Why NZ Marketers Can't Afford to Ignore The Rise of GEO & AEO

Discover why New Zealand marketers must adapt to the rise of GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) to stay competitive in the evolving search landscape.

New Zealand’s digital advertising market just hit $2.967 billion for calendar year 2025, up 12% year-on-year.¹ Search alone accounted for $1.44 billion of that almost half of all digital ad spend in the country.¹ Whilst advertisers are pouring more money into search than ever, the nature of search itself is fundamentally changing. AI is now answering the questions that used to drive clicks to websites, and the implications for New Zealand brands are increasing at an alarming rate.

The Search Landscape Has Shifted

The data tells the story. According to Semrush’s 2025 analysis, nearly 60% of Google searches in the US and EU now end without the user clicking through to any website.² Our own analysis pf Australian and New Zealand data shows similar figures. When Google’s AI Overviews appear in search results, the picture is stark. Pew Research Center found that users are measurably less likely to click on any result link when an AI-generated summary appears at the top of the page.³ Only around 1% of searches lead to users clicking a link within an AI Overview itself.³

This isn’t a distant international trend that will eventually reach our shores. Google AI Overviews are already live in New Zealand, and by mid-2025 they had expanded to over 200 countries and 40 languages.⁴ The shift is well underway and is critical for every New Zealand business that depends on organic search traffic for leads, sales, or brand awareness to be aware of it.

For NZ marketers who have spent years building SEO strategies around traditional organic rankings, this represents perhaps the most significant disruption since Google introduced featured snippets over a decade ago. The search results page is no longer just a gateway to websites, increasingly, it is the final destination.

AI Is Already Reshaping How Kiwis and Australians Shop

The consumer side of this equation is equally revealing. Research from the New Modes 2025 report (surveyed 1,000 consumers across the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand), found that 46% of Gen Z and Millennials in Australia and New Zealand are now using AI platforms daily.⁵ One in three Gen Z consumers prefer AI platforms over search engines for product research, and for this cohort, AI is nearly as popular as Google for starting a shopping journey (33% vs 37%).⁵

Meanwhile, Adyen’s 2025 Retail Report found that 32% of Australian consumers now use AI to assist with shopping, representing a 45% surge in adoption over the previous year.⁶ More than half said they would be open to making purchases using AI technology in the future.⁶ One of the most demanded services from The Optimisers is around agentic readiness; ensuring the data, trust and signals are optimised for AI search and in the future delegated commerce and decisions.

Salesforce’s Connected Shoppers Report paints a similar picture for our region: 25% of ANZ consumers are already using AI to discover products, while 64% are eager to use AI-powered shopping tools for faster service, smarter loyalty rewards, and more personalised recommendations.⁷

This isn’t just younger demographics experimenting with a novelty. The IAB (US) and Talk Shoppe’s comprehensive AI commerce study found that consumers who actively use AI for shopping outspend other online shoppers by 1.3x per month and shop more frequently.⁸ They are, by any measure, a high-value audience.

What Is Generative Engine Optimisation?

You’ve probably already heard a bit about Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), especially if you’ve heard one of our keynotes for the Marketing Association, IAB or University of Auckland.

We’ve been at the forefront of SEO for the past 16 years, even writing a book for Penguin Random House on the subject. Whilst SEO is still relevant, it was built to help websites rank in a list of ten blue links, GEO is the discipline of ensuring your brand, products, and expertise are surfaced, cited, and accurately represented by AI systems: Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, and the growing number of AI-powered shopping and research tools that consumers are already using. Our current strategy is to consider both.

GEO sits alongside a related concept called Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), which focuses specifically on structuring content so that it can be parsed, understood, and presented as a direct answer by AI and voice assistants. Together, GEO and AEO represent the new rules of discoverability in an AI-mediated world.

The core shift is this: traditional SEO optimised for algorithms that ranked pages. GEO optimises for AI systems that synthesise information from multiple sources and present a single, curated answer. Your brand doesn’t just need to rank number one, it also needs to be the source that AI trusts and cites when a consumer asks a question.

