This is the first real month-on-month rise since summer, and it moved on everything at once. Clicks up 29%, impressions up 14%, organic visitors up 27%, and bookings up 72%. Bookings rising faster than traffic means the visitors who arrived converted harder, not just that there were more of them.
The year-on-year picture is still softer: against August 2025, clicks are down 21% and bookings down 27%. Your rankings did not cause it. They improved over the same stretch. What changed is the search results page: Google now runs an AI answer on 9 of your 22 tracked searches, and travellers increasingly read the summary instead of clicking.
Added 12 October 2026. Two corrections to this page, left here rather than quietly edited out. First, the cause. Having looked at this more closely since, the bigger part of that year-on-year gap is how often Google showed the site at all, not how often people clicked: about 78% of the lost clicks trace to fewer appearances in search and about 22% to a lower click-through rate, computed on the August figures as published here at the time. AI answers sit inside that second part, so they are a real factor and the smaller one. Second, the AI answers. Everything on this page about them is the reading from the live check on 2 September 2026: 9 of the 22 tracked searches carried a Google AI answer, and three of those answers cited the site. At the next check on 12 October it was 15 of 22, and that check did not record whether the site is named inside them, so the three citations are the last confirmed count rather than a current one. The September 2026 tab works through both of these properly.
And the traffic is moving rather than disappearing. While classical search clicks fell 21% year on year, visits from AI assistants rose from 71 to 206, up 190%, with ChatGPT accounting for 93% of them. That is the channel to be winning now, and you already are.
Checked live on Google Australia, 2 September 2026.
| Keyword | Live position | June 2022 baseline |
|---|---|---|
| fraser island tour from noosa | 1 | 13 |
| fraser island adventure tours | 2 | 12 |
| fraser island from noosa | 2 | 16 |
| kgari adventures | 2 | new keyword |
| kgari tours | 3 | new keyword |
| fraser island tour | 5 | 29 |
| fraser island tours 4wd | 6 | 9 |
| how to get to fraser island | 8 | 27 |
| 4wd fraser island | 10 | 17 |
| fraser island beach houses | 12 | new keyword |
Across the full 22-keyword tracked set: 20 in the top 20, 18 in the top 10, 13 in the top 5, 12 in the top 3. The two outside that are "k'gari" at 36 and "fraser island", which is not in the top 50. Those two are the biggest unclaimed terms in the category and the obvious next target. Live Google AU check
| Measure | August 2026 | July 2026 | August 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clicks from Google search | 2,926 | 2,264 | 3,708 |
| Organic visitors | 2,807 | 2,209 | 3,509 |
| Bookings | 198 | 115 | 271 |
| Enquiries | 30 | 27 | 43 |
| Visits from AI assistants | 206 | 116 | 71 |
Bookings are the "Book Now" thank-you page event in GA4, counted across all channels. GA4 and Search Console
At the live check on 2 September 2026, Google showed an AI answer on 9 of the 22 tracked searches, and on three of them the answer cited your site: "fraser island tour", "how to get to fraser island" and "fraser island tours 4wd". The first is your most valuable keyword. On the day of that check, Drop Bear was named in Google's own summary at the top of the page. See the note above for where that stands now.
That was worth more than any visibility score, because it was Google quoting you rather than a tool estimating you.