One in five New Zealand business websites does not load

These figures are a dated snapshot. The live numbers, recomputed every day from the same register, are on the NZ AI-Findability Index. Where this page and the Index disagree, the Index is current and this page is the record of what we found on the date above.

There are 769,478 businesses on the New Zealand companies register. Only 121,347 of them list a website at all. That is 15.8 percent, fewer than one in six.

So we went and looked at the ones that do. All of them, one at a time. We are 113,181 sites in.

24,184 of them did not load.

Not slow. Not ugly. Not last updated in 2019. They did not resolve at all. That is 21.4 percent of every New Zealand business website we have been able to try, and it is the most striking thing we have found since we started counting.

A business with a website that does not load is worse off than a business with no website. It is paying for the domain. It is printing the address on invoices, vans and business cards. And when a customer goes to look, there is nothing there.

You are free to cite any of this. The method is at the bottom.

Why we were counting

When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity for a good sparkie in Papamoa, the assistant does not browse the way you do. It builds an answer out of facts it can read and check against each other: what the business does, where it is, how to reach it, whether other sources agree.

So we built an index of how many New Zealand businesses have actually handed the machines those facts. We look for four things, all read from the business's own website, none of them anything we added: a description of what the business does, a phone number you could dial, a logo, and a link to a social profile. Three out of four counts as findable.

Nationally, 60.4 percent pass.

That figure includes the dead sites, and we think it should. An assistant cannot read a site that does not answer any more than a customer can. But the two problems need different fixes, so it is worth splitting them: among the 88,997 sites that did load, 76.8 percent are findable. The other 24,184 are a different conversation.

What the living sites are missing

The most common gap is not the one people expect. It is not the logo, 78 percent have one. It is not even the phone number, although a third of business websites still do not put a dialable number in text a machine can read, usually because it is sitting inside an image.

The most common gap is a link to a social profile. 56 percent of New Zealand business websites do not link to a single one. For an assistant trying to work out whether a business is real, still trading, and the same outfit it saw somewhere else, a social link is one of the cheapest confirmations going, and most of the country is not offering it.

Second: 44 percent carry no plain description of what the business actually does. A site can be beautiful and still never say, in words, the thing it wants to be found for.

Dead business websites, by region

Each region has its own page with its own numbers, its trades and its towns.

Region	Sites checked	Did not load	Share dead
Auckland	51,486	11,332	22.0%
West Coast \*	247	54	21.9%
Waikato	9,088	1,971	21.7%
Taranaki	1,822	390	21.4%
Hawke's Bay	2,852	608	21.3%
Tasman \*	307	65	21.2%
Wellington	12,551	2,649	21.1%
Manawatū-Whanganui	2,732	573	21.0%
Gisborne \*	565	118	20.9%
Bay of Plenty	7,041	1,465	20.8%
Northland	2,420	500	20.7%
Otago	5,274	1,088	20.6%
Canterbury	13,532	2,770	20.5%
Nelson	1,582	315	19.9%
Marlborough \*	701	129	18.4%
Southland	981	157	16.0%
New Zealand	113,181	24,184	21.4%

\* Small sample, treat with care.

Auckland has the most dead business websites in the country. Southland has the fewest by a clear margin. Most of the rest of New Zealand sits within a couple of points of the national 21.4 percent, which is itself a finding: this is not a provincial problem or a city problem. It is everywhere, at roughly the same rate, with Southland the one region doing noticeably better.

The regional picture is the opposite of what you would guess

On findability, Southland comes first at 66.6 percent. Northland, Taranaki and Marlborough follow. The West Coast is last at 57.1 percent.

Auckland is second to last, at 58.5 percent, from by far the biggest sample in the dataset, 51,486 businesses.

The obvious explanation is that Auckland simply has a different mix of trades. We checked, by re-scoring Auckland as though it had the national mix. It moved the number by one tenth of one percent. Auckland's position is not a composition effect. The largest and most competitive business market in the country is genuinely a bit worse at this than Southland.

We do not have a confident explanation for that, and we would rather say so than invent one.