Why This Matters More for NZ Businesses Than You Might Think

New Zealand’s digital advertising market has matured. At $2.967 billion for CY 2025, it grew in line with larger markets. The IAB Australia reported 11.5% growth to AUD $18.4 billion, and IAB UK reported 10% growth to £40.5 billion over the same period.¹ Video was the standout growth format across all three markets, with NZ video ad revenue surging 27% to $653.8 million.¹

But beneath these healthy topline numbers lies a reality not many are talking about. Search accounts for 49% of all digital ad revenue in New Zealand, the single largest category by a significant margin.¹ Social display and video is the next biggest channel at 19%, followed by non-social display and video, also at 19%.¹ Any disruption to the economics of search affecting how consumers find information, compare products, and make purchase decisions, has outsized implications for the New Zealand market.

And the IAB NZ data reveals another trend worth watching: social display and video gained 2% market share in CY 2025, while non-social display and video lost 2%.¹ As AI increasingly mediates the research and consideration phases of the consumer journey, the channels where brands can build trust and visibility are shifting rapidly.

The AI Shopping Journey: What the Research Reveals

The IAB/Talk Shoppe AI commerce study is one of the most comprehensive examinations yet of how consumers behave when AI is part of their shopping process. The findings challenge several assumptions that NZ marketers might hold about how this all works in practice.⁸

AI Is Most Valuable in the Messy Middle

Consumers find AI most effective during the research and comparison phase of their journey, what Google has famously coined “the messy middle.” In the study, 83% of AI shoppers said AI was most effective for researching and comparing products, followed by 71% who valued it for narrowing down choices.⁸ It excels at synthesising complex information, comparing specifications, summarising reviews, and helping consumers cut through the noise.

For NZ brands, this means AI isn’t replacing the journey it’s reorganising and augmenting it. AI Shoppers took an average of 1.6 steps before consulting AI and 3.8 steps afterward, with 95% taking additional steps online after AI to build purchase confidence.⁸ Each of those post-AI steps is a high-intent moment where brands can earn trust and drive conversion, but only if they’re visible in those moments.

AI Drives Traffic to Retailers — But Only If Trust Is Earned

Perhaps the most important finding for NZ retailers and e-commerce operators: after interacting with AI, visits to retailer and marketplace websites nearly tripled.⁸ AI doesn’t yet eliminate the need for your website, it creates a more qualified, higher-intent visitor. But that visitor arrives with specific expectations shaped by what AI told them. If your product page contradicts the pricing, availability, or specifications that AI surfaced, you risk losing the sale entirely.

Trust Remains the Biggest Barrier

Only 46% of shoppers fully trust AI’s shopping recommendations, and 89% double-check AI information against other sources.⁸ This trust gap creates both a challenge and an opportunity. Brands that provide clear, accurate, well-structured product information, the type that AI can confidently cite and that consumers can verify, have a significant advantage over competitors whose digital presence is inconsistent, outdated, or poorly structured.

What NZ Marketers Should Do Now – AI Readiness

The shift to AI-mediated search and commerce isn’t coming it’s here, in every keynote we give almost everyone in the crowd uses LLMs (Large Language Models) daily. For New Zealand businesses, the strategic response needs to span three areas.

1. Make Your Brand Understandable to Machines

AI systems don’t browse your website the way a human does. They need structured, consistent, machine-readable data to understand what you offer, why it’s credible, and when to recommend it. This means investing in structured data markup (schema.org), ensuring product specifications are accurate and comprehensive, and maintaining consistency across your website, Google Business Profile, retail listings, and anywhere else your brand appears online.

For NZ businesses, this also means paying attention to the local information ecosystem. Community forums, local review sites, industry publications, and NZ-specific marketplaces all contribute to what AI systems “know” about your brand. If your only digital presence is a website and a Google Ads account, you’re limiting the signals AI can draw from.

