The pitch lands. The journalist reads it, finds the angle interesting, and starts thinking about putting it on their list for the week. Before they reply, they do what every journalist in New Zealand does in 2026: they open a new tab and type your company name into Google.
What they find in the next thirty seconds determines whether you get a response or an archive.
At Payper, we see this pattern constantly. A founder has a genuinely strong story, the kind of thing that should make every business editor in the country sit up, and we pitch it with confidence. Then the journalist goes to their website and finds a homepage that hasn't been updated since 2022, an "About" page with two sentences and a stock photo, and no way to find a high-resolution image of anyone who actually works there.
The pitch is dead. Not because the story was wrong, but because the website made the journalist doubt whether the business was serious enough to write about.
What do journalists actually do after reading your pitch?
They Google you. Every single time. Research from Muck Rack shows that 86% of published stories begin with a PR pitch, but only 8% of pitches actually convert to coverage. That enormous gap between initial interest and publication is where most opportunities quietly die, and your website is often the thing that kills them.
The journalist's first move after reading a pitch is almost always the same: check your website, scan your LinkedIn, and look for anything that either confirms or contradicts the story you've just told them. If your website looks like it was last touched during the previous election cycle, you've already introduced doubt before a single word has been written.
This isn't vanity. Journalists are under pressure to file accurate stories quickly, in newsrooms that keep getting smaller every year. Anything that slows them down or requires them to chase information you should have made easy to find is a reason to move on to the next pitch in their inbox. And in 2026, there are hundreds of those pitches sitting there.
The five things a journalist needs to find on your website
Most journalists won't spend more than a minute on your site before deciding whether to proceed. That's not laziness, it's the reality of a profession where inboxes overflow and deadlines don't wait. In that minute, they need to find five things:
- A clear explanation of what your company does. Not a mission statement, not a tagline, not three paragraphs of aspirational language about transforming industries. One plain English sentence that a journalist could lift directly into the second paragraph of their story.
- Founder or spokesperson bios with photos. Written in the third person, because that's how journalists will use them. High-resolution, downloadable headshots on a clean background, not embedded in a Canva graphic or cropped from a conference group photo.
- Recent news or a media section. Even a simple page with your last three press mentions, a brief company timeline, and a media contact email tells a journalist you take your public profile seriously.
- Visual assets. Product photos, team photos, or anything a news editor could drop into a layout without sending a photographer. Research from Cision shows 87% of journalists used PR-provided multimedia in the past year, and a press release with images gets twice the engagement of one without.
- A direct way to get in touch. A named media contact with a phone number and email, not a generic contact form that routes to a shared inbox nobody checks until Thursday.
If a journalist can't tick off at least three of those in under a minute, you've made their job harder. And journalists don't work harder for stories they can get somewhere else.
Does your website need a dedicated media page?
Yes, and it doesn't need to be complicated. A media page, sometimes called a newsroom or press page, is simply a single place where journalists can find everything they need without hunting through your blog archives or emailing your info@ address and hoping for the best.
At its simplest, a media page includes a one-paragraph company description that a journalist can quote directly, your latest press releases or announcements, downloadable logo files and high-resolution photos, and a named media contact with a direct phone number and email. You could build one in an afternoon using whatever platform your site already runs on.
The businesses that consistently get the best coverage from Payper are almost always the ones who've invested a few hours in setting this up properly. When we pitched Evnex for their EV charger stories, having downloadable product images and clear technical specifications on their site meant journalists could file the same day. When those assets aren't available, the turnaround stretches from hours to days, and days is often too long for a news cycle that moves faster every year.
We saw the same pattern with Scapegrace Distilling, where strong product photography and a clear brand story on their website made it easy for journalists to say yes quickly. The assets were ready, the story was clean, and the coverage followed.
Your website now has two audiences
This is the part that most New Zealand businesses haven't caught up with yet. In 2026, your website isn't just being read by the humans who visit it. It's also being scraped, indexed, and interpreted by AI.
