the ABC signals) → a site-wide quality score (Q*) → machine learning re-rankers → NavBoost, which re-ranks on 13 months of click data.

The 10 factors that matter: content that ends the search, user engagement via NavBoost, siteAuthority, link relevance over volume, topical authority, relevance fundamentals, E-E-A-T (as quality-rater training data), genuine freshness, page experience, and brand signals.

Demotions cancel out good work. Named attributes punish bad clicks, anchor mismatch, cluttered pages, site-level spam and keyword-stuffed domains.

The zombies are dead: keyword density, exact-match domains, social shares, word count and “AI-content penalties” are not real factors.

The deciding factor for 2026 is net new information gain. Publish what didn’t exist before you published it (your own data, first-hand experience, original research) because that is the one category AI can’t rewrite.

Ranking no longer equals visibility. AI Overviews triggered on 37.8 per cent of Australian SME queries in DNHQ’s State of AI Search report, and citability is now its own discipline.

Most articles about Google ranking factors are recycled guesswork.

The same list of 200 signals. Copied from a 2013 blog post. Republished every January with a new date in the title.

That era is over.

Between 2023 and 2025, two things happened that changed SEO forever:

Google’s most senior search engineers testified under oath in the US Department of Justice antitrust trial. And in May 2024, internal API documentation leaked, exposing more than 14,000 attributes that Google’s ranking systems track for every page on the web.

Which means we no longer have to guess what Google measures.

We know.

And some of it directly contradicts what Google told us for over a decade.

In this guide, you’ll learn exactly what the evidence shows, how Google’s ranking pipeline really works, and the 10 factors that matter most right now.

Let's dive in.

How we know what we know

Here’s the thing about ranking factor claims: not all of them are equal.

There are three tiers of evidence. And before you build strategy on any claim, you need to know which tier it sits in.

Tier one: official confirmations.

Google has publicly confirmed only a handful of signals.

HTTPS. Mobile friendliness. Core Web Vitals. Helpful, people-first content.

Useful? Sure. But it’s a tiny fraction of the pictur

Tier two: sworn testimony.

The DOJ trial put Google’s search leadership on the stand.

And lying under oath was not an option.

This is where we learned that user clicks directly influence rankings. That Google maintains a site-wide quality score. That Chrome browser data feeds the algorithm.

All things Google spent years denying.

Tier three: the 2024 API leak.

The Content Warehouse leak named the internal attributes behind those systems.

siteAuthority. navBoost. contentEffort. siteFocusScore. chromeInTotal.

The leak doesn’t tell us how each attribute is weighted.

But it confirms what’s being measured.

Bottom line?

When testimony and leaked documentation agree, you can treat a signal as real. That standard shapes everything below.

Ranking is a pipeline, not a checklist

The biggest misconception in SEO is that Google scores your page against a flat list of 200 items.
It doesn’t.

Ranking is a staged pipeline. And each factor bites at a specific stage.

Stage one: relevance.

First, Google works out whether your page is about the query at all.

Court exhibits revealed the internal shorthand for this: the ABC signals.

Anchors (what other pages say about you through links).

Body (the words on your page). Clicks (whether users who land on your page actually stay there).

These combine into a topicality score.

Stage two: quality.

Every site carries a largely static, query-independent quality score.

Internally, it’s called Q*.

It acts as a site-wide modifier. A strong Q* lifts every page you publish.

A weak one caps them.

PageRank still exists, by the way. But it’s now just one input into this broader score.

Stage three: machine learning re-rankers.

Systems like RankBrain and RankEmbedBERT refine results, especially for long-tail queries with little click history.

But here’s the detail most people miss: these models are trained partly on scores from Google’s human quality raters.

In other words, the Quality Rater Guidelines aren’t a suggestion. They’re training data.

Stage four: NavBoost.

After users interact with results, a system called NavBoost re-ranks based on 13 months of aggregated click data.

How important is it?

Google’s own engineers described it as one of the strongest signals in the entire system.

The 10 ranking factors that matter in 2026

Quick note before we start: Google doesn’t publish weightings.

So any percentage you see out there is an estimate.

But the ordering below is backed by testimony, the leak, and what we see across client campaigns every single week.

1. Content that ends the search

The strongest pages do one thing extremely well:

They fully satisfy the query. So the user stops searching.

And Google measures this directly through click behaviour.

If people read your page and go back to the results, that’s recorded. If your page is the last one they visit, that’s recorded too.

The leak also revealed an attribute called contentEffort. It’s an estimate of how much genuine work went into a page.

Thin rewrites of what already ranks? They score poorly.

Original data, first-hand experience and real depth? They score well.

2. User engagement through NavBoost

NavBoost is essentially a giant table of query and click data spanning 13 months.

It tracks good clicks (the user stayed). Bad clicks (the user bounced back to the results). And last longest clicks (the result that ended the session).

Two practical implications here.

First: your title and meta description are ranking assets.

They earn the click that starts the record.

Second: the 13-month window rewards consistency.

A viral spike decays as old clicks roll out.

Pages that satisfy users month after month keep accruing signal.

Slow and steady actually wins this one.

3. Site-wide authority

The leak confirmed an attribute called siteAuthority. A domain-level score Google denied having for years.

It works like a modernised PageRank applied to your entire site. And it explains a pattern every SEO has seen:

A mediocre page on a strong domain outranking a superior page on a weak one.

Can you hack it? No.

It builds through editorial links, digital PR, original research worth citing, and time.

4. Backlinks

Still a top factor. But the game has completely changed.

Google’s systems now evaluate why a site linked to you. Not just whether it did.

Which means one contextual link from a relevant, authoritative publication outweighs a hundred generic directory links.

The most reliable link strategy in 2026? Publish something journalists and industry writers genuinely want to reference.

Original studies and proprietary intelligence earn links that cold outreach never will.

5. Topical authority

The leaked attributes siteFocusScore and siteRadius measure how tightly your site concentrates on a subject.

And how far individual pages stray from that core.

Here’s why that matters: sites that go deep on one territory consistently beat generalists in competitive results.

It’s why content clusters work.

Fifty connected pages on one discipline build a compounding advantage that fifty scattered posts never will.

Depth beats breadth. Every time.

6. Relevance fundamentals

Keyword in the title tag.

Clear heading structure.

Terms on the page that match how people actually search.

Do these carry less weight than a decade ago? Yes.

But they remain a prerequisite.

Fall below the threshold and nothing else gets the chance to matter.

Pro tip: get them right once, then move on. There’s no compounding return from endlessly tweaking on-page elements.

7. E-E-A-T

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust.

E-E-A-T isn’t a direct score. But it’s algorithmically real through a very specific pathway:

Human quality raters assess pages against these criteria. And their assessments train the machine learning models that rank you.

In practice, that means named authors with verifiable credentials.

First-hand experience visible in the content. Accurate claims. And a consistent presence across the web that confirms your business is what it says it is.

8. Freshness, done properly

Google rewards genuinely updated content in topics that move.

It also detects fake freshness.

The leaked lastSignificantUpdate attribute suggests cosmetic date swaps get downweighted. So changing “2025” to “2026” in your title does nothing.

A real update means meaningful change: new data, new sections, removed fluff. Roughly a third of the page should move.

For most sites, a quarterly refresh cycle on the pages that drive revenue is the right cadence.

9. Page experience

Core Web Vitals. Mobile usability. HTTPS. No intrusive pop-ups.

These are table stakes rather than growth levers. But the leak revealed something interesting:

Attributes like clutterScore let Google demote a poor experience at indexing. Before a single user has suffered it.

Bottom line?

Clean, fast pages don’t win rankings on their own. But slow, cluttered ones lose them regardless of how good the content is.

10. Brand signals

Testimony confirmed that Chrome browser data feeds ranking through popularity signals.

Sites people visit directly, return to, and search for by name accrue a real advantage.

Google’s own search liaison put it plainly: if you feel like you haven’t developed your brand, develop it.

Which makes branded search volume a legitimate SEO KPI. Because it feeds the systems that decide where you rank.

The signals that push you down

Most ranking factor guides only cover what lifts you.

But the leak revealed an entire ledger of demotions. And they matter, because a demotion can quietly cancel out everything you did right.

navDemotion and serpDemotion.

The punishment side of NavBoost. Sustained bad clicks translate into explicit downward adjustments.
Poor engagement isn’t neutral. It’s a negative signal with its own attribute.

anchorMismatchDemotion.

When the anchor text pointing at your page doesn’t match what the page is actually about, the link’s value gets reduced.

Translation: over-optimised exact-match anchors are now a liability, not a tactic.

clutterScore.

A measure of how cluttered and ad-heavy a page is. Pages drowning in pop-ups and stacked ad units get demoted at indexing.

Site-level spam scores.

Every site carries a spam assessment that influences both crawling and ranking. A history of manipulative behaviour follows the domain.

One more reason shortcuts are expensive in the long run.

Exact-match domain demotion.

The leak confirmed a specific attribute that suppresses low-quality sites relying on keyword-stuffed domain names.

The domain isn’t the problem.

Using it as a substitute for quality is.

Notice the pattern?

Google’s guidelines aren’t suggestions.

They’re enforced algorithmically, with named attributes doing the enforcing.

Second-tier signals worth knowing

Below the top 10 sits a layer of confirmed signals. None will transform your rankings alone. But they compound when they all point the same direction.

Internal linking. How you link between your own pages distributes authority and tells Google how your content relates. Descriptive anchors within content clusters reinforce your topical signals.

Title-to-query match. The leak includes an attribute scoring how well your title matches the query. That’s separate from the click-through benefit. The match itself is measured.

Content originality. Pages judged as near-duplicates of what already exists gain nothing from existing. This one is important enough that it gets its own section below.

Freshness at the query level. Some queries demand fresh results and some don’t. Google adjusts freshness weighting per query. It’s why news topics churn daily while evergreen results barely move for years.

Entity and author recognition. Google builds profiles of authors and organisations across the web. Consistent bylines and credentials make your expertise machine-readable instead of merely claimed.

Location signals. Rankings are localised at a granular level, with click data segmented by location and device. For Australian businesses, this is why national rankings mean little and suburb-level visibility is the real game.

Structured data. Not a direct ranking factor. But schema helps Google interpret your content and keeps you eligible for rich results and AI-generated answers. It’s cheap to implement, so there’s no reason not to.

HTTPS and security. Confirmed since 2014. A lightweight signal. But an unsecured site is a trust problem for users before it’s a ranking problem for you.

None of these deserve months of your attention.

Together, they’re the difference between a site where every signal agrees and one where good content fights its own foundations.

What stopped mattering

Just as important as the real factors are the zombies that refuse to die.

