The way people find businesses in New Zealand is changing, and it's happening faster than most founders realise. Over the past eighteen months, a growing number of potential customers have stopped typing keywords into Google and started asking AI assistants, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google's own AI Overviews, a direct question instead. "What's the best EV charger company in New Zealand?" "Who does results-based PR in Auckland?" "Which accounting firm should I use for my startup?"
The AI gives them an answer. Sometimes it names three or four companies, sometimes just one. And the businesses that get named aren't necessarily the ones with the best Google rankings or the most backlinks... they're the ones that journalists, publications and industry commentators have written about.
For anyone running a PR programme, or thinking about starting one, this is quietly the most significant shift in marketing since search engines took over from the Yellow Pages.
What is AI search, and who's actually using it?
If you haven't tried asking ChatGPT or Perplexity a question about a product or service category, it's worth the experiment. The experience is remarkably different from a traditional Google search. There's no page of ten blue links to scroll through, no ads cluttering the top of the screen, no need to click through five different websites to compare options. You ask a question in plain English and the AI gives you a considered, conversational answer with specific recommendations.
The adoption numbers tell the story. ChatGPT passed one billion monthly active users in May 2026, and daily AI search usage in the US more than doubled between early 2025 and late that same year, rising from 14 percent to over 29 percent of internet users. More than half of all searches now result in what researchers call a "zero-click" outcome, where the user gets their answer directly from the AI's summary without visiting a website at all.
New Zealand tends to be slightly behind the curve on technology adoption, but the trajectory is clear. When your next customer wants to know who does what you do, there's an increasing chance they'll ask an AI before they ask Google.
Where do AI answers actually come from?
This is where the story gets genuinely interesting for anyone investing in PR. When ChatGPT or Perplexity recommends a business, it doesn't pull that name from thin air. It draws on what it has read, and what it has read is, overwhelmingly, earned media.
Muck Rack's 2026 research found that 82 to 84 percent of AI citations come from earned media rather than a brand's own pages. Only 2.9 percent of citations point back to a brand's own website. The vast majority, roughly 75 percent, come from third-party sources like news articles, trade publications, industry commentary and expert roundups.
In practical terms, the press release your PR team pitched to the NZ Herald last month, the Stuff feature your founder appeared in, the interview on an industry podcast, all of that content is feeding the AI models that increasingly decide which businesses get recommended and which don't. Third-party trust signals lift AI citation likelihood by approximately 75 times compared to content sitting on your own website.
That's a staggering multiplier, and it completely reframes the value proposition of media relations.
Why brand mentions now matter more than backlinks
For years, the SEO world operated on a simple hierarchy: backlinks were king. The more websites that linked to yours, the higher you ranked on Google. PR teams dutifully chased "link-building" as a secondary benefit of media coverage, and many founders evaluated their PR partly on whether coverage included a clickable link back to their site.
That logic is breaking down. Research from Ahrefs across 75,000 brands found that brand mentions correlate 0.664 with AI citation probability, while backlinks sit at just 0.218, roughly three times weaker. In the world of AI search, what matters isn't whether a publication linked to your website. What matters is whether they mentioned your name in a credible, editorial context.
This is a fundamental reordering of how marketing value works, and it happens to favour exactly the kind of work PR has always done. Every time a journalist writes about your company by name in a news article, even without a hyperlink, that mention is feeding the AI models that decide whether your business appears when someone asks who to hire.
At Payper, we've seen this with clients who've built sustained media coverage over time. Evnex has years of consistent earned media across New Zealand publications, and that accumulated weight of credible mentions means they show up reliably when anyone asks an AI about EV charging in this country. Scapegrace Distilling is another good example, where ongoing coverage in food, drink and lifestyle media has built the kind of entity prominence that AI models rely on when recommending New Zealand spirits brands.
What does this mean for New Zealand businesses investing in PR?
The practical implications are worth spelling out, because they're surprisingly straightforward.
