Disclaimer: This article was AI generated from my YouTube video transcript.
If you run a business in New Zealand, your customers have already stopped searching for you. This year 68% of Google searches ended without a single click. Nobody clicked through, nobody compared you against anyone. They read the AI answer at the top and got on with their day. Plenty of people do not even open Google anymore - they just ask ChatGPT. That is what GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation, is about: whether the AI recommends you or not. I went and found the areas I was lacking in, fixed them, and I am now seeing leads come in directly from AI tools.
The free check you can run in five minutes
Open ChatGPT, but before you type anything, log out. This part matters. Logged in, it has your memory, your chat history, and it knows who you are, so it is likely to give you a flattering answer that is not necessarily true. Logged out, you see what a complete stranger sees. That is the real test.
Now do not search your business name. Anyone can Google themselves and pull out information. Ask the questions your customer would actually type:
- “Who is the best commercial electrician in Hamilton?”
- “Who should I use for accounting as a small business in Christchurch?”
The real buying questions. Then look at two things. One, are you in the answer at all? Two, if you are not, what did it say instead - and are those your competitors? Whatever it named is exactly what your buyers are looking at. Their authority is sitting right there in front of you, and the gap is basically your entire to-do list.
Why this is happening
The old way of finding a business was simple. You typed into Google, got ten blue links, opened a few tabs and made up your own mind. That is the important bit: you were the one doing the judging.
Now you get an AI overview with all of it already summarised for you, and that decision-making step disappears. With 68% of searches ending click-free, if you are not in the answer you have not been ranked lower down the page. You are not there at all - right at the moment someone was deciding who to give their money to.
No, SEO is not dead
The first thing everyone assumes is that their website must be broken. That is what I assumed too. I checked mine and most of it was fine - well structured, fast, the markup all there. That is the point where a lot of people declare SEO dead.
It is not. AI is reading the same web that has always been there, so the fundamentals still count. If a machine cannot read your site, it certainly cannot cite it. What has happened is that a new layer has appeared on top. GEO is not a replacement for SEO, you need both, and the difference is simple:
SEO gets you ranked. GEO gets you recommended.
Those are two very different things. You can sit at the top of Google and never get mentioned in ChatGPT.
Your website is one source out of thousands
So the site is fine and you are still invisible. What is driving it? AI is not just reading websites. It has scraped effectively the whole internet - Reddit threads, YouTube transcripts, LinkedIn posts, news articles, all of it. Google used to show you a fairly curated list of websites. AI pulls from a far wider pool.
The bad news is your website is now a much smaller slice of the picture. The good news is there are many more places to show up, and most of them are free.
Here is the number that changed how I think about it: around 89% of AI citations come from earned or third-party media, not your own pages. That makes sense from the model’s side. Your website is just you saying you are good, and every business on earth says that about itself, so it gets discounted heavily. The models are looking for other people saying you are good.
Where the work actually is
If 89% of this happens on other people’s platforms, that is where you need to be.
- Reddit - the one most people do not want to hear. It is AI’s single most cited source at roughly 40% of citations. Plenty of businesses think Reddit is beneath them while the models treat it as a primary source. You just need to genuinely answer the questions people are asking in your industry.
- YouTube - the models are reading your transcripts, so stop worrying about camera quality and put out good content.
- LinkedIn - this one matters a lot in New Zealand, because that is where a lot of the business conversation actually happens here.
- Media, podcasts and directories - all of it stacks up as separate sources pointing back to you solving a problem.
Then keep it consistent. The same business name, the same description, the same links. If the models cannot join the dots, none of those mentions get attributed back to you.
Measuring it instead of guessing
The free check tells you whether you are invisible. It does not tell you why. The tool I use is AuraScope, which measures how AI is mentioning, citing and recommending you across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. It scores you, shows what your competitors are doing that you are not, and gives you a prioritised list of which sources are getting cited. That list is exactly what I worked through.
It does not do the fixing for you. What it does is stop you guessing, and because you can run it over time you can see whether the changes are actually landing. For most businesses that is the real problem - no idea whether they are invisible or not, while potentially missing out on a lot of money.
The 90-day reality
Quick recap. Log out of ChatGPT and ask the questions your customer would ask, then look at what it cited instead of you, because that is your improvement list. Keep the SEO fundamentals going, because they still count. Focus on getting mentioned by other people, because earned media beats owned media every single time. And wherever you show up, be consistent.
Most importantly, this is a 90-day thing, not a weekend. The steps above get you 80 to 90% of the way there and then you have to keep doing the work on top. It is a long game.
One red flag worth naming: anyone telling you they can guarantee top rankings inside ChatGPT is selling you something nobody can deliver. It is changing far too fast for that.
The advantage here in New Zealand is that not many people are doing this level of optimisation yet, while a huge number of people are already using the tools. In my own business I now get about one lead a week from AI tools, so the work behind the scenes is paying for itself.
If you want the related read, I went deeper on the same problem in NZ Businesses: Make ChatGPT Suggest You To Customers. And if you are unsure where AI fits in your business or where to start, reach out for a free chat.
