Most NZ business owners have never checked this. Which is fair enough — until recently there was nothing to check. But a growing share of your customers now start with an AI tool rather than a search box, and those tools name a couple of businesses and stop.
The good news is you don't need an agency or a subscription to find out where you stand. You need ten minutes and a notepad. Here's exactly how we run it during an AI Audit — do it yourself first, and you'll know whether you even need us.
Write down the question a customer would actually ask
This is the step people get wrong. Don't use your keywords — use your customer's words. Nobody types "heavy haulage services Hawke's Bay" into ChatGPT. They type something more like a question they'd ask a mate.
I need someone to move a digger in Hawke's Bay — who should I call?
Recommend a good physio in Havelock North
Where can I buy a shipping container in Hawke's Bay?
Write down three or four. Include at least one that names your town, and one that describes the problem rather than the trade — customers often describe a situation, not a service.
Ask ChatGPT, and write down who gets named
Open ChatGPT and ask your first question exactly as you wrote it. Note every business it names, in order. Then push it further:
That second answer shows you the next tier down. If you're not in either list, you're not currently in the conversation for that question.
One caveat worth knowing: AI answers vary between sessions and accounts. Don't panic over a single miss, and don't celebrate a single hit. Run each prompt twice, ideally in a fresh chat, and look for the pattern.
Check Google's AI Overview
Search the same question in Google. If an AI-generated answer appears above the blue links, read which businesses it names and — importantly — which websites it cites underneath.
Those citations are the useful part. They tell you which pages Google's AI currently trusts on your topic. Often it's a directory, a competitor's FAQ page, or a local news article. That's your map: those are the sources you need to either appear on or out-answer.
Not every search triggers one. Around 1 in 5 Google searches currently returns an AI answer, and it's more common for question-shaped searches than short keyword ones. If nothing appears, rephrase as a full question and try again.
Repeat in Perplexity and Gemini
Two more worth thirty seconds each, for different reasons.
Perplexity shows its sources prominently, so it's the fastest way to see which pages are feeding AI answers in your industry. Gemini reflects how Google's own models describe your category, which tends to track closely with what shows up in AI Overviews.
If the same competitor keeps appearing across all four tools, that's not luck. Their site is structured in a way AI systems can read and trust — and that's a fixable gap, not a permanent advantage.
Check you're not blocking the AI crawlers
This one takes thirty seconds and is the most common own-goal we find on NZ websites.
Type your domain followed by /robots.txt into your browser — for example yourbusiness.co.nz/robots.txt. Read what comes up and look for any of these names with a Disallow under them:
- GPTBot — ChatGPT's crawler
- ClaudeBot — Claude's crawler
- PerplexityBot — Perplexity's crawler
- Google-Extended — controls whether Google's AI products can use your content
If any of those are blocked, stop here — that's your problem. No amount of content or schema will get you cited by a tool that isn't allowed to read your site. We find this regularly, usually as a leftover default from a website theme or a previous developer, and nobody involved chose it deliberately.
Reading your results
Tally it up. For each prompt, across each tool, did you get named?
| What you found | What it means | What to do next |
|---|---|---|
| Named in most tools | Your foundations are working | Protect it — keep reviews and content current, and check again quarterly |
| Named in one or two | Partially visible, inconsistently | Usually a schema or entity-consistency gap. Fixable in days, not months |
| Never named, competitors are | You're invisible for these questions | Full GEO groundwork — crawler access, schema, FAQ content |
| Nobody local named at all | The whole category is unclaimed | Best-case scenario. First mover takes it |
That last row happens more often than you'd think in regional New Zealand, and it's the most valuable result on the list. If AI tools currently can't name anyone decent in your trade in your town, the first business to do this properly gets to be the default answer.
The three fixes that move the needle fastest
If you came out badly, the fix list is shorter than you'd expect. In rough order of impact per hour spent:
- Unblock the AI crawlers. A one-line change in robots.txt. Nothing else works until this does.
- Add schema markup. JSON-LD that states what your business is, where it operates and what it offers. This is the strongest single technical signal, and it's a one-off job rather than an ongoing cost.
- Write a real FAQ section. Answer the exact questions you tested in step one, in plain language, on your own site. AI tools pull from question-and-answer content more reliably than any other format — you're handing them a sentence they can quote.
Those three, done properly, typically shift AI visibility within four to eight weeks — considerably faster than traditional SEO rankings move. The reason is that AI systems lean on structured data and recently crawled content, and both respond quickly to being fixed.
If you want the background on why any of this works, start with what GEO is and why it matters for NZ businesses, or the comparison piece on GEO vs SEO and which to fix first.
Want us to run it instead?
The check above is genuinely the same one we run — there's no secret version. But if you'd rather have it done properly and written up, it's included in our AI Opportunity Audit: we test the prompts your customers actually use, record which tools name you and which name a competitor, check your robots.txt and schema, and tell you the cheapest thing to fix first.
No cost, no pitch deck. And if the honest answer is that your Google Business Profile matters more than AI search right now, we'll tell you that instead — see how we approach GEO for what that work actually involves.