Keyword density.

Not a thing.

Top-ranking pages use their target term sparingly. And stuffing actively hurts.

Exact-match domains.

No inherent advantage. See the demotion above.

Social share counts. – Not a direct signal.

Word count.

Not a factor.

An 800-word page that ends the search beats a 3,000-word page that pads it.

AI-generated content penalties.

Google doesn’t penalise content for being AI-generated. It penalises content for being thin, generic and experience-free.

Which, to be fair, describes most of it.

Information gain: the factor that 2026

Here’s our take.

And it’s the one insight we’d put above everything else in this article.

Net new information gain is becoming the most important content concept in SEO.

What stopped mattering

Generative AI can now rewrite anything that already exists.

Instantly. At zero cost.

Every known fact, every published framework, every “ultimate guide” can be paraphrased a thousand different ways before lunch.

Which means the web is filling up with content that adds precisely nothing. Same information. Different words.

And Google can see it.

The leaked contentEffort attribute estimates how much genuine work went into a page.

Originality is scored.

Near-duplicates of the existing consensus gain nothing from existing.

So the question that decides whether your content ranks in 2026 is brutally simple:

Does this page contain something that didn't exist on the internet before you published it?

If the answer is no, you’re competing on rewording. Against machines that reword infinitely better than you.

If the answer is yes, you’re competing in a category AI can’t enter. Because AI can only remix what’s already known. It cannot generate what your market knows and hasn’t published.

Here's the part most businesses miss

You’re already sitting on net new information.

You just haven’t treated it as content.

Your own numbers.

Client results, internal benchmarks, pricing observations, conversion patterns. Aggregated and anonymised, this is data nobody else can publish.

Your first-hand experience. What actually happened when you implemented the thing everyone else only describes. The failures included. Especially the failures.

Questions your market asks that nothing answers.

Every sales call and support ticket contains queries the existing content ignores. Answer those and you’ve created information gain by definition.

Original research. Surveys, testing, analysis. It’s the reason we built our State of AI Search report on 116,918 real Australian search results instead of quoting overseas studies. Nobody could rewrite it, because the data didn’t exist anywhere else.

The strategic shift is this: stop asking “what should we write about?” and start asking “what do we know that isn’t on the internet yet?”

The first question produces the ten-thousandth article on a topic.

The second produces the one that gets cited. By journalists, by other sites, and increasingly by the AI systems answering your customers’ questions.

We didn't just write this. We tested it on ourselves.

Every claim above is one we ran on our own site first.

Over the past two years we rebuilt Digital Nomads HQ around a single rule: publish only what ends the search, and only what didn’t already exist on the internet.

Original research.

First-hand campaign results.

Answers to the questions our market actually asks.

Week after week.

Here’s what happened.

Estimated monthly organic traffic went from roughly 2,500 in July 2024 to more than 35,000 in July 2026. That’s over 14 times the traffic in 24 months, on a domain in one of the most competitive niches there is: digital marketing itself.

But the number we watch closest is the pink line.

Our presence in AI Overviews went from zero to more than 800 keywords over the same window.

That’s the proof that matters in 2026, because it’s the metric ranking alone can no longer buy. We didn’t just climb the classic results. We became the source the AI answers cite.

None of it came from a loophole. It came from the playbook on this page, applied patiently to our own site, with information gain as the layer that made everything else compound.

Which brings us to the final point.

The catch: ranking no longer equals visibility

Here’s the uncomfortable truth to end on.

Everything above determines where you sit in the classic organic results. It increasingly does not determine whether you appear in AI-generated answers.

AI Overviews now appear across a large share of Australian searches. And the overlap between top-ranking pages and AI-cited sources has collapsed.

In other words: ranking first is no longer a guarantee of being the source an AI answer cites.
The two disciplines share foundations. Authority, topical depth and trust help both.

But citability has its own mechanics: extractable structure, clear claims, schema, and presence across the sources AI systems retrieve from.

This is exactly why we built Amalfi, our AI search audit platform. Our clients kept asking the question rankings alone can no longer answer: when someone asks an AI about your industry, do you show up?

Our 2026 State of AI Search report found AI Overviews triggering on 37.8 per cent of Australian SME queries across 18 industries.

That number is only going one direction.

Where to start

If your rankings have stalled, the evidence points to a clear order of operations:
Fix the prerequisites first. Titles, technical health, page experience.

Then concentrate your content on the territory you want to own. Not spread thin across ten territories you don’t.

Invest in pages that genuinely end the search. And refresh them properly, on a schedule.
Build authority through work worth citing. Not links worth buying.

And measure branded search alongside keyword rankings. Because Google does.
None of this is fast. All of it compounds.

The sites winning in 2026 aren’t the ones that found a loophole. They’re the ones the evidence now confirms Google was trying to reward all along.

AI SEO Guide: How to Get Your Business Cited in AI Search

Benjamin Paine — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:20:59 +0000

TL;DR:

To get cited in AI search, make your business a clearly identifiable entity (consistent details everywhere, named authors, sameAs schema), write answer-first content with facts a model can quote, expert quotes and statistics lift AI visibility 30–41%, publish original data only you have, keep pages server-rendered and open to AI crawlers, and earn mentions on the sources AI trusts most: reviews, listicles, Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Then measure it monthly.

The engines barely overlap in what they cite (ChatGPT reads Bing, Perplexity runs its own index, AI Overviews read Google), so track your mention rate per engine like market share. There are no shortcuts, llms.txt included.

Entity, citable content, measurement. That is the whole job.

SEO used to have one job. Rank, get the click.

That job just got cut in half.

Today, most searches get answered before anyone clicks a thing. Google’s AI Overviews show up on close to half of all results. AI Mode passed a billion users in its first year, and its queries run about three times longer than a typed search. Pew found 60% of Americans already read the AI summary in their results. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini answer millions of questions a day by reading the web and writing the answer themselves.

We pulled the numbers ourselves. Across 116,918 Australian search results, an AI Overview already sat on 37.8% of commercial searches. And local-service search demand fell 38% in early 2026 as AI swallowed the queries people used to type, repeat and click.

So the question changed.

It is not “do we rank?” anymore. It is “when the AI writes the answer, does it mention us, or our competitor?”

That is AI SEO. This guide breaks down exactly how it works, what actually moves the needle in 2026, and the hyped tactics you can safely ignore. It is built for Australian businesses, but the mechanics work anywhere.

First, what AI SEO actually is

The category has too many names. AI SEO. GEO (generative engine optimisation). AEO (answer engine optimisation). LLMO.

They all mean the same thing: getting your business named and cited in AI-generated answers, instead of just ranking in the blue links underneath them.

We call it AI SEO because that is the plain-English version. The discipline underneath is GEO.

Here is the distinction that matters. Classic SEO optimises a page to rank in a list.

AI SEO optimises your content, and your whole digital footprint, so that when a model writes an answer, it pulls from you and names you as the source.

	Classic SEO	AI SEO
Goal	Rank a page in a list of results	Get named inside the answer
Unit of competition	The page	The passage, and the entity behind it
How you win	Keywords, links, search intent	Citable passages, entity trust, third-party mentions
What you hold	A position	A mention rate, across many generated answers
Measured by	Rankings, organic traffic	Citations, mentions, share of voice per engine

That last row matters more than it looks. AI answers are not a fixed leaderboard.

Ask the same question five times and you can get five differently worded answers, drawing on different sources. There is no position one in ChatGPT.

What you are building is a mention rate, how often you get named across all the answers in your category. It moves like market share, not like a ranking.

One more thing to clear up, because you will hear it. Google’s official line is that its AI features have no special requirements, and that GEO sold as a separate discipline “is SEO.”

Half true.

The eligibility is the same: indexed, crawlable, snippet-worthy. But what wins is weighted differently.

Passages over pages. Entities over keywords. Mentions over links alone. Same sport, different scoring.

So it is not a replacement for SEO. Most of the foundations overlap. But to optimise for it, you first need to know how the machines actually pick their sources.

How AI engines choose what to cite

This is the part most guides skip.

It is also the part that makes everything else make sense.

Ask an AI engine a question and it does not just match keywords. It runs a process. Roughly like this:

It fans your question out. Google calls this query fan-out. Instead of running one search, the engine breaks your question into a bunch of related sub-questions and runs them all at once.

Ask “best way to reduce cost per lead for a Brisbane plumber” and it quietly fires off separate searches on lead generation, local advertising and the trade.

It grabs passages, not pages.

Using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), it pulls the specific paragraphs that answer each sub-question and feeds them to the model. It is taking the passage that answers the question, not ranking your whole site.

It merges everything into one answer. Then it names the sources it leaned on most.

Three things fall straight out of that. And they shape the entire playbook.

One: passages win, not pages. Answer a specific question cleanly, in a self-contained block, and you get retrieved and quoted.

Bury the answer three paragraphs into an “ultimate guide” and you get skimmed over.

And because of query fan-out, the page that answers the whole cluster of sub-questions, not just the head term, gets pulled into more of those searches at once.

Two: authority breaks the tie.

When several sources could answer a sub-question, the model leans on the ones with real authority, genuine expertise signals, and backing from other reputable sites.

That is E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) doing exactly its job. AI engines also lean hard on news and established media.

Three: you have to be machine-readable. If a crawler cannot reach or parse your content, you do not exist in the answer. Full stop.

Nail those three and you are most of the way there. But first, one thing almost every guide glosses over.

Not every AI engine reads the same web

The engines do not share an index. They barely even share citations. When researchers compared the URLs cited by the major AI platforms for identical queries, the overlap was 1.4%. Being cited in one engine tells you almost nothing about the others.

Here is who reads what:

Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini run on Google’s index. Your existing Google SEO is the ticket in. Google’s stated bar: the page must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet.

ChatGPT leans on Bing. One analysis found 87% of ChatGPT search citations matched Bing’s top results. If you have ignored Bing Webmaster Tools for a decade, it just became a real channel, and its reporting now shows how often Copilot and Bing AI cite you.

Perplexity runs its own crawler and index, and leans harder on community sources than anyone. On Perplexity, Reddit alone accounts for as much as one in five citations.

The practical read: you do not need a separate strategy per engine. You need foundations every engine can read, your site verified in both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and a real presence on the community platforms the engines trust.

Which brings us to the playbook.

The AI SEO playbook: 7 things that actually work

1. Build a clear, trusted entity

AI models think in entities, the real-world thing your brand is, not strings of keywords. Before they will confidently cite you, they need to know who you are.

That means a consistent identity everywhere: same business name and details across the web, a strong About page, named people with real credentials, and schema that links your site to your profiles (the sameAs property).