Who is good at it

Vets lead every trade at 69.7 percent, then accommodation at 68.1 and health and beauty at 67.5. These are all businesses people ring in an urgent or a personal moment, and it shows.

Cafes and eating places sit at 60.9. Tourism and activities at 59.7. Retail at 59.2. The industries whose whole livelihood depends on being found by somebody who does not already know their name are, as a group, below the national average.

The headline we had, and killed

The lowest scoring category in our data is the one holding web, SEO and marketing businesses, at 49.3 percent. That is an irresistible headline. We are not running it.

When we looked inside that category we found a film production company, a printer, some database consultants and an online clothing shop sitting alongside the actual agencies. It is a loose digital and creative bucket, not a list of marketers.

So we tested it properly. We pulled every business in the country whose name genuinely says it sells marketing, SEO or web services, and scored those instead. They come in at 76.2 percent, comfortably above the national average. The people who sell findability are, it turns out, good at it.

We are telling you this because it is the most interesting thing we learned about our own data, and because anyone re-running our numbers by category will hit the same trap.

Where New Zealand actually stands

Our four-fact measure is ours. Nobody else publishes it, so there is no international league table to drop New Zealand into, and any story claiming "New Zealand 60.4 percent versus Britain's something" would be inventing a comparison. We are not going to do that.

Here is what can honestly be said.

On the official measure, New Zealand is mid-table. The IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking scores 69 economies on their capacity to adopt digital technology. In the 2025 edition Switzerland leads on 100.00, the United States is second on 99.29 and Singapore third on 99.18. New Zealand is 28th on 75.67, five places behind Australia, which sits 23rd on 79.90.

And now the contradiction, which is the most useful thing here. The Network Readiness Index ranks 127 economies across 53 variables. New Zealand comes 23rd overall. But on one specific indicator, "Firms with website", New Zealand ranks 8th in the world, scoring 92.64.

Eighth. Out of 127.

Our register says 15.8 percent.

Both are true. Indicators like that are built from business surveys, and business surveys reach formal, staffed, contactable enterprises. The companies register contains every registered entity: the staffed firms, and also several hundred thousand sole traders, dormant shells and one-person operations that no survey ever rings.

So New Zealand genuinely is near the top of the world for website adoption among the businesses anyone surveys. And an AI assistant working from the public record still cannot find a website for five out of six registered New Zealand businesses.

If you only read the index, the country looks close to solved. The machine-readable reality is a different country.

The only comparable study we could find tested 50 websites

In July 2026 a UK agency, Mode Marketing, ran the nearest thing to our test that exists. It checked whether the UK's top 50 digital agencies were readable by AI, and found 38 percent had no structured data on their homepage, 14 percent had an llms.txt file, and three of the fifty actively blocked ChatGPT's crawler.

Good work, worth reading. It is also 50 websites, hand-picked from a ranking of the best agencies in the country.

One number in it sits beside ours. Of those 50 hand-picked, top-of-industry sites, 47 were reachable. Three were not. Six percent, on a curated list of the best.

Across a whole national register, nobody curated and nobody selected for quality, New Zealand's figure is 21.4 percent.

Those measure different populations and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The best 50 agencies in Britain ought to beat the entire New Zealand business register, and they do. The point is the scale of what has been measured. As far as we can establish, nobody has run this test across an entire country's business register before, anywhere.

Check your own

Any New Zealand business can see its own result in about ten seconds, free, with no signup, at list-it.nz. Type the business name and you get the four facts, what the AI engines currently say, and which businesses they name instead.

Method, so you can check us

Every business on the New Zealand companies register is in our database, from the September 2026 NZBN snapshot. Where the register records a website, we fetch it and look for four facts in the page itself. We count nothing that List-It has added, generated or enriched. A site that does not resolve scores zero and counts as not findable. Three of four is the pass mark.

The full index, by region, trade and town, recomputes daily and is public at list-it.nz/findability.

Using these figures? Please cite "List-It NZ AI-Findability Index, list-it.nz/findability" with the date you accessed it. If you want a cut we have not published, a particular town, a single trade, or a comparison between two places, email info@list-it.nz and we will run it.