Perplexity Is Citing More Australian Sites
- Here's What They Have in Common
Welcome back. This month has a theme: AI citations are shifting fast, and Australian sites are finally starting to benefit. But the gains aren't random - there are clear patterns in which content types and structures AI tools prefer. That's most of this issue.
We've also got a quiet April in traditional search to cover, plus the single structured data change we're now recommending as a GEO priority.
April Was Mostly Quiet - Except for YMYL Health Content
No major named update in April. Google's "quality infrastructure" improvements from March continued rolling - industry reports show more AU sites seeing thin secondary pages drop out of the index, but no site-wide penalties.
The one meaningful exception: health and medical content in Australia. Sites publishing health guidance without clear clinical authorship (a named author with verifiable medical credentials) saw quiet ranking drops across several informational health queries. This isn't a new policy - it's been in Google's quality rater guidelines for years - but enforcement appears to have tightened.
If you publish any health, medical, financial advice, or legal content: audit your authorship setup. "Written by the editorial team" is no longer sufficient. Named authors with credentials, linked to an external profile (LinkedIn, a professional association, a university profile), are the minimum bar for YMYL content in 2026.
Verdict: YMYL sites should do an authorship audit this month. Everyone else: steady as she goes.
The Formats AI Tools Cite - and What That Means for AU Businesses
We've been spot-checking Australian search queries across ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews - watching which sites get cited and what those pages have in common. It's informal observation, not a controlled study, but the pattern lines up with the peer-reviewed research on the topic (the 2024 Princeton/Georgia Tech/AI2 GEO study, KDD 2024): structure and sourcing beat plain prose.
Why .gov.au and .edu.au Still Win "What Is" Queries
For definitional queries ("what is negative gearing Australia", "what is the superannuation guarantee"), government and university sites dominate AI citations. This isn't going to change - those sites have intrinsic authority signals that private sites can't replicate.
The opportunity for commercial sites is in the "how to" and "best" query types. "How to reduce capital gains tax Australia", "best way to structure a trust for small business" - these are questions where lived expertise and specificity matter more than institutional authority. AI models pull from the clearest, most direct answers to these queries, regardless of whether the source is a government site.
The practical implication: stop trying to compete with .gov.au on informational queries. Identify the "how to" and "best" variants of your topic area, and build content that answers them with genuine depth and specificity.
Add FAQPage schema to your top 5 informational pages
FAQPage schema is the single highest-ROI structured data change for AI citation rates right now. AI models are explicitly pulling from the Q&A format that FAQPage schema provides - it's pre-packaged, extractable information that doesn't require the model to parse prose.
Here's a minimal FAQPage schema block you can add to any page. Drop it in a <script type="application/ld+json"> tag in the <head>:
Add 3-5 real questions your customers ask about your topic area. Don't make them up - pull them from your actual sales calls, your "Contact" form messages, or your internal site search data. Real questions get cited; generic questions don't.
Priority pages to add this to first: your main service page, your blog's most-trafficked post, and your FAQ/about page if you have one.
Worth your time
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