It means genuine third-party mentions, because an entity the web talks about is one the model trusts. And it means reviews and consistent sentiment that back up what you claim.

If your brand qualifies, add presence in the places machines treat as ground truth: Wikipedia, Wikidata, recognised industry databases. They feed the knowledge graphs the models lean on. Hard to earn, worth it if you can.

This is the most underrated part of AI SEO. Most businesses pour everything into content and ignore the entity foundation that decides whether the content gets trusted at all.

2. Write content built to be cited

Entity sorted?

Now the content has to be retrievable. Format matters as much as substance now.

Lead with the answer. Put the direct response at the top of each section, then expand. Answer-first is what gets lifted into AI responses. Bury it and it never gets pulled.

Pack in facts.

This is not vibes, it is measured. The academic study that coined the term GEO, out of Princeton and IIT Delhi, tested content changes across 10,000 queries.

Adding expert quotes lifted a source’s visibility in AI answers by up to 41%.

Adding statistics, around 32%. Citing authoritative sources, around 30%. No redesign, just restructuring. Concrete, attributed, extractable content wins.

Answer the whole question.

Cover the main query and the follow-up sub-questions someone would ask next, the ones the fan-out is already searching for. Be the complete source, not a fragment.

Format for extraction.

Clear headings. Short paragraphs. Lists, tables, definitions, real FAQ blocks. All easier for a model to parse and pull a clean passage from.

Write how people ask.

AI queries are longer and more conversational than typed searches. Match that, not clipped keyword phrases.

Keep it fresh.

AI engines skew hard toward recent content; the large majority of AI Overview citations come from pages published or updated within the last two years. Stale pages age out of answers faster than they ever aged out of rankings. Update your key pages on a schedule, and show it, with visible dates and dateModified schema.

3. Publish data nobody else has

The most reliable citation magnet on the internet is a fact that only exists on your site.
Models need something concrete to quote, and someone to attribute it to.

Original research, surveys, benchmarks, price data, a genuine “state of the industry” number. Publish the number your category needs, and every engine answering that question has one source to name: you.

It does not have to be a 100,000-result study.

A trade business that publishes “the average cost of a bathroom renovation on the Sunshine Coast, from our last 200 jobs” owns a fact no national publisher can match. This guide’s own authority runs on our research. That is the play, and it is open to any business willing to count something real and publish it.

4. Make it machine-readable with structured data

Structured data (schema markup) translates your content into something machines understand precisely.

Use the types that fit your pages: Organisation, Article, FAQ, Product, Review, Breadcrumb. Keep the markup accurate and matched to what is on the page, and pair it with clean semantic HTML.

It is not a magic ranking lever, and now there is data on that too.

Ahrefs tested schema at scale: pages with markup do get cited more, but adding schema to already-cited pages changed nothing.

The markup travels with well-built sites rather than causing citations by itself. Treat it as hygiene. It removes ambiguity, and ambiguity is what gets you left out of an answer.

5. Get the technical access right for AI crawlers

A whole new layer of technical SEO showed up in the last two years: managing how AI crawlers reach your site. AI bot traffic is up more than 300% since early 2025, driven by GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), Google-Extended and PerplexityBot.

Decide on purpose how those bots interact with your content, do not leave it to a default. Many sites block AI crawlers in robots.txt without realising it.

Make sure your important content is server-rendered, so a crawler sees it without running JavaScript; a bot that only gets a blank shell cannot cite you. And keep pages fast and accessible, because the same technical health that helps Google now decides whether AI can read you.

6. Show up in the sources AI pulls from, especially the ones people write

Here is the uncomfortable bit.

AI answers get built from the whole web, not just your site. So part of AI SEO happens off your site entirely.

When an engine answers “best [your service] in [your city],” it pulls from directories, review platforms, industry publications, and the listicles that rank for that query.

Not on those sources? Not in the answer.

And the sources AI trusts most are not the ones brands control.

Across one 30-million-citation analysis, the most-cited domains in AI answers were Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn, in that order.

Semrush’s 325,000-prompt study found LinkedIn cited in 14.3% of ChatGPT answers and 13.5% of Google AI Mode answers. For professional and B2B queries, LinkedIn is the most-cited domain outright.

The play is participation, not spam. Genuine answers in the subreddits and forums where your category gets discussed.

Real expertise published on LinkedIn under named people, not just the company page. Video answering the questions your buyers actually ask, because YouTube gets read too. Astroturfing gets spotted, by the platforms and increasingly by the models. Showing up authentically and consistently does not.

7. Measure it, because you cannot improve what you cannot see

This is where almost everyone is flying blind.

Classic rank tracking tells you nothing about whether ChatGPT or an AI Overview is citing you.
You need to track AI visibility directly.

Where you are cited.

Where competitors are cited instead. For which queries. Across each engine. And how it moves over time.

The tooling caught up in the last year.

Purpose-built trackers, Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Profound, Peec and others, monitor citations and share of voice across engines. Bing Webmaster Tools now reports Copilot and Bing AI citations natively. And in GA4, referrals from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com are real sessions you can segment and attribute. Pick one tracker plus GA4, and baseline yourself this month. Without measurement, AI SEO is guesswork. With it, it becomes a process you can actually run.

The hyped tactics you can ignore (for now)

A complete guide should tell you what to skip, not just what to do.

Exhibit A: llms.txt. A proposed file that is meant to point AI models at your best content.

The hype is loud.

The reality moved in mid-2026, so here is the honest, current read.

In June 2026 Google updated its docs to clarify it does not use llms.txt for Search or its AI features. No positive effect, no negative effect.

But it softened the tone, from discouraging the file to, basically, “use it if you want.” John Mueller compared it to the old keywords meta tag: harmless, but not a ranking lever. Google has even started checking for the file in Chrome’s new Lighthouse agentic-browsing audits, as a discoverability signal for AI agents, not a ranking factor.

Bing is warmer on it. Bingbot honours llms.txt, with early reports of faster ingestion for listed URLs, and Bing Webmaster Tools now shows how often Copilot and Bing AI cite you. But independent data still shows the AI bots that matter barely request the file.

So the verdict, with a 2026 nuance: add an llms.txt if you like. It is cheap, low-risk, and Bing and AI agents may use it. Just do not believe anyone selling it as a Google ranking lever. Entity authority, citable content and measurement are still where the visibility comes from.

Same goes for anyone promising “AI SEO hacks,” secret prompts, or a shortcut into ChatGPT. There isn’t one. The brands getting cited have real authority and genuinely useful, well-structured content. That is the whole trick. It is not a hack.

The Australian angle most businesses are missing

Here is what our research turned up that should change how Aussie businesses think about this.
Demand did not just move online. It moved into the answer.

Across six Australian markets and 21 industries, local-service search demand fell 38% in 2026, in lockstep with AI Overviews scaling.

The research-heavy categories fell hardest. Law down 56%.

Mortgage broking down 47%.

Because those are exactly the questions AI answers well.

But the high-intent, local, ready-to-buy searches held up.

AI will happily summarise “how much can I borrow.” It will not risk recommending the wrong tradie or booking the wrong clinic. So the most defensible visibility in Australia sits right where local intent meets genuine authority. And most Australian businesses have done nothing to claim it yet.

That is the opportunity. The brands that build AI visibility now, while the field is wide open here, become the default the day everyone else wakes up.

What comes next: answers that act

One more shift worth watching, because it changes what “visibility” means again.

The engines are becoming agents.

Google spent I/O 2026 wiring agents into Search, and AI Mode can already research, compare and move toward booking and buying on a user’s behalf. OpenAI is testing ads inside ChatGPT.

When an AI does not just recommend a provider but books one, being the source it trusts stops being marketing and becomes distribution.

Everything in this guide, the entity work, the machine-readable content, the third-party trust, is the same foundation agents will use to decide who gets the job. Build it once, it pays twice.

Feeling like a lot? Start here. In order.

Baseline what AI says about you today. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the questions your customers ask, including “best [your service] in [your city].” Note who gets named, who gets cited, and what they say about you. That is your scoreboard.
Fix your entity foundation. Consistent details, a real About page, named authors, schema with sameAs. Nothing else works without this.
Map your query fan-out. Run your core customer question through Google AI Mode and ChatGPT. Note the sub-questions each one fans out into. Then make sure your content answers that whole cluster, not just the head term.
Make your key pages answer-first, with verifiable facts, clean formatting, and a visible update date.
Publish one piece of original data your category would have to cite.
Check AI crawlers can actually reach and render your content. Verify Bing Webmaster Tools while you are there; it is ChatGPT’s window onto your site.
Get listed, reviewed and genuinely active on the third-party sources your category’s answers are built from, including Reddit, LinkedIn and YouTube where it fits.
Start measuring AI citations, so you improve against data, not hope.

The bottom line

AI SEO is not a new trick bolted onto the old job. It is the old job, done for a results page that now writes its own answers.

The fundamentals still matter. But the goal moved, from ranking in a list to being the source a machine quotes.

The winners will not be the ones chasing hacks. They will be the recognisable, trusted, well-structured brands that Google and the AI engines both reach for when they build an answer. In a year where AI is rewriting search in front of us, and rewriting it in Australia right now, becoming that source is the highest-return work you can do.

Want to know whether AI search currently cites your business or your competitors? Run a free AI visibility audit, or talk to our AI SEO team about getting your brand into the answers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between AI SEO and traditional SEO?

Traditional SEO optimises a page to rank in the list of results. AI SEO, also called GEO, optimises your content and digital footprint so AI engines like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini cite you when they write an answer. The foundations overlap, but AI SEO leans harder on entity authority, citable content and machine readability, because the goal is to be inside the answer, not just beneath it.

How do AI engines decide which sources to cite?

They fan your question out into related sub-questions, run them all at once, retrieve the specific passages that answer each (a process called retrieval-augmented generation), then merge them into one answer and name the sources they relied on most. That rewards content that answers questions cleanly in self-contained blocks, comes from a trusted entity, and is easy for a crawler to reach and parse.

What is query fan-out, and why does it matter for AI SEO?

Query fan-out is the technique Google’s AI Mode, and other AI engines, use to answer a question. Instead of one search, they break it into several related sub-questions, run them at once, then synthesise the results. It matters because you no longer win by ranking for one head keyword. You win by answering the whole cluster of sub-questions a query fans out into, so your content gets pulled into more of those searches. The move: run your key questions through AI Mode and ChatGPT, see what they fan out into, and cover it.

Which AI engine should I optimise for first?

Start with Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, because they sit on top of the search behaviour you already have, and they run on your existing Google SEO. Then ChatGPT, whose search citations track Bing’s index closely, so verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools. Then Perplexity, which rewards community presence like Reddit. But the URLs each engine cites barely overlap, so the durable answer is: build the foundations every engine reads, entity, citable content, crawler access, then measure per engine.

