AI-driven search tools are quickly taking prominence in search engine results pages (SERPs). Google now provides AI-generated answers at the top of its SERPs through Gemini. But that’s not the only way such tools are changing search behaviour and having a significant impact on providers, from aged care to retirement living. More and more people are using AI-powered tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to find information about services for older Australians.
Sure, ChatGPT provides a list of sources, but who ever bothers to click on those? In today’s instant gratification culture, many more people are simply reading the AI-generated information and going with that, rather than visiting the websites that contain more detailed information. This has led to a significant drop in website visitors. It’s true in every industry, and the AI impact on the online visibility of aged care in Australia is no exception, as people increasingly rely on these AI tools to find suitable care for their elderly relatives.
How AI Search is Changing User Behaviour
The biggest issue with AI-driven search is that it produces what’s known as “zero-click” searches. As we explained above, when users see the information they want displayed at the top of the search results, they stop searching, use the info and don’t click on a link to go to a website. You’ve probably come across these AI results yourself, as shown in the figure below. You can see that the first result is an AI-driven answer, with a sponsored link below it. The organic search results are only listed further down the page. This puts the AI information right in the viewer’s eyeline.
Image1: Google search results showing Google AI Gemini results at the top.
As with so many other businesses, the impact of zero-click searches on care providers can have a ruinous effect. The statistics tell the story.
According to digital intelligence software like Similarweb and SparkToro, approximately 65% of Google searches are zero-click. Digging deeper we can see from the graph below that the average click-through rate (CTR) for aged care providers over the previous 16 months is 6.6%. The figures include those who browsed the results and didn’t find anything they wanted to click on, but we can safely assume that these contribute far less to zero-click searches for aged care than the AI information does.
Image 2: Comparison of total impressions vs total click-throughs for Australian aged care providers – March 2024 to June 2025.
If we zoom in on the 2025 figures alone, the situation looks stark, with the click through rate dropping to under 4.5%, and an average search ranking of 24.7. These figures are well below established healthy benchmarks.
Image 3: Comparison of total impressions vs total click-throughs for Australian aged care providers –January 2025 – June 2025.
AI Impact on Aged Care Providers in SERPS
The AI impact on aged care providers trying to compete for search engine visibility, and the sheer number of zero-click searches for aged care is being felt across the board. Websites are losing visitors as searchers no longer click through from search engines. For retirement living providers, this means prospective residents and their families could be forming first impressions, and even shortlisting communities, based purely on AI summaries, without ever visiting the official website or speaking with sales staff.
It also robs them of one of the most vital aspects of marketing: fostering relationships with clients through personal interaction. Properly conceived websites have carefully planned information architecture that creates user journeys through the site, ultimately leading them to some kind of conversion point. Even if they don’t complete the conversion at first, the information and bona fides of the website engage visitors, build brand profile and foster brand loyalty. All of this is lost if a person simply gets a short AI summary in response to a question and leaves it at that.
Compounding these dangers is the fact that many Australian organisations haven’t yet come to grips with this new situation and often don’t realise the full extent of AI’s invisible effect. As Lydia O’Sullivan, Marketing Manager, Digital at The Aveo Group, explains: “We probably so far have seen the same results in the data from a volume of traffic, impressions, click-throughs, but we probably didn’t put that down to AI as yet… our initial feeling was that it was macro factors, but it could be now a combination of both.”
Of course, this has led to a lot of legal wrangling over intellectual property that is yet to be resolved, but that’s how things stand at the moment. This doesn’t mean it’s game over though. Far from it. We can counter this with an effective digital strategy for aged care that accommodates AI-driven user interactions. One that not only takes AI-driven results into account but also provides the kind of direct answers that people are looking for. The shift that’s needed is to reframe website content in ways that do this, with question-answer formats and the long-tail search terms that people use. Australian aged care SEO must become more focused and granular to succeed. It’s a challenge, but improving LLM search visibility is not much different to the many seismic Google algorithm changes we’ve successfully adapted to in the past for our clients..
Data-driven Insights for Australian aged care SEO
If we really dig into the stats, we can derive some insights that we can use to take AI-driven results into account for Australian aged care SEO. This kind of granularity supports O’Sullivan’s assertion that brands need to expand the range of metrics they use: “We’ll be updating our analytics and reporting to include: — citations, impressions versus clicks, indexing and crawlability. Just looking at it slightly differently versus just traffic.”
Chatbot Traffic Insights
Below we can see the total Perplexity and ChatGPT traffic for aged care to some of the providers in Australia:
Image 4: Total Chatbot traffic to major Australian aged care providers.
This shows how many times a chatbot sent traffic to a website. As you can see, My Aged Care was the most referenced (roughly 78%), followed by Bolton Clarke at around 17%. Aged Care Online and Regis were the least visited, at about 4.2% and 1,2%, respectively. One can deduce from this that the aged care sites with the largest online presence and those with official domains like gov.au are particularly sought out.
The average chatbot traffic distribution paints the same picture in the following figure, with My Aged Care showing significant chatbot activity compared to the others, and a big spike in March 2025. This shows that chatbots were used to access the site far more often than usual. Both these graphs highlight the growing significance of chatbot-originated queries, and just how active these AI tools are.
Image 5: Chatbot traffic distribution to the main Australian aged care providers.
Marketing Channel Performance
Over the last year, organic search (non-sponsored, without AI) still accounted for around 45.72% of aged care website traffic. At the same time, the channel dropped from around 1.35 million visitors in July 2024 to about 1 million by December that year. This would indicate that the organic online visibility for aged care in Australia is less than half that what it was before the advent of AI-driven results. You can also observe a very strong downward trend, indicating the continuing and increasing AI impact on aged care website traffic.
