This week we pulled the Google results for "automated decision making privacy act".
It is a topic we know well. We have spent months on it and built a free tool around it. If any search on earth should have mentioned Intuitive IT, it was that one.
At the top of the page sat Google's AI summary. It explained the obligation clearly, got the 10 December date right, and listed what a privacy policy has to disclose. It cited Allens, Hamilton Locke, Gilbert + Tobin, Vocare Law, Lander & Rogers and the privacy regulator.
Not us. Not anywhere near us.
I would like to say I was surprised. Much to my embarrassment, I was not. We had done the work and never told the machines about it in a form they could use, which is exactly the mistake I am about to suggest you check for.
The concierge problem
Think about a good hotel concierge in the CBD.
A guest asks where to eat. The concierge does not hand over a directory with four hundred restaurants in it. They name two. Maybe three. Places they know, places they trust, places they can describe in a sentence. The restaurant that is not on the concierge's mind never loses an argument, because it never comes up.
For a growing share of questions, AI tools are now the concierge. Someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI summary "how do I know if my privacy policy covers automated decisions" or "who are good advisers for SMSF trustees in Melbourne". They get an answer with a few names in it. Those names get the phone call.
What AI search visibility means for a professional services firm
AI search visibility is whether those tools name you when your kind of client asks your kind of question. Ranking on page one is a different measurement, and a less useful one than it was two years ago. What counts is being in the answer.
There isn't good Australian data on this yet, so the closest evidence is American. Pew Research Center tracked the Google searches of 900 US adults in March 2025. When an AI summary appeared, people clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits. Without one, they clicked in 15%. And they clicked a link inside the AI summary itself in just 1% of visits.
Translate that into your world. Where an AI summary appears, being one of the names inside it is what counts, and even then most people will not click. They remember the name, and they ring it.
That study is a US sample from 2025, and Australian behaviour will differ somewhat. At the time of writing nobody has published the Australian equivalent, so treat the numbers as a direction rather than a measurement.
Why your firm probably isn't being named
There are three duller reasons, and the quality of your work is not one of them.
Your expertise lives in your partners' heads rather than on your site. The website says "tailored advice for complex needs" and answers not one question a client would actually type. AI tools cannot cite an answer nobody wrote down.
You're described differently everywhere. Different names, old addresses, a service list on your site that does not match your LinkedIn page or your industry listing. People forgive that. Machines get confused by it and leave you out.
Nobody else mentions you. AI tools lean heavily on third parties: industry bodies, publications, directories, other firms' articles. If the only place your firm is described is your own website, you're one quiet voice.
Beware: Anyone who guarantees your firm will be recommended by ChatGPT is overselling. These tools are probabilistic and they change monthly. You can make it much more likely. Nobody can promise it.
What to do about it
Five things, roughly in order of effort.
Search for yourself, the way a client would. Not your firm's name. The question a good client would ask before they'd ever heard of you. Do it in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, and write down who gets named.
Answer the real questions on your own site. Short, plain, specific answers to the questions clients actually ask, written by people who know. A page with eight genuine questions and good answers does more here than a page of positioning.
Be described the same way everywhere. Same name, address, services and specialties across your site, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile and any industry listings.
Add the technical signals. Structured data that tells machines what your firm is, where it is, what it does and who works there. This is the unglamorous part, and it is a difficult nut to crack without someone who does it regularly. It is also where firms with genuinely good content still fall down.
Get mentioned by others. Contribute to your industry body's publications. Speak. Write the occasional piece for a trade outlet. Each one is another place the concierge has heard your name.
None of this is magic, and most of it isn't new. It's the same advice that's always worked for being found, aimed at a reader that happens to be a machine. If you want a sense of where else AI is genuinely useful in a firm, rather than just where it's a threat, there's a more practical list in five ways AI can save a small business time and money.
Tip: If an agency pitches you "AI search optimisation", ask them to show you, live, what ChatGPT says about two of their existing clients before and after their work. The same discipline applies as choosing any technology provider: ask for evidence, not promises.
The second check is the one that tells you anything. The first only tells you where you started.
What we're doing about our own
We're taking our own advice, starting with the topic that embarrassed us. Clear answers on our own pages, the same description of the firm everywhere, structured data done properly, and fewer pages that say nothing.
It is slightly humbling to be the firm that sells this and had to fix its own house first. The good news is that it makes the point better than a case study would: the fix is ordinary work rather than wizardry.
So here's the one thing to do this week. Type the question your best client would have asked before they found you into ChatGPT, and see who it names.
If you'd like a structured version of that check, our web team's free Web AI Readiness Audit looks at any page on your site and tells you how well it's set up to be found and cited by AI tools. If it finds gaps, they can fix them and show you the before and after.
Where these numbers come from
- Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results, Pew Research Center, July 2025
- AI summary for "automated decision making privacy act", Google Australia, retrieved by Intuitive IT on 22 October 2026
Yener
