Yes, but far fewer people will arrive the way they used to. Industry research suggests around 60% of searches now end without a click, because Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity answer the question directly. For New Zealand businesses, this means the website is no longer the destination of every buying journey. Sometimes the AI's answer is. The businesses that stay visible are the ones whose expertise gets cited inside those answers. That's a different game from traditional SEO, and it's still early enough that small players can win it.
Three shifts, all measurable.
No. It means SEO has split into two jobs. The first job is the familiar one: ranking for searches where people still click through, which especially includes high-intent commercial searches ("marketing agency Auckland", "[service] pricing NZ") and anything where the searcher needs to transact rather than just learn. The second, newer job is being the source AI engines quote when they answer your buyers' questions. The two jobs overlap (good structure, authority and clarity help both) but they're not identical, and businesses optimising only for the first are slowly disappearing from the second.
AI engines select sources that make their job easy: content that answers a specific question directly, in the first paragraphs rather than after a long wind-up; self-contained sections that can be lifted whole; real numbers, named sources and dates; comparison content (AI answers love a structured comparison); and authorship signals, meaning a named expert with credentials attached. Content that loses: thin "ultimate guides" that say what everyone says, keyword-stuffed pages written for 2019's algorithm, and anything whose answer is buried under six paragraphs of preamble. The uncomfortable summary: AI search rewards genuine expertise expressed clearly, and punishes content that was only ever pretending.
AI engines try hard to give locally relevant answers, and the pool of well-structured, authoritative NZ content in most B2B categories is shallow. A mid-sized Auckland firm that publishes direct, well-evidenced answers to its buyers' questions can become the cited source for its category in a way that would be nearly impossible in the US market. The same dynamic that made early SEO adopters disproportionately visible in the 2000s is running again, compressed into the next couple of years.
How do I check if AI tools mention my business? Ask them directly, monthly, using your buyers' real questions. Track who gets named over time. It's the new rank tracking.
Will website traffic keep falling? For informational queries, probably. High-intent commercial traffic is more resilient, and it's also the traffic that was always worth the most.
Does this replace our SEO investment? It redirects it. Foundations (site health, authority, links) still matter; the content layer on top now needs to be answer-shaped.
How fast can visibility in AI answers change? Faster than traditional SEO in some cases. AI engines refresh sources continually, and well-structured new content can be cited within weeks, not the months rankings typically take.