What does it actually cost to get found online in NZ?

Ask three people and you will get three answers between zero and two thousand dollars a month. That is not because anyone is lying. It is because "getting found" covers about six different jobs, and most quotes do not say which ones they include.

Here is what each job actually costs in New Zealand in 2026, cheapest first, with what you get for it.

Free, and genuinely worth doing first

Nobody makes money telling you to do these, which is precisely why they get skipped.

A verified Google Business Profile. Free. Still the single biggest lever for a local business, and around four in five NZ businesses either have not claimed one or have left it half filled. Check yours in ten seconds.
Apple Business Connect. Free. Feeds Apple Maps and Siri. Roughly a fifteen minute job and almost nobody in New Zealand has done it.
Bing Places. Free, and it matters more than its market share suggests because it feeds Copilot and, indirectly, other AI answers.
A claimed listing on a verified directory. Free on List-It, where every registered NZ business already has a page built from the official register.
Asking two happy customers for a review this week. Free. Beats most paid work.

Realistically this is an afternoon of your time and it moves more than the first several hundred dollars you could spend.

The AI visibility tools: USD $29 to $399 a month

This is the newest category and the most aggressively marketed. Tools like Profound, Peec, Otterly, AthenaHQ and Ayzeo track whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI answers mention your business. Entry pricing runs from about USD $29 a month at the cheap end to USD $399 a month for multi engine coverage.

They are good at what they do. The thing to understand before buying one is what they do not do: they measure your visibility, they do not create it. A tracker will tell you, every week, in a nice dashboard, that ChatGPT still does not mention you. Fixing that is a separate job.

For a New Zealand business turning over a few hundred thousand a year, USD $29 a month to be told you are invisible is a hard sell. Our own tool sits deliberately at the other end: NZD $149 a year, and it fixes as well as measures. The cheapest of the American trackers costs more in four months than we cost in a year.

A one off website fix: $500 to $3,000

If your website is slow, unreadable to machines, or missing the structured details search engines and AI assistants look for, this is the work that changes it. Speed, Core Web Vitals, accessibility, on page SEO, schema markup.

Quotes in New Zealand generally run $500 to $3,000 depending on site size and who is doing it. Our sister company Bay Web Co does it as a fixed $999 plus GST with a written guarantee on the result, which anchors the range but is not the only option. Get two quotes.

This is a one off, not a subscription. Done properly it stays done for a year or two before standards move.

Ongoing SEO: $500 to $2,500 a month

This is where most of the money in the industry sits, and where most of the disappointment does too.

A real SEO retainer in New Zealand starts around $500 a month for a small local campaign and runs past $2,500 for anything competitive. What you are buying is ongoing content, link building and technical work. It can absolutely work. It is also slow, hard to attribute, and completely wasted if the free items at the top of this page are still undone.

Do not buy a retainer while your Google Business Profile is unverified. That is spending a thousand dollars to push water uphill.

A full website rebuild: $3,000 to $15,000+

Sometimes necessary. Usually not, and usually sold to people whose actual problem was on the list above. If your current site loads, states what you do and can be edited, a rebuild is unlikely to be the thing standing between you and the phone ringing.

So what should a small NZ business actually spend?

An honest sequence, and you can stop at any point where the phone starts ringing enough.

1. $0. Every free item above. Give it an afternoon. Most businesses never get past here and most businesses would not need to. 2. $149 a year. A tool that watches whether it is working and tells you what changed, so month two is not guesswork. 3. $999 once, only if the check says your website itself is the blocker. Not before. 4. A monthly retainer, only once one to three are done and you know you need more than they gave you.

The order matters more than the amounts. Almost every unhappy small business SEO story we have heard started at step four.

How to find out which step you are on

Two free checks, no signup, about ten seconds each.

Why isn't my business showing up on Google? reads your public Google Business Profile and names the biggest gap.
What do the AI engines say about you? runs the searches your customers run and shows you who gets named instead.

If both come back clean and the phone still is not ringing, your problem is not visibility and nobody should be selling you SEO.

A note on these prices

Ranges are indicative New Zealand market rates as at September 2026, gathered from published pricing and our own quoting. AI visibility tool pricing is entry tier list pricing in US dollars, taken from the vendors' own public pages. We run one of the products mentioned, so treat our own numbers with the scepticism you would apply to anyone quoting themselves, and get comparison quotes for anything above the free tier.