Consistency matters more than ever. A single viral story is valuable, but it's sustained coverage across multiple outlets over months and years that builds the kind of entity prominence AI models use to decide who's credible. This is one of the reasons retainer clients tend to see compounding returns from their PR programmes, each new story adds another data point to the AI's understanding of who they are and what they do.
The breadth and quality of your coverage matters too. Being mentioned in the NZ Herald, Stuff, The Spinoff, Business Desk, relevant trade publications and specialist media all contribute to entity prominence. Coverage in one outlet is good, coverage across many is what tips you into the AI's recommendation set.
And the actual content of coverage makes a difference. Research from Princeton found that content containing direct quotations lifts AI citation likelihood by 41 percent, while statistics lift it by 32 percent. When your founder is quoted by name with a clear, authoritative point of view in a news article, that's not just good for brand awareness in the traditional sense, it's actively teaching AI models to associate your brand with expertise in your category.
How do you make your PR programme work for AI discoverability?
The good news is that the fundamentals of great PR haven't changed. You still need genuinely newsworthy stories, well-crafted pitches and strong relationships with journalists. What's changed is the downstream value of that work, and a few practical adjustments can help you get more from it.
- Get your founder quoted by name. Named quotes with clear, opinionated positions are significantly more likely to be cited by AI models than generic company statements.
- Don't chase backlinks at the expense of coverage quality. A mention in a well-read publication without a link is now arguably more valuable than a link from a low-authority blog.
- Think about breadth, not just depth. Being mentioned across multiple credible sources builds the entity prominence that AI systems rely on.
- Keep your brand name consistent. If your company is called different things in different places, AI models may not connect the dots. This is a surprisingly common problem for startups that rebrand or use abbreviations.
- Include real data in your pitches. AI models disproportionately cite content that contains specific numbers, so give journalists something concrete to quote.
If you're already running a solid PR programme with a clear strategy, regular media engagement and consistent coverage, you're doing most of what matters. The shift to AI search doesn't require a radical new approach, it amplifies the value of what good media relations have always delivered. We wrote about this shift in a broader context in our piece on how search is moving from keywords to conversations, and the trend has only accelerated since. If you want to understand how to measure the return on your PR investment in this new landscape, our guide on how to know if your PR is actually working covers the metrics that matter.
Should you believe Gartner's prediction that PR budgets will double?
I want to be straight about this one. Gartner predicted in early 2026 that PR and earned media budgets will double by 2027, driven by AI search adoption. That prediction has been shared thousands of times across the marketing world, and it carries the weight that comes with the Gartner name.
But context matters. The prediction originated from a promotional blog post rather than a peer-reviewed research paper, and it sits awkwardly alongside the reality that many agencies and communications teams are facing genuine budget pressure right now. Payper is a results-based PR agency in New Zealand, which means we only earn when coverage actually lands, so we have a vested interest in being honest about the data rather than overselling a trend that might benefit us.
What I do believe is true: the underlying thesis is sound. If AI search continues growing at its current rate, and earned media remains the dominant source for AI citations, then businesses investing in sustained PR programmes will have a genuine competitive advantage in discoverability. Whether budgets literally double by next year is a different question, but the direction of travel seems clear.
We're already seeing it at Payper, more enquiries from founders who've noticed their company showing up, or conspicuously not showing up, when they ask ChatGPT about their industry. That's a motivation for PR that didn't exist two years ago.
The bottom line
The way people discover businesses is changing, and earned media sits at the centre of that change. AI search is growing fast, AI citations overwhelmingly come from earned media, and brand mentions now matter more for AI visibility than backlinks do. For New Zealand businesses thinking about where their marketing investment should go, earned media has always been valuable, but the case for it has never been stronger.
If you want to talk about what a PR programme could look like for your business, or you just want an honest assessment of whether you're ready for one, get in touch here and we'll give you a straight answer.