Marketing Momentum: AI, Search and Smarter Franchise Growth in 2026

The way New Zealanders find businesses is changing fast — but not in the way the hype merchants would have you believe. AI is reshaping discovery, yet the fundamentals that have always driven growth matter more than ever. Here's how multi-location and franchise networks should think about search, AI and technology this year.

How New Zealanders Find Businesses in 2026

Business discovery online breaks into four distinct channels, and each is moving in a different direction:

• Organic search — the unpaid Google listings you earn through SEO. Reach is rising, but clicks are falling.
• Paid search (Google Ads) — buying visibility at the moments that matter. Spend is growing, click-through rates are being squeezed.
• Local search — Google Business Profile, plus Apple and Bing listings. Rising, and the channel least affected by AI.
• AI and LLMs — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and the rest. The newest layer, and the fastest growing.

Directories, social and sales platforms sit in the broader discovery picture, but the search-and-AI layer is where the real shift is happening.

Organic Search: Google Still Owns the Room

Google handles roughly 90% of New Zealand search queries — it's the foundation of any discovery strategy, including AI discovery. Non-Google traffic is almost entirely Bing (~7%), which matters because Bing feeds some AI search surfaces, doubling as partial AI insurance. Everyone else — Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Ecosia — is a rounding error.

What's changing is what a top ranking is worth. Google's own Q1 2026 results show search queries hitting an all-time high, so the channel is thriving. But a #1 organic ranking isn't what it used to be: when an AI Overview answers the query on the page, fewer people click through. Major 2025–26 studies confirm this, with one ISB/Carnegie Mellon study recording a 38% drop in clicks when an AI Overview appears.

The flip side is the opportunity. Brands cited inside an AI Overview earn around 35% more organic and 91% more paid clicks. Being in the AI answer is the new position zero.

Paid Search: Half of Every Digital Dollar

New Zealand's total digital ad revenue reached $2.97B in 2025, up 12% year-on-year. Paid search alone accounts for roughly half of that — $1.44B and growing at 12%. Video is the fastest-growing format at $653.8M (+27%), now about 22% of digital spend, while classifieds and directories sit steady at $389.5M (+7%). For most NZ businesses, Google Ads remains where the money goes — and where intent-driven leads are captured.

Local Search: Bigger and More Important Than Ever

Google Business Profile powers your presence across Google's local surfaces — the Knowledge Panel, Maps and the Local Pack. For franchise networks, it's a powerful driver of local enquiry: profile engagements generate high-intent views, website clicks, calls and store visits, and earn the reviews that heavily influence purchase decisions.

Demand is surging. Around 46% of all Google searches now carry local intent, "open near me" searches have jumped 400% year-on-year, and industry reports point to profile views up 35% YOY.

Two things now matter enormously:

Data consistency across providers. LLMs and AI Overviews synthesise from structured sources. Inconsistent name, address and phone (NAP) data across Google, Apple, Bing and directories doesn't just hurt local ranking — it actively confuses the models, which can then drop or misrepresent your business in AI answers. This is a newly elevated risk for franchise networks.

Reviews. Positive review scores are a key driver of purchase likelihood, with the conversion sweet spot sitting between 4.2 and 4.8 stars. They're also a major trust and E-E-A-T signal.

AI Overviews and LLMs: A Genuine Race

If Google owns conventional search, the AI layer is genuinely competitive. ChatGPT still leads referral traffic at around 76% — but it was 84%+ a year ago, which signals a maturing, competitive market rather than a stable monopoly. Gemini is the fast-rising number two and the one to watch, backed by Google's distribution across Search, Android and Workspace. The field is fragmenting, which is exactly why visibility needs to be tracked across engines, not just one.

"AI SEO" Is Mostly Just SEO

Despite everything you've heard about AEO, GEO, AIO and LLMO, these are largely repackaged SEO. The good work you already do — strong content, authority, clean technical foundations — gets you most of the way there.

• ~85% is what already works: quality content, backlinks, technical health and genuine topical depth (E-E-A-T). Use schema markup and avoid slop.
• ~15% is the AI-specific focus: earned mentions through PR, entity consistency, conversational queries and AI visibility tracking.

It's a real extra focus, not a whole new discipline.

Where LLMs Actually Get Their Answers

If you know where LLMs source answers, you know where to earn visibility. The key finding: there is no universal top source. Even the most-cited domain on any platform rarely exceeds 5% of citations — the rest spreads across thousands of domains. The goal isn't "rank #1," it's "be present and consistent across many authoritative places."

