How do I get my business found by AI search?

Work in three layers, in order. Foundation, so the AI crawlers can reach and read your site. Structure, so your answer is easy to lift, which means leading each page with the answer under a heading written as the question a customer would ask. Authority, so the engines trust you enough to repeat you, which is built through reviews, mentions and presence on the places AI reads, rather than on your own website.

Miss one layer and the other two cannot carry it. A perfect answer on a site the AI cannot reach is invisible. A reachable site with nothing worth quoting gets skipped.

The four that decide whether you can be cited are OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT, Claude-SearchBot for Claude, PerplexityBot for Perplexity and Googlebot for Google AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Most published advice names GPTBot and ClaudeBot instead, but those are training crawlers and allowing them does not make you citable. Google-Extended only governs Gemini and Google AI training, not AI Overviews.

One correction worth knowing. Cloudflare's 15 September 2026 change is widely reported as a blanket block on AI crawlers. It is not. From that date, new domains joining Cloudflare have bots classified as Training or Agent blocked by default on pages that display ads, while Search stays allowed. Existing domains are unchanged.

It builds on SEO rather than replacing it. Google's own guidance states that getting found in AI search is still SEO, working from the same foundations. Forrester reaches the same conclusion, that answer engine optimisation does not differ fundamentally from SEO.

The engines mostly read pages that already rank, so solid search foundations still do the work underneath. What changes is the shape of the content and where authority comes from. You will see it called AEO, GEO, AIO, LLMO and AISO. They are one thing under several names.

Yes, and there is now New Zealand evidence rather than guesswork. 55% of Kiwi online shoppers use AI tools at least sometimes when they shop, rising to 61% among 18 to 39 year olds, according to IAB research published in July 2026.

At the same time 93% still use a search engine or an online store to research a purchase. AI has been added on top of search in New Zealand rather than replacing it, so the businesses that show up in both win twice.

82% of New Zealand businesses now use AI, but almost none have built for AI search. Authority is slow to build, which means the ones who start now become the trusted name before the rest catch on.

It helps considerably. A clear readable price, even a starting figure or a range, is something an answer engine can quote with confidence. Most New Zealand competitors still hide their pricing, which means a published price is both a citation advantage and a differentiator.

The same applies to honest comparison pages. What your business costs and how it compares are the exact questions people put to AI before they buy.

Mostly off your own website. Brands are around 6.5 times more likely to be cited through someone else's site than through their own. Answer engines lean on Reddit, whose content is licensed to several AI companies, along with LinkedIn, YouTube and review platforms.

In New Zealand that means your Google Business Profile, NoCowboys, Trade Me feedback and whatever directory your trade actually uses.

Here is the part that should cheer up every small business. Backlinks, the old currency of SEO, show almost no correlation with AI citation. You do not need years of domain authority. You need to be quotable.