Search grew more than one front door
A couple of years ago, worrying about being found online mostly meant one thing: where you ranked on Google. That has changed. A real share of the questions people used to type into Google now go somewhere else first, to ChatGPT, to Perplexity, to Google's own AI Mode, or to the assistant built into their phone. Each of those hands back a written answer with a few sources attached, not a page of ten blue links.
I wrote recently about Google's AI Mode and what it does to your traffic. This is the wider version of that story. The question is no longer only how you rank on Google. It's whether your business gets mentioned at all when someone asks an AI about the thing you do.
They don't all read the web the same way
This is the part that catches people out. Each of these answer engines builds its reply from a different source, so there's no single ranking to chase anymore.
- Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews lean on Google's existing index, so ranking well on Google still feeds into what they say.
- ChatGPT pulls live web results when it searches (it uses Bing's index underneath), and answers from older training data when it doesn't.
- Perplexity reads a handful of current pages for almost every answer and cites them in the open, so being one of those cited pages is the entire job.
The useful thing is that being quotable looks much the same across all of them. You're trying to be a clear, trustworthy, easy-to-lift source. Do that once and you tend to do better everywhere at the same time.
What actually gets you mentioned
I'd rather tell you what I'm seeing across client sites than sell you a trick. A few things genuinely help.
Answer the real question in plain words, near the top of the page. These systems lift the sentence that reads like a direct answer. If your service page opens with a paragraph of throat-clearing before it says what you do, you've made yourself harder to quote.
Keep your details identical everywhere. Your business name, address, and phone number should read exactly the same on your website, your Google Business Profile, and any directory you're listed in. A missing suburb or an old mobile number is enough to make an AI less sure it's talking about the same business, and less confident sources get left out of the answer.
Give the machines structure. Proper headings, real bullet lists, and schema markup all make it easier for a system to work out what a page is actually about. None of that is visible to your customers, but it changes how readable your site is to the things now doing the summarising.
Say something only you could say. This is the part that matters most and the part most businesses skip. An AI answer is stitched together from what's already common knowledge. If your page only repeats what's already everywhere, there's no reason to quote you over anyone else. A real number from a job you did, an honest opinion, a warning about a mistake you keep seeing: that's the material that gets picked up, because nobody else has published it.
Get mentioned elsewhere. These tools weigh what other websites say about you, not just what you say about yourself. Reviews, a tidy directory listing, a mention in a local paper, a supplier page that lists you as a stockist, all of it feeds the picture an AI builds before it decides whether you're worth citing.
Does a small NZ business need to care yet?
Honest answer: it depends on how your customers look for you. If you're a local tradesperson and people find you by tapping "electrician near me" into their phone, Google and your Google Business Profile still do most of the work, and I'd put your energy there first. If you sell something people research before they buy, especially business to business, some of those buyers are already asking ChatGPT or Perplexity for a shortlist before they ever open Google. If that's your market, being absent from those answers is quietly costing you.
You don't need to chase every platform. You do need to know which one your actual customers are using.
A short list worth doing this month
- Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity a question a good customer would ask, in your area, and see whether you come up at all
- Check that your name, address, and phone number match across your site, your Google Business Profile, and any directory listing
- Make sure your top two or three service pages answer the core question in the first couple of sentences
- Claim and tidy your Google Business Profile and any stray directory listings
- Keep publishing the occasional thing only you could write, from real experience
The bottom line
The number of places people search went up. The fundamentals didn't really move. Be clear about what you do, keep your details consistent, structure your pages properly, and put something genuine on the page that nobody else can copy. That was good advice when Google was the only game in town. It's the same advice now that it isn't, which should be a relief rather than a worry.