The NZ AI-Findability Index

When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for “a good electrician in Tauranga”, the assistant can only name businesses it can read facts about. This index measures how many New Zealand businesses have given it those facts, across 1,311 New Zealand business websites we have read (of 113,015 businesses with a website on the register), by region, trade and town.

How “findable” is defined: Among NZ businesses whose own website List-It has read, a business counts as findable when that website exposed at least 3 of 5 facts an AI assistant needs: a description of what it does, a valid phone number, a logo, a social profile, and a services list. Every fact is taken from the business’s own website, read by us in register order so that no region is reached before another. Nothing List-It has added to a page counts towards its score. Hours and photos are not counted, because they can only be added by an owner who has claimed the page, and the index should not punish a business for a field it could not have filled. The “businesses” column is the sample size for each row; regions and towns appear once their sample is large enough to mean something, and the whole index is marked provisional until at least 80% of NZ business websites have been read.

Regional, trade and town tables appear as the read grows. The first full national picture is expected within two weeks; the daily update keeps going after that.