Does AI SEO work for local businesses?

It is arguably most valuable there. Our Australian data shows research-style queries collapsing into AI answers while high-intent local searches hold up. AI engines are cautious about recommending the wrong local provider, so they lean on strong local signals: consistent business details, reviews, local directories and genuine third-party mentions. A local business with a clean entity and real reviews can beat national brands inside AI answers for local queries.

Do I need an llms.txt file?

It is no longer a flat no, but it is not a priority either. As of mid-2026 Google says it does not use llms.txt for Search or its AI features, so it has no ranking or visibility effect, though it softened to fine to use it if you want, and now even checks for it in Chrome’s Lighthouse agentic-browsing audits. Bing is more supportive: its Bingbot honours the file and shows faster ingestion of listed URLs. It is cheap and low-risk to add, and Bing and AI agents may use it, but treat anyone selling it as a Google ranking lever with caution. Your time is still better spent on entity authority, citable content and measurement.

How long does AI SEO take to work?

Months, not days, because it rides on authority and trust building up across the web. Structural and content fixes can start changing how you are represented fairly quickly, but becoming a consistently cited source compounds over time. The brands that started early are already the defaults in their categories.

Can I measure whether AI is citing my business?

Yes, just not with classic rank trackers, which only see the blue links. You need tools built to monitor AI answers directly, such as Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit, Ahrefs Brand Radar or Profound, tracking where you are cited, where competitors are cited instead, and across which engines and queries. Add GA4 to see the sessions AI engines refer. Measuring it is what turns AI SEO from guesswork into a process.

Google Ads 2026 Bidding & Budgeting Updates Explained

Benjamin Paine — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 10:01:53 +0000

Google just changed how its bidding works.

And one part of it has a deadline.

Here is the short version: from 17 August, some of your best Google Ads campaigns could quietly start costing more. Not because you did anything wrong.

Because Google is closing a gap you have probably been benefiting from without realising.

If you run Google Ads, or pay someone to, this is the one to understand before August.

Let us break it down.

The change with a deadline: Bidding Target Optimisation

This is the one main aspect to act on… so let’s start here.

Right now, loads of budget-capped campaigns quietly beat their targets.

You set a Target CPA of $50.

But because the campaign is limited by budget, it has actually been pulling leads in at $30.

You have been getting a better result than you asked for.

You might not have even noticed.

From 17 August, Google is closing that gap.

For campaigns marked “Limited by budget” that use Target CPA or Target ROAS, performance will line up more closely with the target you set.

Google calls it more consistent and predictable.

Here is the catch.

If your capped campaigns have been over-delivering, your cost per lead could climb, or your ROAS could slip, back toward the number sitting in your settings.

It hits Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen and Travel campaigns.

And one thing to be clear on: Google will not touch your targets or budgets for you.

The shift happens automatically.

What you do about it is on you.

What to do about it

Before 17 August, go through every campaign that is Limited by budget and running Target CPA or Target ROAS.

For each one, you have three honest options.

Lock in the better result. If a capped campaign has been over-delivering and you want to keep that, lower the target to match what it is actually doing.

Set the Target CPA to the $30 it is really hitting, not the $50 you typed in six months ago. For most over-delivering campaigns, this is the move.

Keep your targets as they are. Happy to trade a bit of efficiency for the consistency Google is offering? Do nothing. Just make it a decision, not an accident.

Turn the budget up. A capped campaign that is beating its target is usually telling you there is more profitable volume out there. Lift the budget and go get it at your stated target, instead of leaving it boxed in.

Google is rolling out a Bid Target Adjustment Tool from 6 July to help, you will get a notification in your account.

It shows each campaign’s history and lets you apply new targets in a few clicks. That is your window. This kind of account hygiene is exactly what we handle as part of Google Ads management.

The other two changes are upside, not homework

The rest of the announcement is good news, no deadline attached.

Smart Bidding Exploration, expanded

This one lets you set a ROAS tolerance so your campaigns can chase conversions from searches they are not currently catching.

A controlled way to find new, profitable demand.

As of 15 June it is live in all Performance Max campaigns without product feeds, globally, with a beta rolling out to Shopping and feed-based PMax. Google says campaigns using it see an 18% lift in unique converting query categories and 19% more conversions on average. If growth is the goal, test it.

Promotion Mode (beta)

Got a sale, a launch, a peak season?

Promotion Mode lets you temporarily loosen your ROAS tolerance and add budget for that window, then ease back, without rebuilding the campaign. It is in beta for Search and Performance Max.

For retailers and anyone with seasonal spikes, this is a genuinely handy way to lean in hard when it counts.

And a name change

Small one. “Maximise conversions with a Target CPA” is now just Target CPA. “Maximise conversion value with a Target ROAS” is now Target ROAS. Same behaviour, clearer names. Update your reports if they still use the old labels.

Our take

Google is selling the big change as consistency. For some accounts, fair enough, that is welcome.

But be clear-eyed. If your capped campaigns have been over-delivering, this can quietly hand back some of that efficiency unless you act.

The worst outcome is sleepwalking into higher costs because nobody checked the targets before 17 August.

And here is the deeper bit.

All of this, the target optimisation, the exploration tolerance, the promotion boosts, is only as good as the conversion data underneath it. Automated bidding optimises toward the signals you feed it.

So clean tracking and accurate targets are what turn these changes into a win instead of a cost.

The accounts that come out ahead in August will be the ones that were actually managed. Not set and forgotten.

Want us to review your campaigns before 17 August, or just take the bidding off your plate? Talk to our Google Ads team, or see how we run performance marketing end to end.

Frequently asked questions

What is changing in Google Ads on 17 August 2026?

For campaigns that are Limited by budget and use Target CPA or Target ROAS, Google will deliver performance that lines up more closely with the target you set. Many of those campaigns currently beat their targets, so this can push cost per lead up, or ROAS down, toward your stated number unless you adjust.

Will Google change my targets or budgets automatically?

No. The performance shift is automatic, but Google will not change your targets or budgets for you. You decide: lower targets to lock in current performance, keep your targets, or lift the budget to scale.

What is the Bid Target Adjustment Tool?

A tool rolling out in Google Ads from 6 July 2026, flagged by a notification in your account. It shows each campaign’s history and lets you review and apply updated targets fast, ahead of 17 August.

What should I actually do before 17 August?

Go through every Limited by budget campaign on Target CPA or Target ROAS. For each, decide whether to lower the target to keep the better performance it has been delivering, keep the target, or raise the budget to scale. Do not leave it to chance.

What are Smart Bidding Exploration and Promotion Mode?

Two opportunity features from the same announcement. Smart Bidding Exploration lets you set a ROAS tolerance to catch new converting queries (now in PMax without feeds, with a beta for feed-based campaigns). Promotion Mode lets you temporarily boost ROAS tolerance and budget for peaks like sales, in beta for Search and Performance Max.

Bing Webmaster Tools 2026: Features, Benefits & AI Insights

Benjamin Paine — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 01:21:46 +0000

TL;DR

Bing Webmaster Tools just became the easiest free way to see whether AI is citing your business.

The June 2026 update added Intents (the intent behind citations), Topics (your citations grouped by theme), Citation Share (your share of citations for a query) and Compare (change over time), built on the AI Performance report that covers Copilot, Bing and partner AI.

It’s global and free, and on reporting depth it’s well ahead of Google’s new Search Console AI report, which is thinner (no query or click data) and only in a UK preview.

When we pulled our own data, Bing showed 15,152 AI citations across 478 queries and that we hold 65% of the citations for “Google Ads management companies Australia.” Beyond AI, Bing Webmaster Tools is a genuinely useful, underused free SEO platform (search performance, URL inspection, keyword research, backlinks, site scans). Bottom line: set it up, it takes minutes and it’s now the best free glimpse of your AI visibility.

Most Australian businesses set up Google Search Console and never give Bing a second thought. In 2026, that is a mistake, and Microsoft just made it a bigger one.

On 16 June, Bing Webmaster Tools added four new features to its AI Performance report: Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare.

Together they make Bing Webmaster Tools one of the only free, first-party tools that shows you whether AI is actually citing your business, and that is the question every business is now asking and almost nobody can answer.

Here is what Bing added, why it matters more than the logo suggests, how it leaves Google’s new reporting behind, and the full set of reasons every Australian business should have Bing Webmaster Tools set up.

First, the bigger picture: why Bing matters in 2026

Bing is not just Bing anymore. Bingbot feeds the Bing index and Microsoft Copilot, the AI assistant with hundreds of millions of monthly users, plus a set of partner AI experiences.

So when Bing reports on how your content appears in AI answers, it is reporting on a real and growing slice of the AI web, not a rounding error.

And measurement is the hard part of AI search. Classic rank trackers cannot see whether an AI answer cited you. Until recently, almost nothing could, for free. That is the gap Bing is now filling.

What Bing just added to the AI Performance report

The AI Performance report launched earlier in 2026 and answered one question: where is my content cited in AI-generated answers across Copilot, Bing and partner AI experiences. The four new features answer the deeper questions of why, what, how much and how it is changing.

Intents: the context behind a citation

Bing now classifies the queries that triggered your citations (it calls them grounding queries) into intent categories: Informational, Commercial, Navigational, Learn and Solve, Research, Creation, Local and more.

So instead of just seeing which queries cited you, you see the kind of need behind them.

An ecommerce site might find it is being cited mostly in commercial, comparison-style queries; an educator might find it surfaces in research and learning queries. That tells you which experiences AI is putting you in, and where to deepen content.

Topics: visibility by theme, not just keyword

AI systems reason in themes, not isolated keywords. Topics groups your grounding queries into thematic clusters, so “solar panels,” “solar energy efficiency” and “residential solar installation” might roll up into a Solar Energy topic.

You can finally see which subject areas are driving your AI citations, spot emerging areas of authority, and find topical gaps, in the same thematic way content teams actually plan.

Citation Share: how much of the answer space you own

Total citation counts tell you how often you appear.

Citation Share tells you how much of the citation space you hold for a given query: if a query produced ten citations across all sites and three were yours, your Citation Share is 30%.

It is the closest thing yet to a share-of-voice metric for AI answers. Bing is clear that it is observational, not a ranking or a competitive scoreboard, and it does not expose competitor domains, but it shows where your presence is strong and growing versus where it is fragmented across many sources.

Compare: how it is changing over time

Compare overlays a previous period on the current view, the last 30 days against the prior 30, or custom ranges, so you can see whether your AI citation activity is rising or falling, and tie shifts to content updates, seasonality or broader changes.