Image 6: Organic traffic to the main Australian aged care providers – June 2024 – May 2025.
Search Console Performance
You can use the search performance dashboard of your choice, but you’ll likely see the same patterns. Total click-throughs to websites are down, along with impressions, visitor numbers, and search engine positioning. We can use a previous screenshot to demonstrate this:
Image 7: Search console performance indicators.
Here you can see the total number of impressions (how many times the website was displayed in the SERPS), the number of clicks to the website, and the resulting CTR. It also shows the current average search engine position of the website in its rankings. This kind of high-level data provides a clear view of AI impact.
Real-world Examples
As we mentioned, one of the most effective ways of countering AI-driven results and LLM search visibility issues is to pre-empt the kinds of question prompts that people are likely to use when searching for aged care in Australia. Below is a comparison of the actual user queries that appear on the most popular aged care provider websites.
Image 8: Examples of aged care website question prompts.
You’ll notice that instead of presenting the information under headings like “Our Aged Care Services”, it’s framed in the form of questions, e.g. “What types of aged care services are available through My Aged Care? If you think about it, it’s a more natural kind of discourse. You ask your question and get an immediate, accurate answer. These are exactly the kind of queries that create zero-click searches for aged care, as they’re easily answered in the AI-driven snippets. Including them in your website content gives the chatbots exact matches, prompting them to use your content, and letting searchers see that your website is a rich resource of the information they want.
Practical Digital Strategy for Aged Care Providers
There are plenty of strategies that providers can use to improve online visibility for aged care in Australia. Many of these strategies apply equally to retirement living, where conveying lifestyle benefits, amenities, and community culture online is just as critical as showcasing clinical or care-related information. Digital PR is becoming increasingly important, particularly with the rise of generative AI, but it’s not the 1% of the 100%. There are many other moving parts to an effective LLM strategy.
Optimise for AI Overviews
Clearly structured content is a must. This helps Google to “read” the web pages as easily as possible and reward it with a more prominent place in search results. Using informative headings, succinct summaries, and bullet points will help.
O’Sullivan points out that this isn’t something new to the SEO realm: “There’s definitely a lot of feelings of, ‘Oh, you know, search is no longer going to exist.’ And it’s just trying to educate people on that — it’s just changing. We need to be at the forefront, but we’re also still implementing SEO best practice stuff that goes towards AI optimisation also.”
Also concentrate on entity SEO. This is where you centre the content around entities, instead of just using keywords. An entity could be your USP, an event or any kind of physical product. It’s anything that the search engines will treat as a distinct item, as opposed to keywords that are merely semantic devices.
Focus on Core Products and Services
This follows on from the previous point. Your products and services are also entities. Carefully prioritise the aged care services you provide, and create concise, authoritative content around them. For example, in addition to your Services page, you can create a blog and fill it with articles that demonstrate your authority and trustworthiness as an Australian aged care provider. Make sure that your site navigation is logical and easily accessible, and give all the necessary details, like your location, fees, eligibility criteria and your USPs. This will encourage AI tools to adopt your website as a preferred source.
Leverage Google Business Profiles
One of the best ways to counter AI-driven results by demonstrating website authority is to maintain an active Google Business Profile (GBP). This is a full business listing that Google displays when searchers look for specific products or services. It appears in a separate highlighted box with a map, which draws the eye far more than the Gemini info at the top. Searchers can click for more details.
Encourage your clients to leave reviews, and to increase the amount of user-generated content on your site. The search engines place a lot of emphasis on peer reviews and content that comes from them rather than brand crafted copy.
Content Strategy Adjustments
Another recommended digital strategy for aged care providers is to rewrite your content to make it more tailored to specifically address the most common AI-generated user queries. Framing the copy in the form of direct questions and answers is one way. Another is to put yourself in a potential client’s shoes and imagine the questions they would have. Then write clear, concise content that answers those questions, citing statistics, examples and other supporting information.
Multi-platform Consistency
Today everything is omnichannel and multi-platform. From a small business perspective, it really is concerning. The silo is gone. Social feeds into organic, paid attributes value to brand — it is truly holistic now. Make sure that your business listings on all other platforms you use have the identical, accurate information on your business name, physical address, email addresses and phone numbers. This includes your GBP, your social media profiles and your business directory listings. This will help ensure accurate, consistent AI data extraction and presentation.
The Future Outlook for Online Visibility for Aged Care in Australia
While it’s generally called AI, what we’re really talking about in the present day is LLM – large language modelling. In this scenario. merely ranking highly isn’t enough anymore. A digital strategy for aged care needs to be agile, so that it can successfully adapt to fast-moving changes in user behaviour, search trends and ever-expanding LLM capabilities.
“If you don’t actually start thinking about investing in other media channels and a broader strategy… you’re going to be dead in the water. You can spend as much as you want on paid search, but it’s going to fall off a cliff.“
This includes optimising content for AI snippets, using structured data markup and Q&A provision. Websites need to easily expose chatbot-friendly answers to the most common questions so that they get referenced in AI summaries. And don’t forget, there’s nothing stopping aged care providers from creating their own AI-driven chat widgets to answer users’ questions directly.
By switching to an AI-first approach, companies can mitigate the AI impact on aged care providers, and even gain more prominence than they originally had. O’Sullivan recommends working closely with an agile, forward-looking agency: “Our agencies are our partners, an extension of the team. That really is critical… because we can’t do everything ourselves.”
