The short answer: AI tools recommend businesses they can read about. A plain-English website that says what you do, where you work and how to reach you — backed by a tidy Google Business Profile and genuine reviews — is what gets you mentioned. With 45% of consumers now asking AI tools for local recommendations, this stopped being optional sometime last year.
People are asking AI which business to call
The numbers moved fast. In BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, 45% of consumers had used AI tools to find or choose local businesses, up from 6% a year earlier. ChatGPT was used for business recommendations by 31% of consumers and Google’s AI Mode by 23% — making AI the third most-used discovery channel, behind only Google and Facebook. ChatGPT itself passed 900 million weekly users in February 2026.
New Zealand sits inside this shift, not beside it: Google still handles about 87% of NZ searches (StatCounter, June 2026), and its results increasingly open with an AI-written answer rather than ten blue links.
How AI decides which businesses to mention
There’s no secret index. When someone asks “who’s a good plumber in New Plymouth?”, AI systems draw on what’s publicly readable:
- Your website — the only source written entirely in your words
- Your Google Business Profile — category, hours, area, photos
- Reviews — volume, recency and what they actually say
- Directories and mentions — consistent name, address and phone details across the web
Two things follow. First, AI can’t recommend what it can’t read — a business with no public footprint simply isn’t in the running. Second, consistency beats volume: conflicting hours, old phone numbers and three spellings of your trading name make machines (and people) trust you less.
Why your website matters more, not less
It sounds backwards: if AI answers the question, who visits websites? Fewer people — and that’s exactly the point.
Pew Research Center found that when an AI summary appears, users click a traditional result link on just 8% of visits, versus 15% without a summary. SparkToro’s 2026 analysis of clickstream data found 68% of Google searches now end without any click at all. The answer on the screen is the visit.
Which means the win is no longer “get the click” — it’s be the source the answer is built from. Your website’s job has quietly changed from brochure to source of truth.
Seven things that actually help
- Have a real website, even one page. Plain text a machine can read: what you do, the areas you serve, hours, and how to get in touch. Our one-page website guide covers the exact checklist.
- State facts like you’d answer a question. “We repair heat pumps across Tauranga and charge an $89 call-out fee” is quotable. “Passionate about comfort solutions” is not.
- Keep name, address and phone identical everywhere. Website, Google Business Profile, Facebook, directories. One version of the truth.
- Claim and fill your Google Business Profile. It’s free, it feeds both Maps and AI answers, and half-empty profiles read as half-open businesses.
- Collect genuine reviews and reply to them. Reviews are one of the few sources every AI tool leans on. Never buy them — fake patterns are exactly what these systems are good at spotting.
- Put your common questions on your site. A short FAQ in plain language gives AI ready-made answers with your name attached.
- Don’t block AI crawlers. Some websites block GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot in robots.txt without realising it means those tools can’t cite them. If you want to be quoted, be readable.
What doesn’t help
- Keyword stuffing. Princeton researchers testing generative-engine visibility found stuffing keywords in reduced it by around 10%. Write like a person.
- Paying for placement. You can’t. See the FAQ below.
- Anyone promising results. Nobody controls what Google’s AI or ChatGPT says, and nobody honest claims to. What you control is being clear, consistent and worth recommending.
What we do on LaunchPad sites
Every site we build ships with the machine-readable plumbing done: semantic structure, schema markup, an llms.txt file for AI assistants, AI-crawler-friendly settings, and your business facts written in plain, quotable English — tuned from the brief you give us. It’s included in the $1-a-day price ($365 + GST a year, $419.75 incl. GST), not an add-on. We set your site up to be as readable and quotable as it can be, and we don’t promise anyone a particular spot in anyone’s answers — now you know enough to be suspicious of people who do.