This is what turns a snapshot into a trend you can actually manage.

Why this matters for your business

We have been saying all year that the hard part of AI search is not the theory, it is the measurement. You cannot improve what you cannot see. Our own State of AI Search research exists because AI visibility was invisible to standard tools. Bing has now handed every business a free way to see part of it.

Used well, these reports tell you which themes AI already trusts you on, which intents you are winning, where your citation share is climbing, and where it is slipping. That is a content-strategy input you could not get for free a month ago. For any business serious about being cited in AI answers, it belongs in your monthly reporting now.

What it looks like in practice: our own AI data

We did not just read the announcement.

We pulled our own AI Performance data to see what it actually reveals, and the picture is genuinely useful.

In the latest period, Bing recorded 15,152 AI citations of our content across 478 grounding queries. We hold a 20% or greater share of the citation space on 173 of those queries, with a median citation share of around 16%.

That alone turns “we hope AI is citing us” into a measured number.

The Intents view showed that roughly 62% of those citations come from informational queries, with commercial and local intents, the ones closest to a sale, making up a smaller slice.

That is an immediately actionable signal: our educational content and free tools are doing the heavy lifting in AI answers, and lifting commercial-intent visibility is the clear opportunity.

The Topics view showed AI cites us most in Marketing and Advertising, Business and Public Relations, telling us exactly which themes AI already treats us as an authority on, and where our coverage is thinner.
And Citation Share surfaced the wins worth knowing. We hold roughly 65% of the AI citations for “Google Ads management companies Australia,” and strong share on terms like “digital marketing consultant” and “best Google Ads agencies Australia.”

A month ago, none of that was visible for free.

How this compares to Google (Bing is well ahead)

Google launched its own generative AI performance report in Search Console on 3 June 2026, covering AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover. It is a welcome first step, but as a reporting tool it is far thinner than Bing’s, and barely available.

Google’s report shows impressions, pages, countries and devices over time.

That is essentially it.

There is no query-level data, and no click data yet (Google says clicks are coming, with no date).

And as of now it is rolling out only to a subset of UK site owners, so most Australian businesses cannot even open it.

Bing, by contrast, gives you the grounding query that triggered the citation, the intent behind it, the topic cluster, your citation share, and a compare-over-time view, globally, today.

Put simply, Bing is telling you why and how much. Google is telling you, roughly, how often, in the UK.

To be fair to Google, its report covers the bigger surface.

AI Overviews and AI Mode reach far more people than Copilot, so even limited Google data is a window into the platform that matters most, and Google uniquely lets you opt your content in or out of grounding its AI features. It is early, and more metrics will come.

The full features and benefits of Bing Webmaster Tools

The AI report is the new headline, but Bing Webmaster Tools has been a genuinely useful, and underused, free SEO platform for years. What you get, and why it is worth having:

Search Performance. Impressions, clicks, queries and pages for your Bing traffic, the Bing equivalent of Search Console, and a second data source most competitors ignore.
URL Inspection and indexing. Check how Bing sees a page, and submit URLs for indexing. With IndexNow, you can push new and updated pages to Bing (and other participating engines) instantly rather than waiting to be crawled.
Site Explorer and Crawl Control. See how Bing crawls your site structure, and control crawl rate and behaviour, useful for larger or technically complex sites.
Free keyword research. Bing’s keyword tool gives real search-volume data at no cost, a handy cross-check against paid tools.
Backlinks report. A free view of your backlink profile and your competitors’, no subscription required.
SEO reports and site scan. Automated on-page SEO checks that flag technical and on-page issues across your site.
Sitemaps and robots testing. Submit sitemaps and test your robots file, the housekeeping that keeps you properly indexed.
AI Performance, now with Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare. The new layer that shows how you appear across Copilot and Bing’s AI answers.

The overarching benefit: it is free, it takes minutes to set up, it gives you a second independent data source beyond Google, and it is now the easiest free way to glimpse your AI search visibility. For a tool that costs nothing, the return is hard to beat.

How to get started

Setup is quick, and you do not have to start from scratch.

Create a free account at Bing Webmaster Tools with a Microsoft, Google or email login.
Add and verify your site, or import it directly from Google Search Console in a couple of clicks, which carries your sites and sitemaps across.
Submit your sitemap and, ideally, set up IndexNow so new pages get picked up fast.
Once data builds, open the AI Performance report and explore Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare for your site.

Final thoughts

Bing Webmaster Tools has become one of the most useful free tools in an Australian marketer’s kit, and the June update is the reason to finally pay attention. It will not replace your Google reporting or a dedicated AI-visibility platform, but it is free, fast to set up, and it answers a question that mattered to no one two years ago and matters to everyone now: is AI citing my business?

For more on the measurement side, see our guide to measuring AI search visibility, and how we approach AI SEO and SEO more broadly.

If you want help reading those reports, or a fuller picture of your visibility across Google and AI search, run a free AI visibility audit or talk to our team.

Frequently asked questions

Is Bing Webmaster Tools free?

Yes, completely free. You create an account, verify your site (or import it from Google Search Console), and you have access to all of its reporting, including the new AI Performance features.

What are the new AI features in Bing Webmaster Tools?

Four, added on 16 June 2026 in preview: Intents (the intent category behind queries that cite you), Topics (your citations grouped into thematic clusters), Citation Share (your share of all citations for a query), and Compare (citation activity over time). They build on the AI Performance report that launched earlier in 2026.

Does this show my visibility in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews?

Not directly. Bing’s report covers Microsoft Copilot, Bing and select partner AI experiences. That is a meaningful slice of the AI web, but not Google’s AI Overviews or ChatGPT specifically, so treat it as one view and pair it with other measurement for the full picture.

What is a grounding query?

In AI answers, grounding is the source material the system uses to support and cite its response. A grounding query is the query context Bing associates with a citation of your content. The new Intents and Topics features classify those grounding queries by intent and theme.

Is Google’s Search Console AI report as good as Bing’s?

Not yet. Google’s generative AI performance report (launched 3 June 2026) shows impressions, pages, countries and devices for AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover, but no query-level data and no clicks yet, and it is rolling out only to a subset of UK site owners. Bing offers grounding queries, intents, topics, citation share and compare, globally, today. Google covers the bigger surface, so use both, but on reporting depth Bing is well ahead right now.

Should an Australian business bother with Bing if most traffic comes from Google?

Yes. Bing’s audience skews higher-value, it costs nothing to set up, it gives you a second independent data source, and it is now the easiest free way to see part of your AI search visibility. Even if Bing is a small share of your search traffic, the AI insight alone is worth the few minutes it takes.

Google’s June 2026 Spam Update: Early Signs

Benjamin Paine — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 02:50:20 +0000

TL;DR

Google launched the June 2026 spam update on 24 June. It’s global, runs through SpamBrain, and is the second spam update of the year.

Crucially, it does not target link spam or site reputation abuse, which points it at content and technical spam, above all scaled content abuse (spun, mass-produced pages).

It’s very early, the rollout may take days, but in the first 24 to 48 hours we’re already seeing templated location-page networks shed rankings, including former number-one terms. Spam updates are enforcement, not a reshuffle, so recovery means fixing the problem and waiting months.

If your content is original and useful, you’re likely fine. If you sit on spun location or thin AI pages, audit and fix them now.

Mark 24 June in Search Console and don’t judge rankings until the rollout completes.

Google started rolling out the June 2026 spam update on 24 June. It is the second spam update of the year, it is global, and it is live right now.

This is a same-week, Australian read on it. What the update is, what it targets, the very early signals we are seeing here in the first day or two, and what an Australian business should actually do about it. We will update this as the rollout completes.

A note on timing: this is early. As we write, the update is barely a day old and Google says it may take several more days to finish. Rankings move around a lot during a rollout. Treat the early signals below as field notes, not as our usual research, and not as proof of cause and effect.

What Google actually announced

Google logged the update on its Search Status Dashboard at 09:03 PDT on 24 June 2026 and called it a “normal spam update.” It applies globally, across all languages and regions, and rolls out through SpamBrain, Google’s AI spam-detection system. No new spam policies were announced with it.

Two details are doing a lot of work. Google has confirmed this update does not target link spam, and does not target the site reputation abuse policy. By elimination, that points it at the rest of the spam policies, the content and technical ones: scaled content abuse, cloaking, doorway pages, expired-domain abuse and auto-generated spam. In plain terms, this looks like a content-quality enforcement, not a links pass.

What a spam update is, in 30 seconds

It helps to know the difference between this and a core update, because people confuse them every time.

A core update re-evaluates quality across the whole web. It rewards and demotes, and you can recover on your own as Google reassesses you. A spam update is enforcement. It is Google pushing an upgraded version of its spam detection live to catch and penalise specific policy violations. It demotes or removes, and recovery means actually fixing the violation, then waiting, often months, for the systems to re-trust the site. It is less about reshuffling rankings and more about cleaning up the index.

So if you get hit by a spam update, this is not a wait-and-see. It is a find-it-and-fix-it.

The early signs in Australia (and the big caveat)

Here is what we have been watching in the first 24 to 48 hours. Again: it is early, it is directional, and we are not claiming Google’s update caused any single movement.

We track a number of Australian agency and business sites that run large, templated location-page networks. You know the pattern: the same service page copied across a dozen towns, with the city name swapped in and not much else changed. Since the update began, several of those sites have shed rankings, including terms they held at position one.

And on some of those pages the templating is not subtle. We have seen a Brisbane page serving images still named and tagged for Adelaide, a city-marketing page sharing a healthcare stock image, and “local” copy that is plainly the same boilerplate with the suburb pasted in. That is the signature of pages mass-produced to rank, rather than written for a real local audience.

We are not naming anyone, and one day of rank-tracker data during a live rollout is noisy. But the pattern is worth flagging: templated, scaled location pages losing visibility the moment a scaled-content spam update starts is exactly what you would expect if the two are connected. We will know more as the dust settles.

Why this matters more in Australia than people think

A huge share of Australian service businesses, and the agencies they hire, sit on exactly this kind of content: spun location pages for every city they would like to rank in, near-duplicate industry pages where only the noun changes, and thin, mass-produced blog posts. For years it worked well enough. The risk profile just changed.

It also lands in a year where Google has widened what counts as spam. In May 2026 it formally extended its spam policies to cover manipulating AI Overviews and AI Mode, the first time gaming AI answers was named directly. The direction is consistent: scaled, low-value content built to rank, including inside AI answers, is increasingly in the firing line. That is the same shift our own State of AI Search research has been tracking all year.

What Australian businesses should do right now

If your content is original and genuinely useful, the honest answer is: probably nothing, beyond watching. If you have leaned on scaled or templated content, here is the practical playbook.