Thirty-five percent of consumers now use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity as their starting point when discovering new products and services, according to Similarweb research. When someone asks an AI assistant "who are the best EV charger companies in New Zealand?" or "which PR agencies in Auckland charge only for results?", the answer comes from what the AI has learned by reading web content, and that includes your website.
Research from Ahrefs across 75,000 brands found that brand mentions on the web have a 0.664 correlation with AI citation probability, compared to just 0.218 for traditional backlinks. In plain English, the number of times your brand is mentioned in clear, factual language across trustworthy websites matters roughly three times more for AI visibility than the link-building that SEO agencies have been selling for two decades.
And this connects directly to your website, because 44% of all AI citations pull their information from the opening section of a page, according to SparkToro. If your homepage opens with "Welcome to [Company]. We're passionate about innovation" instead of stating clearly what you actually do and where you do it, you've told every AI model on the planet nothing useful about your business.
How does earned media affect your AI search visibility?
Significantly. A 2025 study by Muck Rack found that 82% of AI citations come from earned media, meaning articles that journalists wrote about you, while only 6% come from paid or owned content. The coverage you land through PR is doing more for your AI visibility than almost anything else you could invest in.
But those stories link back to your website. When they do, AI models follow those links and read what they find. If a journalist writes a strong piece about your product and then the AI follows the link to a website that's thin on detail, hasn't been updated in months, and doesn't clearly state what you do, the AI learns almost nothing useful from the visit. The earned media did its job, but your website wasted the opportunity.
Payper is a results-based PR agency in New Zealand where clients only pay when coverage lands. We've been structuring our clients' web content with AI readability in mind since 2024, because we noticed early that the same qualities that make a website useful for journalists, clear language, specific claims, real numbers, measurable outcomes, make it equally useful for AI models. The overlap between what a journalist needs and what an AI model needs turns out to be almost total.
The founder bio problem
This is the gap I see most often. As someone who spends a lot of time pitching journalists on behalf of founders, the single most common weakness on New Zealand business websites is a proper founder or CEO biography.
Journalists need to know who they're writing about. They need a name, a background, a detail or two that makes the person human and quotable. When they find a vague line about "our team brings decades of experience across multiple industries," they have nothing to work with. When they find a specific story, a career shift, a moment that explains why this company exists, they have the start of something they can actually write.
Your bio should be written in the third person, because journalists will copy from it. Around 100 to 150 words, with at least one specific detail that a reader would find interesting. Not your university degree unless it's directly relevant, but something that reveals character or motivation or an unusual path. If you've already put together a press kit, the bio section is one of the most important things in it.
And please, get a proper headshot. Not a selfie, not a crop from a Christmas party photo. A clean, well-lit image on a plain background that an editor can use at any size. This costs less than a hundred dollars and lasts for years. If you're unsure what good visual assets for PR look like, we wrote a whole piece on that recently.
Can you fix this in a weekend?
Mostly, yes. The gap between a website that helps your PR and one that quietly kills it is usually a few hours of focused work, not a full redesign. If you can carve out a Saturday morning, you can make a meaningful difference to how journalists and AI models perceive your business.
A practical weekend priority list:
- Rewrite your homepage opening paragraph so it says exactly what your company does, where, and for whom, in one clear sentence that a journalist or an AI could quote directly.
- Update or create founder and key spokesperson bios in the third person, with downloadable high-resolution headshots alongside each one.
- Build a simple media or press page. One page with a company description, recent coverage or announcements, downloadable visual assets, and a direct media contact.
- Review your About page. Strip the aspirational corporate language and replace it with specific, factual statements about your team, your product, and your market.
- Check your images. If your best product photo is a low-resolution JPEG from three years ago, book a half-day photoshoot. If budget is genuinely tight, a smartphone in good natural light with a clean background beats no image at all.
None of this requires a developer, a rebrand, or a strategy consultant. It requires a few honest hours looking at your website through the eyes of someone who has never heard of you and has thirty seconds to decide whether you're worth their time.
Because in 2026, that someone might be a journalist on deadline... or an AI model deciding whether to recommend you to the next person who asks.
Get in touch here and we'll give you a straight answer.