2. Create Content That AI Wants to Cite

The brands that win in a GEO world are those that become authoritative sources on their topic. This doesn’t mean churning out generic blog posts (like many of the agencies are still recommending!), it means creating genuinely useful, expert content that answers the questions consumers actually ask AI. Think product comparison guides, detailed specification breakdowns, transparently sourced buying advice, and content that demonstrates real expertise rather than just keyword density.

Consider how consumers interact with AI when shopping. The most common tasks are comparing products (57%), answering product-specific questions (53%), tracking prices (53%), and summarising reviews (49%).⁸ Structure your content to serve these needs directly, and AI systems will be more likely to cite you as a trusted source.

3. Treat Post-AI Touchpoints as Critical Conversion Moments

When a consumer arrives at your website after consulting AI, they’re not just browsing, they’re checking the website for trust signals. The IAB/Talk Shoppe research found that 76% of these visitors are checking prices and deals, 44% are confirming product variants and options, and 41% are reading verified reviews.⁸ Your product pages need to be optimised for this specific behaviour: lead with pricing clarity, surface verified reviews prominently, and ensure that what AI told the consumer matches what they find on your site.

The Opportunity Is Now

New Zealand’s digital advertising market is healthy, growing, and increasingly sophisticated. But the rules that have historically driven that growth building websites for blue-link rankings, bidding on keywords, optimising for click-through rates are in the process of being rewritten in real time by AI.

The businesses that will thrive are those that recognise GEO not as a replacement for SEO, but as its necessary evolution. In a world where AI systems mediate an ever-larger share of consumer decisions, being visible, credible, and accurately represented in AI-generated responses is as fundamental as having a website was twenty years ago.

For NZ marketers, the question isn’t whether AI will change how consumers find and choose your brand. It already has. The question is whether your digital strategy is ready for a world where the first impression increasingly isn’t a Google result or an ad, it’s an AI-generated answer that may or may not mention you at all.

The cost of inaction is invisibility. The opportunity for those who move early is disproportionate influence in the moments that matter most.

Interested in our guide on how to look at Keywords from a GEO perspective, visit our AI Search Strategy Guide for a comprehensive understanding of how LLMs decipher search queries.

Sources

1. IAB New Zealand, Q4, CY 2025 Digital Advertising Revenue Report, March 2026. Comparisons with IAB Australia (AUD $18.4b, +11.5%) and IAB UK (£40.5b, +10%) cited by IAB NZ via M+AD Daily.

2. Semrush, Zero-Click Searches Study, 2025. 58.5% of US searches and 59.7% of EU searches end without a click.

3. Pew Research Center, “Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results,” July 2025. Based on browsing data from 900 US adults; ~18% of searches triggered AI summaries; only ~1% of searches led to a click on a link within an AI Overview.

4. Search Engine Journal, “Impact of AI Overviews: How Publishers Need to Adapt,” October 2025. AI Overviews live in 200+ countries and 40 languages as of May 2025.

5. Commerce / Future Commerce, New Modes 2025 Report, September 2025. Surveyed 1,000 consumers across US, UK, Australia and New Zealand. Reported via eCommerce News NZ and Mediaweek Australia.

6. Adyen, 2025 Annual Retail Report (Australia), 2025. Poll of 41,000 consumers across 28 countries including Australia; 32% of Australians use AI for shopping, a 45% year-on-year increase.

7. Salesforce, Connected Shoppers Report (sixth edition), April 2025. Dual surveys of 8,350 shoppers and 1,700 retail decision-makers worldwide including 500 shoppers and 100 retailers in ANZ.

8. IAB (US) / Talk Shoppe, “When AI Guides the Shopping Journey: Opportunities for Marketers in the Age of AI-Driven Commerce,” October 2025. 450+ digital ethnographies and survey of 600 US consumers.

9. EY, Future Consumer Index — New Zealand, 2025. Survey of 23,000+ consumers globally including 500+ in New Zealand.

Source: Richard Conway, CEO, The Optimisers, 27th March 2026