Mark the date. Annotate 24 June in Google Search Console so you can isolate this window later. Do not judge anything from data collected mid-rollout, positions are still moving.
Do not panic-react. Comparing rankings during a live rollout produces junk signals. Wait until the rollout completes and you have several clean days of data, then compare against before 24 June.
Audit for scaled and thin content. Look hard at your location and industry pages. If two of your city pages are the same copy with the town swapped, that is the exact profile this update targets. Find them before Google does.
Fix or consolidate. Either make each page genuinely unique and locally useful, or consolidate weak near-duplicates into one strong page and redirect. A smaller set of real pages beats a big set of spun ones.
Shift to information gain. Original data, real client results, a genuine point of view, the things only you can publish. That is what survives every spam and core update, and what gets cited in AI answers too.

And set expectations on recovery. If you are hit and you fix it, Google’s systems can take months to re-trust the site. There is no overnight bounce-back. The time to clean up scaled content is before an update reaches it, not after.

The bottom line, for now

It is too early to call winners and losers with any confidence, and we will not pretend otherwise. But the early direction is consistent with everything Google has said this update is about, and with where search has been heading all year: thin, scaled, manufactured content is losing ground, and original, trustworthy content is the safe place to stand.

If you have been meaning to clean up a sprawl of spun location pages, this is your prompt. Not because of one day of rankings, but because the platform has been moving this way for two years and just took another step.

Worried your site sits on the wrong side of this? Run a free visibility audit, or talk to our SEO team about auditing your content before the rollout finishes.

How Much Does Digital Marketing Agency Cost in Australia?

Benjamin Paine — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:33:56 +0000

Digital marketing in Australia typically costs between $1,000 and $4,000 per month per channel for small to medium businesses, based on DNHQ’s June 2026 audit of 140 Australian agencies.

Published entry prices for full-service agencies start around $500/month for SEO, $495/month for social media management, $400/month for Google Ads management, and $1,295 for a website project, but most agencies charge considerably more, and 78% don’t publish their prices at all.

Service	Average advertised entry	Median advertised entry	Typical SME range (advertised)	Upper-tier published solutions
SEO (monthly retainer)	$1,496/mo	$1,470/mo	$1,200–$2,500/mo	$5,000+/mo
Google Ads management	$1,391/mo	$1,250/mo	$1,200–$3,500/mo + ad spend	$6,000+/mo
Web design (project)	$8,404	$4,975	$2,500–$15,000	$50,000+
Social media management (organic)	$1,219/mo	$960/mo	$950–$2,500/mo	$7,500+/mo
Paid social marketing (ads mgmt)	$1,221/mo	$1,200/mo	$1,200–$2,500/mo + ad spend	$3,500+/mo

Benchmarks exclude ultra-budget productised offers (SEO under $500/month; ads and social under $400/month; websites under $1,000). Those exist from as little as $99 – $330/month but are a different product class: templated, volume-delivered, and minimally customised. See methodology.

Source: DNHQ Australian Digital Marketing Price Index, published pricing of 140 Australian agencies audited June 2026. Prices AUD; GST treatment varies (see below).

Why you can't find this answer anywhere else

Here’s the uncomfortable truth our research uncovered: of 411 agency service lines we audited across 140 Australian agencies, 78% publish no pricing whatsoever.

Only 8% publish a genuine rate card.

The rest gate their prices behind “free strategy sessions”, budget-bracket enquiry forms, and downloadable brochures that ask for your email first.

That’s why every “how much does digital marketing cost” article you’ve read is vague.

The data didn’t exist, so we built it.

This article is based on the published pricing and published inclusions of 140 Australian agencies across SEO, Google Ads, web design and social media, collected June 2026.

The methodology is at the bottom; the numbers are real, recent, and Australian.

How much does SEO cost in Australia?

SEO in Australia costs an average of $1,496 per month at published entry level (median $1,470/month), with advertised retainers spanning $500 to $5,000 per month across the 38 qualifying monthly from-prices in our audit.

Most full-service agencies advertise entry prices of $1,200–$2,500 per month.

Ultra-budget productised SEO exists from $200–$499/month but is a different product (capped keywords, templated content, volume delivery).

Notably, the cheapest published prices cluster in regional Australia, while capital-city agencies are the most likely to publish nothing at all.

What the published market actually looks like:

Tier	Monthly price	What’s typically included (where stated)
Budget / productised	$549–$999	Up to 10–30 keywords, 2–4 blogs/mo, basic links, monthly report
Standard SME	$1,500–$2,500	40–75 keywords tracked, content optimisation, link building, GBP/local, monthly report + strategy session
Growth	$2,500–$4,000	75–100 keywords, more content + stronger links, technical work, dedicated specialist
Competitive/enterprise	$5,000+	Custom scope; most agencies at this level publish nothing

Three things the price tags don’t tell you:

The same dollar buys wildly different amounts. Among agencies that publish both prices and quantities, a tracked keyword costs anywhere from $30/month to $99/month. Always ask what the number includes.

Hours are almost never disclosed. Only a handful of Australian agencies state how many hours of work your retainer buys (where stated: roughly 12–15 hours at ~$1,900/mo).

If an agency won’t tell you the hours, you can’t compare quotes.

AI/GEO optimisation is now claimed by half of Australian SEO agencies, and quantified by none. 49% of the SEO providers we audited now sell some form of AI-search optimisation.

Not one attaches a defined deliverable to it. If you’re paying for it, ask what “it” is.

How much does Google Ads management cost in Australia?

Google Ads management in Australia costs an average of $1,391 per month at published entry level (median $1,250/month), with qualifying fees spanning $400 to $6,000+ per month, plus your ad spend (always billed separately).

Most published SME packages sit between $1,200 and $3,500 per month.

Setup fees, where charged, run $499–$2,000.

Flat-fee budget operators exist from $290–$330/month; at that price expect a capped campaign count and minimal optimisation hours.

The four fee models you’ll encounter (only 48% of agencies disclose which one they use):

Flat monthly fee: the most common disclosed model ($550–$6,000+/mo)
Weekly fee tiers: e.g. $249–$499/week pegged to minimum daily ad spends
Percentage of ad spend: typically appears at higher spend levels (e.g. 15% of spend)
Unit/hours-based: pre-purchased blocks (e.g. ~$135/unit, 10 units/month)

The number that matters more than the fee: minimum ad spend.

Only 22% of agencies state one, but where stated they range from $500/month to $500/day ($15,000+/month). Your real monthly cost is fee + spend: an advertised “$300/month” management fee on a $3,000/month spend requirement is a $3,300/month commitment.

Buyer’s checklist from the data: ask the fee model, ask the minimum spend, confirm you own the ad account (some agencies build in theirs), and confirm whether ad creative is included.

Landing pages are excluded from most base packages and sold at up to $1,000/page.

How much does a website cost in Australia?

A professionally built website in Australia costs an average of $8,404 at published entry level, but the median is $4,975, because a handful of premium builds ($15,000–$50,000+) drag the average up.

Qualifying advertised projects run $1,295 to $50,000+, and below the $1,000 line sits a separate template/subscription market ($499–$995 builds, $25–$399/month website subscriptions).

If you’re a typical small business, the median is your better benchmark.

The clusters in the published data:

Tier	Project price	What defines it
Budget template	$499–$1,299	Template design, 5–15 pages, hosting bundled, client provides content
Small business	$2,500–$5,400	Kit/theme-based, ~4–7 pages, basic SEO setup, some training
Mid-market custom	$5,000–$15,000	Custom design, CMS (usually WordPress/Shopify), copywriting optional
Premium custom	$15,000–$40,000+	UX research, user testing, custom code, accessibility standards
Enterprise	$50,000+	Headless/DXP platforms, integrations, milestone delivery

The two questions that cause every web project dispute (and that almost nobody answers up front): how many pages (stated by just 11% of agencies) and how many revision rounds (stated by 29%; quantified by a handful at 2–3 rounds).

Get both in writing before you sign.

Also budget for the after-launch reality: care/maintenance plans run $49–$300+/month at the SME level (and up to $2,200 – $9,900/month for managed performance retainers), and “12 months free hosting” style inclusions exist but are rare.

How much does social media marketing cost in Australia?

Social media management (organic posting, content and community) in Australia costs an average of $1,219 per month at published entry level (median $960/month), running $495–$2,450 per month depending on posting volume.

Paid social marketing (Meta/TikTok ads management) averages $1,221 per month (median $1,200), running $695–$2,500 per month plus ad spend.

These are different products with different price logic and most agencies sell them separately, though a small hybrid market bundles posting and ads into one $650–$900/month fee.

Below the $400 line sits a productised feed market ($99–$300/month for templated posting), which is a different product class. Fewer agencies publish social pricing than any other service.

What the posting-cadence tiers look like in the published data:

Posts per week	Typical monthly price	Notes
~3 posts/wk (12–13/mo)	$275–$1,440	Cheapest tiers reuse one post across 2 platforms
4–5 posts/wk (16–20/mo)	$469–$2,700	Mid tiers add stories/reels, more platforms
Paid social mgmt	$300–$2,500 entry	Creative often costs extra; check minimum spends

The catch most buyers miss: community management (actually responding to comments and messages) is almost never included.

Only ~1 in 3 agencies even mention it, and at several it’s a paid add-on. If “managing our socials” means answering your customers, confirm it’s in scope.

Same for photo/video: usually an add-on or top-tier perk, and several agencies require a separate “boosting” budget of $300–$500/month paid by you.

The hidden costs nobody puts on the pricing page

From auditing 88 agencies, the recurring traps:

GST ambiguity. Fewer than 1 in 10 agencies state whether prices include GST. Where stated, prices are almost always exclusive, so add 10% to everything you see. (Every price in this article is as published; ask every agency “inc or ex GST?”)
Setup fees ($499–$1,999 for ads; $550+ onboarding; $900 campaign setup), often revealed only at proposal stage.
“No lock-in” with an asterisk. “No lock-in contracts” is the most-published commercial term in Australian marketing: more agencies publish their contract stance than their price. But look closer: “no lock-in” frequently coexists with a 3-, 6- or 12-month “initial period”, “sprint” or “recommended minimum”. One agency we audited displays a “No Lock-In Contracts” badge on the same site as a 3-month-minimum FAQ.
Media spend is never included. Ad budgets go to Google/Meta on top of every management fee quoted here.
The $X/day decoy. “$5–10/day” figures on agency pages are your ad spend, not their fee. Three agencies in our audit present platform costs where buyers would expect pricing.

What should YOUR business budget?