A few patterns hold:

• Recurring across engines: Reddit, Wikipedia, LinkedIn and YouTube surface repeatedly. LinkedIn alone appears in roughly 14% of ChatGPT Search and Google AI Mode answers, so presence there is high-leverage.
• Each engine differs: ChatGPT leans on Wikipedia (~7.8%), Perplexity leans on Reddit, and Google AI Overviews overlap about 54% with organic rankings — the SEO bridge.
• The honesty check: only ~12% of AI-cited URLs overlap Google's top 10. The other ~88% come from pages not ranking first, so rankings help but distributed authority — mentions and coverage — matters too.

The major AI engines mostly route back through Google anyway, so "non-Google" is smaller than the hype suggests. But it isn't zero, and a handful of platforms carry real weight.

The Foundations That Matter Now

Get the fundamentals right before chasing the shiny things.

A fast, clean site wins. Over half of mobile visitors leave if a page takes more than ~3 seconds. Core Web Vitals and mobile-first are table stakes — Google and AI both favour fast, well-built sites. Avoid code bloat.

Structured data on every location. Schema labels your content for machines so each branch is read accurately — the same data that feeds AI Overviews.

Consistent NAP everywhere. Identical name, address and phone across your site, Google Business Profile, Apple, Bing and directories. Inconsistency is the number one silent killer of local visibility.

Measure the whole journey. GA4, Search Console and call/lead tracking — then move toward measuring AI mentions, citations and sentiment so you can see the full funnel, not just the last click.

At Scale: The Multi-Location Challenge

• Branch pages that convert. Every branch needs its own indexed, locally-relevant page — not a thin directory stub.
• Centralised brand, localised execution. Consistent brand plus genuinely local content is what ranks and what AI trusts to cite. Use E-E-A-T as a guiding principle.
• A reputation system, not ad-hoc reviews. Build a repeatable process to earn and respond to reviews across every location, targeting that 4.2–4.8 star sweet spot.
• Accessibility as standard. HTTPS and WCAG basics are now ranking and trust signals, not nice-to-haves. Keep XML sitemaps and robots.txt current (an llms.txt file is strictly optional).

AI Inside the Business

Beyond visibility, AI is an operational advantage — it's about operations, not just marketing.

• 24/7 customer service and review management. AI chat and booking handle routine enquiries around the clock, freeing staff for high-value work — especially when paired with marketing automation, email, SMS and booking integrations.
• Content at scale. Drafting local landing pages, social posts and review responses — human-edited, not human-replaced.
• Smarter operations. Automated email drafts and scheduling, meeting transcription and summaries, voice-to-text on any device.

Unless something radical changes, AI is a powerful force-multiplier for good workers, not a replacement — and it rewards businesses with clean, consistent data.

Doing It Right: Guardrails for Networks

• Start with one workflow. Pick a single high-volume task, prove the case, then scale. Don't try to boil the ocean.
• Build an internal knowledge repository. A centralised, well-structured source of truth — processes, SOPs, brand and product knowledge — lets AI tools work for you. The AI can even help you build it.
• Set clear AI usage policies. Update your terms of service, privacy policies and internal guidance. A simple shared policy protects the brand across all franchisees — for example, never paste customer or commercial data into public AI tools, and use business-grade platforms.

What to Ask Your Marketing Partner in 2026

Four questions that reveal a solid partner:

1. How are we tracking visibility in AI answers, not just Google rankings? This space is early, but your team should at least be working toward a measurement solution for AI Overviews and LLMs.
2. Is our location data consistent across Google, Apple and Bing? Inconsistency now actively confuses AI — they should be managing this at scale.
3. What's our earned-media and mentions strategy? Not just on-site SEO. Off-site authority is what gets you into AI answers.
4. What's our plan to measure traffic from the dark funnel? What methodology attributes brand mentions and otherwise-unattributed traffic?

Red Flags to Watch

Be wary of the hype merchants: anyone selling "AEO" as a brand-new product, promising guaranteed AI rankings, pushing llms.txt "magic," or charging a significant AI premium for what is simply good SEO.

The Bottom Line

It's 85% doing the fundamentals brilliantly, 15% the new AI focus. A technically clean, fast website with great content and high-converting branch pages. Fully-optimised Google Business Profiles with consistent NAP data across Apple and Bing. A solid AI Overview and LLM measurement program, and a high-ROI Google Ads program.

Pick a partner who does both very well — and start leveraging AI internally for productivity growth.

Adapted from Ronan Nichol's FANZ Knowledge Builder Series presentation. Ronan is Founder and Managing Director of Storm, an independent full-service digital marketing agency specialising in franchise and multi-location growth.