How To Show Up In AI Search: A Guide For NZ Business Owners

ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and Gemini recommend the businesses the internet trusts most on a topic. That trust comes from three things: whether you already rank on Google, what review sites and lists say about you, and how recently any of it was updated. This guide covers how those answers get put together, where your business needs to show up, and how to tell if it's working.

AI search now comes up on about three in four of our sales calls. Owners want to know how it works and what it means for their business. Everything in this guide comes from the work we've done on this with our clients over the last few months. If you'd rather watch than read, the video version is below.

How Does ChatGPT Decide Which Businesses To Recommend?

When someone asks ChatGPT "Who's the best roofer in Hamilton?", it runs several searches, often at the same time. They might look something like this:

• best roofers Hamilton
• roofing companies Hamilton reviews
• roof restoration Hamilton cost
• top rated roofers Waikato

It then reads the pages that come back, compares them and writes one answer. Across all of those searches, it weighs three things.

1. Authority: Do You Already Rank On Google?

Authority is how much the internet trusts you on a topic. It starts with whether you already show up on Google for the searches AI runs.

Ahrefs' latest analysis of 863,000 keywords, reported in March 2026, found 38% of the pages cited in Google's AI Overviews rank in Google's top ten for the same search. The other citations split almost evenly between positions 11 to 100 and pages outside the top 100. The ten page-one positions supply more citations than the next ninety combined. Ranking on page one is still the strongest single route into an AI answer.

2. Trusted Sources: What Other People Say About You

AI puts more weight on what other people say about you than on what you say about yourself. It pays particular attention to two kinds of pages:

• Review sites: your Google reviews and the directories in your industry, such as NoCowboys or Builderscrack.
• Listicles: the "top ten roofers in Hamilton" articles, comparison pages and local "best of" lists.

If your name keeps appearing across those pages with the same details, AI is confident naming you. If you're missing, or the details don't match, it's more likely to name someone else.

Most of our clients are now named among the top three to five businesses in their industry across most of the answer engines. Reviews have done more of that work than anything else, and we push for them every month.

3. Freshness: How Recently Was It Updated?

AI leans heavily towards recent information. Ahrefs studied 17 million citations and found the pages AI assistants cite are, on average, about a quarter newer than the pages in normal Google results. A separate Ahrefs study of the 1,000 pages ChatGPT cited most found 76.4% of those with a visible date had been updated in the previous 30 days, though Ahrefs notes some of those dates may overstate how recently a page changed.

A website that hasn't been touched in two years, reviews that stopped coming in last winter, or a Google profile with old photos all tell AI you might not be the best current answer.

Where Does Your Business Need To Show Up?

Start with the questions your customers ask, and write down ten that people ask before they buy from you. For a roofer, those might be:

• How much does a re-roof cost?
• Should I restore or replace my roof?
• How long does a re-roof take?

Ask each one in ChatGPT and Google while you're logged out. Do it three times, because the answers change each time, and write down who gets named.

Answer Every Question On Your Website

Your website needs to answer every one of those questions in plain words.

We often see a business come up first for every local question, then miss every question about price because its website never mentions a price. A competitor with a clear cost page gets quoted instead.

If your customers ask about price, timeframes, the areas you cover or what's included, put the answer on your website. Start each section with the answer and then explain it. Keep to one idea per section, so AI can pick each one up on its own.

Our own guide to how much a marketing agency costs in New Zealand follows the same rule. It leads each section with the answer, and Google's AI Overview was quoting it within three days of the page going live.

SEO Is Still The Foundation

SEO, short for search engine optimisation, means making your website easy for Google to find, read and trust. That includes a page for each service and each area you work in, clear headings, a site that loads quickly on a phone, and other reputable websites linking to yours. AI leans on Google's results, so SEO is still the base everything else sits on. Our post on the benefits of SEO covers the basics.

Add Schema So AI Doesn't Have To Guess

Schema is a set of hidden labels in your website's code. Your customers never see them, but Google and AI do. Schema spells out the facts: that you're a roofing business, your address, the areas you cover, the services you offer, your hours and your reviews. With schema in place, AI doesn't have to guess what your business does, and most web developers can add it for you.

Keep Your Details The Same Everywhere

Your business name, phone number, address, services and prices should read the same on your website, your Google Business Profile, your directories and your social pages. When your own information doesn't match from one place to the next, AI can't be confident about it either.

Keep Your Key Pages, Reviews And Google Profile Fresh

Update your key pages regularly with your prices, recent projects, new photos and a "last updated" date. Keep new reviews coming in every month rather than in bursts, and keep your Google Business Profile active with new posts and photos. For the websites we look after, we make the bigger updates every quarter.

Check AI Is Allowed To Read Your Website

This check takes about thirty seconds: type your website address followed by /robots.txt into your browser, for example yourbusiness.co.nz/robots.txt. If you see the word "Disallow" next to names like GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot or ClaudeBot, your website is telling AI tools not to read it.

If your website runs through Cloudflare, check its AI bot setting as well, because Cloudflare can block AI crawlers by default. When we checked 45 client websites in October, none of them were blocking AI tools.

Why YouTube Matters For AI Search

Long-form video is becoming one of the most indexed and most trusted kinds of content on the internet. Several studies this year put YouTube at or near the top of the websites Google's AI Overviews cite most. Surfer's analysis of 46 million AI Overview citations puts YouTube at about 23% of them, although other studies find a much smaller share.