Pulling the channels together, realistic all-in monthly budgets (fees + minimum viable ad spend, ex GST):

Local service business, one channel: $1,500–$3,000/mo (e.g. local SEO, or Google Ads with modest spend)
Established SME, two channels: $3,000–$6,000/mo (the bracket most full-service agencies design for, and consistent with what agencies themselves recommend: several audited agencies state $2,000–$5,000/mo working minimums)
Growth-stage, multi-channel: $6,000–$15,000/mo
One-off website: $2,500–$15,000 project + $50–$300/mo care

Worth knowing as you budget: our companion research found Australian search demand fell 32–44% across every capital city in 2026 while AI Overviews now appear on ~37–38% of results, which means every dollar should be working both classic search and AI visibility. See the State of AI Search →

Agency vs in-house: what does each actually cost?

The comparison most businesses run in their head (“for that retainer I could just hire someone”) deserves real numbers.

A single in-house digital marketing specialist costs roughly $105,000 – $130,000 a year all-in: a $85,000–$100,000 salary (SEEK’s 2026 average for the role), plus 12% superannuation, leave loading, payroll on-costs, recruitment, and the tool stack agencies amortise across clients (SEO platforms, reporting software and ad tools run $300–$800+/month on their own). That’s $8,700–$10,800 per month for one generalist, before any ad spend.

Against the benchmarks in this article, the same money buys two to four specialist channel retainers (e.g. SEO at ~$1,500/mo + Google Ads at ~$1,250/mo + paid social at ~$1,200/mo ≈ $4,000/mo) with senior specialists in each discipline, no leave or turnover risk, and tools included.

The honest counterpoints: an in-house hire gives you dedication, brand immersion and unlimited iterations that no retainer matches, and one generalist can’t be a senior technical SEO, media buyer, designer and copywriter at once, which is the actual trade. The pattern that works for most SMEs in the data’s $3,000–$6,000/month bracket is hybrid: a marketing coordinator in-house owning brand and approvals, with channel execution bought as specialist retainers.

What we charge

We’ve spent this entire article telling you 78% of agencies won’t publish prices. Here’s ours:

Service	DNHQ pricing
SEO	from $1,797/mo*
Google Ads management	from $1,497/mo*
Social media marketing	from $1,497/mo*
Website builds	from $5,000*

*Starting prices: your exact fee depends on scope, competition and inclusions, and is itemised line-by-line in every proposal. No lock-in contracts.

Methodology

Pricing data: published prices, packages and inclusions from the websites of 180 Australian digital marketing agencies across SEO, Google Ads/PPC management, web design and social media marketing, collected June 2026 (DNHQ Australian Digital Marketing Price Index). The transparency statistic (78%) is computed on a 140-agency representative sample drawn from independent directories and roundups across 20 Australian cities; price benchmarks additionally include a 40-agency oversample of price-publishing agencies found via search. Benchmark figures exclude ultra-budget productised offers (SEO under $500/month entry; ads and social under $400/month; web projects under $1,000) as a distinct product class; their existence and price points are noted in the text. Figures are advertised/published entry prices, not invoices. Quotation permitted with attribution to DNHQ Research.

What Does an SEO Agency Actually Do in 2026?

Benjamin Paine — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 02:37:47 +0000

Most articles answering this question hand you a tidy list of services and stop there.

This is not one of those.

After running more than 300+ SEO campaigns across Australia, here is what a good SEO agency actually does, day to day, and the part almost every explainer still gets wrong: the job changed in 2026.

Google now answers a large share of searches itself, before anyone clicks a single result.

An agency still selling nothing but “we’ll get you to number one” is selling a service that, on its own, no longer does what it used to.

So this is the honest version.

What the work really involves, how we do it, and what separates an agency built for search in 2026 from one still working off the 2021 playbook.

First, what SEO actually is now

SEO, search engine optimisation, has always meant improving how visible your website is in search.

For two decades that came down to one thing: rank high in Google’s organic results so people click through to you.

That is still half the job.

The other half is new.

Google now answers a large share of searches itself, with an AI Overview that summarises the web at the top of the page.

We ran the numbers: across 116,918 Australian search results we analysed, an AI Overview appeared on 37.8% of commercial searches.

On informational queries it is far higher. The click you used to earn by ranking is increasingly satisfied before it happens.

So modern SEO is two jobs at once.

Rank in the organic results, and become the source the AI cites when it writes the answer.

A good agency does both.

Most still only do the first, because their tools and their thinking were built for a results page that is quietly disappearing.

What a good SEO agency actually does

The work breaks into the same broad areas it always has, plus one that did not exist three years ago. Here is each, and how we approach it.

1. Technical SEO, the foundation

Before a single piece of content goes live, your site has to be something Google can crawl, understand and trust.

That means site speed, mobile performance, a logical structure, clean indexation, and structured data.

We start every engagement with a full technical audit, because a brilliant content strategy sitting on a broken foundation ranks for nothing.

Fix the plumbing first.

2. Keyword and intent research

This is where most of the value is won or lost, and where the biggest mistake gets made.

The highest-volume keyword is rarely the one that pays.

We have learned across hundreds of accounts that the terms worth targeting are the ones carrying real buying intent, often lower in volume and far higher in value.

We map keywords to what the searcher actually wants and what stage of the decision they are at, not to a vanity traffic number.

3. On-page optimisation

Titles, headings, internal linking, page structure and the on-page content itself, all aligned to the intent behind the query.

Done properly, this is quiet, unglamorous work that compounds.

It is also where a lot of “SEO” begins and ends at weaker agencies. For us it is table stakes, not the whole service.

4. Content that earns rankings and citations

This is the area that has changed most.

The generic “ultimate guide to X” that agencies churned out for a decade is now the single most exposed type of content there is.

Our research found that when a blog post ranks first for a query, an AI Overview sits above it on the large majority of searches, summarising the answer so the user never clicks. Generic explainer content is now AI training data, not a traffic driver.

So we build content differently: original data, a genuine point of view, real depth, and the structure that makes it citable.

The goal is content the AI cannot simply summarise away, content good enough that the AI quotes you as the source.

5. Off-page authority and links

Google still rewards being talked about.

Earned links from real publications, genuine digital PR, and authority built through expertise, not links bought from a marketplace.

The shortcut approaches that some agencies still quietly rely on are the ones most likely to get a site into trouble.

We build authority the slow, durable way, because it is the only way that survives an algorithm update.

6. Local SEO

For any business that serves a place, this is where a lot of the real money is.

Google Business Profile optimisation, local citations, reviews, and Map Pack visibility.

There is a 2026 bonus here too: our data shows that local, suburb-qualified searches are the surface AI is least likely to answer itself, so they remain one of the cleanest, most defensible places to compete. We lean into that deliberately.

7. AI search visibility, the new pillar

This is the job that did not exist three years ago.

Tracking whether AI engines cite you, for which queries, and how you compare to competitors, then optimising to win those citations.

Classic rank tracking does not capture any of it. This is the gap most agencies have not closed, and it is the one we built a tool specifically to solve.

8. Measurement and reporting

The last job is proving it worked, in terms that matter.

We report on leads, conversions and revenue from organic search, not just rankings and sessions.

A ranking is an input.

A booked enquiry is the result.

If your current reports are full of traffic graphs and light on leads, you are being shown activity, not outcomes.

How we actually run it

The list above is the what. Here is the how, the process every Digital Nomads HQ client moves through. Discovery. We start with your business, not your website. Your best customers, your highest-value services, your real goals. The strategy is built backwards from revenue, not forwards from a keyword list. Technical foundation. We audit and fix the technical issues holding the site back, so everything that follows has somewhere solid to stand. Content and optimisation. We build and optimise the pages that match real buyer intent, the commercial and local pages that convert, and the authority content that earns rankings and AI citations alike. Measure, learn, improve. SEO is never finished, because Google never stops changing. We track results, including AI visibility, feed what we learn back into the plan, double down on what works, and adapt as the search engine shifts under everyone’s feet.

The 2026 difference most agencies are still missing

Here is the uncomfortable truth about a lot of the industry right now.

The search results page has fundamentally changed, and most agencies are still selling against the old one.

We have the data on exactly how much it has changed.

Beyond the 37.8% of commercial searches now carrying an AI Overview, our Australian search demand study found that local-service search demand fell 38% in early 2026, as AI began absorbing the searches that used to be typed, repeated and clicked.

The ground has moved.

An agency that promises “we’ll get you to number one” without a word about AI visibility is promising a 2021 outcome. Ranking first underneath an AI answer that already satisfied the searcher is a hollow win.

The job in 2026 is to be inside the answer, to defend the transactional and local searches AI cannot resolve, and to measure visibility in a way that reflects how people actually search now.

If your agency cannot talk fluently about that, they are optimising for a web that is disappearing.

Our edge: Amalfi

This is where we do something almost no other Australian agency can.

The standard rank-tracking tools, the ones most agencies quietly rebrand and resell, were built to measure the old results page.

They cannot see AI Overviews, and they cannot tell you whether AI is citing you or your competitor.

So we built our own.

Amalfi is our proprietary AI-search intelligence platform.

It scans where AI cites you, where it cites your competitors instead, and exactly what to fix, live.

It turns the one thing every other agency is guessing at, your visibility inside AI search, into something measurable and actionable.

That matters for a simple reason.

You cannot improve what you cannot see.

Most agencies are flying blind on AI search because their tooling was built for a different era. Amalfi was built for this one, which means our clients get a true picture of how they show up in AI answers, not just a rankings report that ignores half of what is happening on the page.

How to tell a good SEO agency from a weak one

If you are choosing an agency, a few questions cut through the noise fast:

Do they measure your visibility in AI search, or only classic rankings?

Do they report on leads and revenue, or just traffic and positions?

Do they have their own data and tools, or are they reselling the same dashboards as everyone else?

Can they show real results for businesses like yours, with named outcomes?

If the answers are thin, you are looking at an agency working off the old playbook.

The search results page has changed too much for that to be enough.

The Bottom Line

A good SEO agency in 2026 still does the fundamentals: technical foundations, smart keyword and intent research, on-page work, real content, earned authority and local visibility. What separates the good from the dated is whether they have absorbed what AI has done to search, and whether they can measure and win the new visibility that comes with it.

That is the job we have built Digital Nomads HQ around: 300-plus SEO campaigns, 97% client retention, 25,000-plus page-one rankings, and the only proprietary AI-search platform of its kind in the Australian market. We do the old job properly, and the new one most agencies have not started.

Want to see where you actually stand? Run a free AI visibility audit powered by Amalfi, or talk to our SEO team about what is possible.

