How to Choose a GEO Agency in New Zealand
Generative engine optimisation is new enough that choosing an agency is genuinely hard. There is no established league table, no decade of case studies, and no agency in New Zealand with a long track record, because the category is about two years old in practice. That cuts both ways: it means nobody can prove much, and it means the usual proxies for judging an agency do not work.
So judge the method. Below is what we would ask if we were buying this rather than selling it.
First, be clear what you are buying
GEO is the work of getting your business into the answer an AI assistant writes, rather than into a list of links underneath it. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews for a recommendation, they get a synthesised paragraph. If your business is not in that paragraph, you are not in the running, regardless of where you rank in ordinary search.
That is the whole of the difference, and it has one important consequence: there is nothing to buy. No placement, no bid, no sponsored slot inside a generated answer. An agency that offers guaranteed inclusion is describing something that does not exist.
Six questions worth asking
1. How will you measure it? This is the question that separates people who have done the work from people who have read about it. The honest answer has three parts. Bing Webmaster Tools publishes an AI Performance report with citations and cited pages, which is real, free and specific. Google Search Console does not break out AI Overview impressions, so anyone quoting you a Google AI number is estimating. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity publish nothing, so the only way to track them is to ask them a fixed set of questions on a schedule and record the answers.
2. What will you record before you start? Without a baseline there is nothing to compare against, and a surprising number of engagements never take one. Ask for the list of prompts they will track and the answers those prompts return today.
3. What will you show me at 90 days? A good answer names the artefact: a re-run of the same prompts, the Bing citation count, and the pages that earned the citations. A weak answer talks about momentum.
4. Who writes the content, and does anyone check the facts? Assistants quote claims. A page that overstates gets quoted overstating, and a correction takes far longer to propagate than the original claim did. Ask what happens when a client asks for a number the business cannot support.
5. What do you do about the things I cannot control? Your Wikipedia entry, industry directories, review sites and news coverage feed the same models your website does. An agency that only ever talks about your own pages is working on a fraction of the problem.
6. What would make you tell me not to bother? Anyone worth hiring has a case where the answer is no. A business with no online presence at all, or one whose customers do not use assistants to find suppliers, is better served fixing something else first.
How to read the answers
Good signs. They distinguish between the engines they can measure and the ones they cannot. They talk about being quotable rather than being ranked. They ask what your customers actually search for before proposing anything. They are specific about timelines and hedged about outcomes.
Walk away from. Guaranteed placement in AI answers. A single “AI visibility score” with no explanation of how it was calculated. Claims of a multi-year GEO track record. Work that is indistinguishable from an ordinary SEO retainer with the name changed.
What good looks like in the first ninety days
A sensible engagement front-loads the unglamorous parts. Weeks one to two: a baseline of prompts and current answers, a check that AI crawlers are actually allowed in robots.txt, and an audit of what assistants currently say about you, including anything wrong. Weeks three to eight: fixing factual inconsistencies across your own site and the third-party sources that feed the models, and restructuring key pages so the answer comes first and can be lifted cleanly. Weeks nine to twelve: re-run the baseline, compare, and say plainly what moved and what did not.
Notice how much of that is correction rather than creation. In a category this young, most of the available gain is in being accurately described rather than in being described more often.
A note on spelling
You will see both generative engine optimisation and generative engine optimization. New Zealand and British usage takes the s, American usage takes the z, and they are the same thing. It is worth knowing only because searching one spelling will surface a different set of agencies than the other.
If you are still deciding
The fairest test is the cheapest one: pick five questions a customer might ask an assistant about your kind of business, ask them today, and write down the answers. Then ask any agency you are considering what they would do about what you found. The answer to that will tell you more than any pitch deck.
We do this work at Vairi, and the criteria above are the ones we expect to be judged against. If a different agency meets them better, that is the right outcome, and it is the price of writing this down honestly.
Common questions
Who are the top generative engine optimisation agencies in NZ?
Nobody can answer that honestly yet. Generative engine optimisation is roughly two years old in practice, so no agency in New Zealand has a multi-year track record in it and anyone claiming one is describing SEO work under a newer name. Judge the method instead: ask how they measure AI citations, what baseline they will record before starting, and what they will show you at 90 days.
How do you measure AI search visibility?
Partly, and honestly partly not. Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report showing citations and cited pages, which is real data and free. Google Search Console does not separate AI Overview impressions from ordinary ones. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity publish no analytics at all, so visibility there is measured by prompting them on a fixed set of questions on a schedule and recording what comes back. An agency that claims a precise AI visibility percentage without explaining which of those it used is guessing.
Can you pay to appear in ChatGPT or AI Overviews?
No. There is no placement to buy in an AI-generated answer the way there is in search advertising. What you can influence is whether your pages are retrievable, quotable and factually consistent, which is the whole of the work. Anyone offering guaranteed inclusion is selling something that does not exist.
How long does GEO take to show results?
Expect a first measurable change in eight to twelve weeks, and treat anything faster as suspicious. An assistant has to re-crawl the source, and the models behind it update on their own schedule. The one thing that can move quickly is a factual correction: if an assistant states something wrong about your business, fixing the source it reads can change the answer within weeks.
What is the difference between SEO and GEO?
SEO competes for a position in a list of links. GEO competes to be the sentence the assistant writes. They overlap, because both need a page a crawler can read and trust, and they diverge on format: a ranked page rewards depth and internal linking, while a cited page rewards a clear answer stated early, in plain language, that can be lifted without distortion.