Our clients on long-form YouTube range from about 4,000 subscribers to between 30,000 and 40,000. The channels with the most subscribers spend the least on paid advertising. Paid still matters for those businesses and still does a great job, but most of their leads now come from the audience and the authority their channels have built. Very few New Zealand businesses publish long-form video on YouTube yet.

How Many Videos Does It Take?

A vidIQ study of 32.9 million channels that started under 1,000 subscribers tracked how many reached 1,000 over the following year:

• No new videos: 0.20% reached 1,000 subscribers.
• 1 to 11 new videos: 1.86%.
• 12 to 51 new videos: 8.65%.
• 52 or more new videos, about one a week: 30.77%.

The study can't prove that more uploads cause growth. Even so, the channels that posted about once a week were around 150 times more likely to reach 1,000 subscribers than channels that stopped posting.

Plan YouTube Like You Plan Your Ads

Treat YouTube as part of your creative strategy, the same way you'd plan your ads. Take the ten questions your customers ask and answer each one properly on camera. For a roofer, that's whether to restore or replace, what a re-roof costs and how long it takes.

Each of those videos becomes a source AI can quote. It also gives your ads content to cut into short clips, and it gives your sales team something to send before a quote. Our guide to building thought leadership as a business owner covers how to show up as the expert in your industry.

Put the question in the title, say it out loud in the first few seconds, and add chapters in the description. Filming on a phone is fine when you're starting out.

How Do You Know If AI Search Is Working?

Google Analytics shows the visits that come from ChatGPT and other AI tools. In Google Analytics 4, open Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition, and set the table to session source and medium. Look for chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and copilot.microsoft.com.

For one of our clients, a medical company, ChatGPT sent 45 visits to their website in the three months to October 2026. That is a small number next to the rest of their traffic, but 34 of those 45 visitors engaged with the site and four of them enquired. We checked with the client, and all four became customers. AI had already recommended the business before those people arrived.

Analytics will undercount this, because plenty of people hear your name in ChatGPT and then search for you on Google. Add one question to your enquiry form, "How did you hear about us?", and make ChatGPT or AI one of the options.

Then, once a month, run your ten questions again and see if you're being named more often.

Is AI Search Replacing Google?

AI search is adding to Google rather than replacing it. Customer journeys are getting longer, with more touch points before someone buys. Google's own research calls this stage "the messy middle", where people explore their options and compare them before they decide.

On a common path now, someone asks an answer engine, gets a shortlist of three to five businesses, researches them, and then comes through Google by searching your name. Google gets the credit in your analytics, but the answer engine still played a part in the decision.

Why Do Some Businesses Get Left Out?

Every industry where customers search before they buy is affected, and authority is the biggest opening in all of them right now. The two mistakes we see most often:

• The business moves on and its online presence doesn't. When you change your value proposition or your products, update every place your business appears so they all say the same thing. Old descriptions on directories and social pages leave AI unsure which version is true.
• Nobody asks for reviews after a sale. Most of the businesses we meet don't ask, because it feels like extra operational work. A simple monthly process fixes it: decide who asks, when they ask and where the link goes.

What To Do This Month

1. See where you're at. Take the transcript of our video, or this guide, into Claude or ChatGPT. Connect your Google Search Console and Google Analytics, then ask where your business stands and what to fix first.
2. Start getting authentic reviews. Ask every happy customer, every month, across a range of sources such as Google, the directories in your industry and Trustpilot.
3. Audit your website. Check that it answers the questions your customers ask, that your SEO and schema are in place, that your facts match everywhere, that your key pages have been updated recently, and that AI is allowed to read it.
4. Start on YouTube. Pick the question your customers ask most and answer it on camera.

After that, a steady rhythm keeps you current:

• Every month: ask for reviews, publish a blog post, add a team or project update, and re-run your ten questions.
• Every quarter: make the bigger updates to your website, such as prices, services, projects and photos.

FAQ

What is answer engine optimisation (AEO)?

Answer engine optimisation is the work of making your business easy for AI tools such as ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and Gemini to find, trust and recommend. It covers reviews, listings, website content, schema, consistency, freshness and video.

Is AEO different from SEO?

AEO builds on SEO, since AI tools lean on search results when they put an answer together. A website that ranks well on Google starts with an advantage. AEO adds the signals AI weighs on top of that, mainly what other sites say about you and how recently it was said.

How do I check if ChatGPT can read my website?

Type your website address followed by /robots.txt. If you see "Disallow" next to GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot or ClaudeBot, your site is blocking AI tools. If your site runs through Cloudflare, check its AI bot setting too.

How do I see AI traffic in Google Analytics?

In Google Analytics 4, go to Reports, Acquisition, Traffic acquisition, and set the table to session source and medium. Visits from AI tools show as sources like chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com.

How many YouTube videos do I need before it works?

There is no fixed number, but the data favours consistency. In a vidIQ study of 32.9 million small channels, 30.77% of those that posted 52 or more videos in a year passed 1,000 subscribers, compared with 0.20% of channels that stopped posting. A video a week for a year is a sensible first target.

Written by Ben Langton-Burnell, CEO and Founder of The Launch Agency.