Content Marketing Strategy: 2026 Guide + Free Builder

Benjamin Paine — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 06:52:40 +0000

Most content marketing guides are still teaching the old playbook.

Publish, rank, collect the clicks.

The trouble is the clicks are drying up.

We tracked more than 80 service keywords across six Australian markets and 21 industries, month by month.

Demand climbed through 2024, peaked in late 2025, then fell 38% in 2026. None of the six markets escaped it.

That fall tracks almost exactly with Google rolling out AI Overviews across Australian search.

The answer now sits at the top of the results, so the questions people used to type, read and click on get handled on the spot.

Which means a content marketing strategy in 2026 has to do two things at once. Earn attention when the click never comes, and become the source the AI quotes.

This guide gives you a nine-step framework to do both, plus a free template and a tool that drafts your strategy in minutes.

What is a content marketing strategy?

A content marketing strategy is your documented plan for using content to reach a specific audience and hit a business goal. In 2026, add one more job to the list: staying visible when AI answers the search for you.

Three terms get used as if they mean the same thing.

They do not.

Content marketing strategy is the why. Who you help, how, and why you are the one to do it.

Content strategy is the what and how. Creating, organising and governing the content itself.

Content plan is the when and who. The calendar, and the people who own each piece.

You do not need a 40-page document.

A strategy people actually use covers five things: a clear goal, a defined audience, a position (what you can say that nobody else can), the content and channels to deliver it, and a way to measure it.

Why you need a content marketing strategy in 2026

The old reasons still apply.

A documented strategy ties content to revenue instead of guesswork.

It wins buy-in from the people who hold the budget.

It stops you publishing for the sake of publishing.

Study after study finds the same thing: teams with a documented strategy outperform the ones working on instinct, and feel less stretched doing it.

Then there is the reason nobody was talking about two years ago.

Visibility no longer equals traffic.

When an AI Overview answers a question, you can be cited inside that answer.

You get seen, credited and trusted, with no click attached.

And if you are not the source the model pulls from, you are invisible even when you technically rank on page one.

A 2026 strategy is built to win the citation, not just the position.

The 2026 shift: AI search, GEO and the content that gets eaten

Before the how-to, look at the ground you are building on, because it has shifted under everyone. Two pieces of our own Australian research show how far.

In our State of AI Search study we captured 116,918 live search results across 18 industries and six cities. 37.8% of commercial Australian searches now trigger a Google AI Overview.

More than a third of the time, the answer shows up before anyone clicks a result, and across the study that came to roughly 387,000 AI citations.

Our Australian Search Demand study tells the second half.

Local-service search volume fell 38% in 2026, and the categories that fell hardest were the research-heavy ones: lawyers down 56%, mortgage brokers 47%, web design 40%. Those are exactly the questions an AI Overview can settle in a single box.

This is where it gets uncomfortable for content marketers.

The classic how-to article, the ultimate guide, the what-is-X explainer: that is exactly the content AI now absorbs and summarises. Publish it in 2026 and you have mostly written training data for the answer box. You have not given anyone a reason to visit you.

So the bar has moved, and it moved fast.

Content that an AI can summarise in two lines is now a waste of budget.

What earns its place is the content AI cannot fully replace or has to cite: first-hand experience, original data, a genuine point of view, and the transactional or local searches where someone still has to click.

That is the thinking behind generative engine optimisation (GEO), and it runs through every step below. The rule is simple enough: publish less, and publish what only you can.

How to build a content marketing strategy (9 steps)

1. Set SMART goals

Start with the one outcome that matters most, and make it Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. “Grow organic leads 30% by Q4” beats “get more traffic”, because every later decision then has to earn its place.

Common goals, with a number attached: brand awareness (branded-search volume up 50% in six months), lead generation (40 qualified enquiries a month), authority (cited in AI answers for your 10 priority queries), sales (25% year-on-year revenue from organic), retention (cut churn 15%).

Pick one primary goal and at most two to support it. Everything cannot be the priority.

2. Research your audience and map the buyer journey

Go deeper than age, location and job title. In an AI-search world the questions your audience asks are the product, because those questions are what the engines now answer. Build one or two researched personas with real roles, real pains, the actual words they use, and where they look. Pull from your sales-call transcripts, your analytics and customer interviews, not assumptions.

Then map content to the buyer journey, because a strategy that serves one stage only leaks revenue:

Top of funnel (awareness): the problem-aware searcher. Guides, explainers, original research, short video.
Middle of funnel (consideration): comparing options. Comparisons, case studies, webinars, how-tos.
Bottom of funnel (decision): ready to act. Service pages, pricing guidance, testimonials, demos.

Most businesses over-invest at the top and starve the middle and bottom.

Fix that on purpose.

3. Define your positioning, brand story and voice

This is the step most tactical guides skip, and it is the one that decides whether your content is forgettable.

Before a single topic, decide what you can say that competitors cannot: your point of view, your proof (data, results, credentials) and the through-line that makes your content recognisably yours.

It matters more under AI search, not less.

Generative engines cite sources they understand and trust as entities, so a clear and consistent voice, a real named author, and demonstrable first-hand experience, the signals behind E-E-A-T, are now ranking and citation factors.

Anonymous, me-too content is the first thing a model skips.

4. Choose your 3 to 5 content pillars

Pillars are the core themes you want to be known for.

Pick three to five, no more, where your expertise, your audience’s interests and your commercial goals overlap.

For a digital agency, pillars might be SEO, AI search, paid media, and web or CRO. Each pillar becomes a hub, with cluster content answering the specific questions beneath it, all interlinked.

There is a reason for this beyond tidiness.

Google now reads content as topic clusters, not isolated pages.

Depth across an interconnected set of pages signals real authority, and that same interlinking improves your odds of being cited in AI answers. Pillars are how you build authority on purpose instead of by accident.

5. Do topic and keyword research by intent

Find the specific topics under each pillar.

Use a keyword tool (Semrush, Ahrefs or Google Keyword Planner) to gauge search volume, difficulty and intent, meaning what the searcher actually wants: to learn, to compare, or to buy.

Then add the 2026 filter most guides miss. Ask which queries an AI Overview already answers in full, and which still need a click.

With AI Overviews on 37.8% of commercial searches, this is now the single most important call you make.

Weight your calendar toward the click-worthy topics (transactional, local, opinion-led and experience-driven) and toward topics where you have first-hand data to add.

6. Choose your content types and formats

Match formats to your audience and your goal. The core menu: blog posts and guides, video (still the highest-engagement format in 2026 across YouTube, Reels and LinkedIn), email, podcasts, webinars, case studies, infographics and social.

Then add the two modern types that actually survive AI search:

Answer content. Pages built as direct, citable answers: the question as a heading, the answer in the first sentence or two, real numbers to back it. This is how you get pulled into AI Overviews instead of summarised out of them.
Original research. Your own data. It is the single best asset for earning links and AI citations, and almost none of your competitors have it.

Do not spread across ten formats.

Pick the two or three your audience actually consumes, and do them properly.

7. Plan distribution and promotion

Great content that nobody sees is not a strategy. It is a diary. Plan how each piece reaches your audience across three buckets:

Owned: your site, email list and SEO. The foundation, because it compounds.
Earned: digital PR, guest articles, podcast appearances, and the backlinks original research attracts. For most Australian businesses this is the biggest under-used lever, and the one that earns the authority AI engines reward.
Paid: Google Ads, Meta and LinkedIn to put your best pieces in front of the right audience faster.

Match channels to where your audience already is. Pick two and go deep. Six shallow ones will not move anything.

8. Build your calendar, workflow and team

Put your prioritised topics into a calendar with an owner, content type, status and due date.

Consistency beats sporadic bursts.

But a calendar on its own is not a system.

Define the engine behind it: who briefs, writes, edits, optimises and publishes, and to what standard.

Set your cadence honestly.

Promise two strong pieces a month and deliver them.

That will do more than eight thin ones you abandon by March. Document the strategy and share it, so freelancers, in-house staff and any agency are working to the same brief.

9. Audit, measure and optimise

A strategy does not end at “publish”.

Track your goal metric, organic traffic and conversions.

Then add the measurement the old playbooks omit: are you being cited in AI Overviews and AI answers for the queries that matter?

Classic rank tracking no longer sees what happens above the organic results, so treat AI citation as the new page one.

Tie content to pipeline and revenue with attribution in GA4 and Search Console so you can defend the budget.
Set KPIs by goal.

Awareness maps to branded search and impressions, leads to conversions and cost per lead, authority to citations and backlinks.

Run a content audit twice a year: find your winners and refresh them (recency is now a real AI-citation signal), prune or consolidate the dead weight, and repurpose the best pieces into video, social and email so one strong idea earns its keep five times over.

Then re-baseline your demand assumptions, because the curve is still moving.

Common mistakes to avoid

Publishing the content AI eats. How-to explainers and “ultimate guides” are exactly what AI Overviews absorb. Lead with citable answers, real numbers and first-hand experience instead.
Optimising for demand that no longer converts. Forecasts built on 2025 volumes are too high. Plan against the current curve.
Skipping distribution. If you spend 80% on creation and 20% on promotion, flip it.
No pillars, no owner, no measurement. A strategy that is not structured and run is just a document.
Treating AI search as a future problem. It is already on 37.8% of commercial Australian results. It is a now problem.

Build your strategy with DNHQ

We build content marketing strategies for Australian businesses designed for how search actually works in 2026: content that gets cited, not just ranked. If you would rather not start from a blank page, see our Content Marketing Services and AI SEO work, or book a free strategy session.

Frequently asked questions

What is a content marketing strategy?

A documented plan for using content to reach a specific audience and achieve a business goal, and in 2026, to stay visible in AI search. At minimum it covers your goal, audience, positioning, content pillars, channels and measurement.

How do I create a content marketing strategy?

Set SMART goals, research your audience and map the buyer journey, define your positioning, choose three to five content pillars, research topics by intent, choose your content types, plan distribution, build a calendar and team, then audit and measure, including your AI visibility.

What are content pillars?

Three to five core themes you want to be known for. Each becomes a hub with cluster content beneath it, all interlinked, which builds topical authority and improves your odds of being cited in AI answers.

Is content marketing still worth it if search demand is falling?

Yes, but the goal shifts from clicks to citations. Australian search demand fell 38% in 2026 as AI answers scaled, and 37.8% of commercial searches now show an AI Overview, so the businesses that capture the attention that remains are the ones cited in those answers.

How long does a content marketing strategy take to work?

Most businesses see traction in three to six months. Original research and answer-led content can be picked up and cited faster.

Is there a free content marketing strategy template?

Yes. Use our free one-page template and 90-day calendar, or generate a tailored strategy with the interactive tool on the page.