The honest state of the NZ market
AEO is early. There is no accreditation, no standard playbook, and the search volume for it is still small, most of the demand shows up inside ChatGPT and Gemini rather than in Google's keyword data. That newness cuts both ways: it means genuine expertise is rare, and it means claiming expertise is free. Here is how the market actually breaks down.
The three kinds of AEO provider in NZ
1. SEO agencies with AEO added on. The most common. Schema markup, FAQ content, and entity work were already part of good technical SEO, so extending to AEO is natural. The question to ask: how do they measure AI visibility specifically? If reporting is still rankings and traffic only, the AEO is a bullet point, not a service.
2. AI-visibility specialists. A small group building services specifically around being named by AI engines, measurement first, then the work. This is where we sit: Jelly Digital runs AEO for trades and professional services, built on Citable, a platform that tracks real customer prompts across seven AI engines and records exactly which businesses get named, cited and recommended, month over month.
3. Consultants and one-off audits. Useful for a snapshot: where are you mentioned today, what are the gaps. The limitation is that AI answers refresh continuously, an audit ages the way a rankings screenshot does.
What a genuine AEO service includes
- Measurement across multiple engines: prompt-level tracking of who gets named in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews, not a single screenshot of one chat
- Entity and schema work: LocalBusiness, FAQ and service markup, consistent NAP, llms.txt
- Direct-answer content: pages that answer real customer questions with real numbers
- Review and platform strategy: velocity on Google reviews plus presence on the platforms engines cite in your industry
- Reporting that names engines: "you are now named on 4 of 12 customer prompts in Gemini" is AEO reporting; "impressions are up" is not
The questions that expose AEO-washing
Ask any provider these four: Which AI engines will you measure, and can I see a sample report? Which prompts will you track for my business? What did you change for your last AEO client and what happened to their AI visibility? How do you handle the fact that most AI crawlers don't read JavaScript? Confident, specific answers mean a real practice. Hand-waving about "optimising for AI" means you're buying the old service with a new label.
Should you just do it yourself?
The foundations, Google Business Profile, weekly reviews, plain-language FAQ content, are absolutely DIY-able, and we publish exactly how in our plain-English AEO guide. Where providers earn their fee is measurement across engines, schema implementation, and the content volume needed to own your category's questions before a competitor does.
