ChatGPT ads are now open to New Zealand businesses, and the entry price is low. That's useful, but it also means some of the ChatGPT visits in your analytics may soon be paid for. If you want to know whether AI assistants recommend you on their own, you need to keep the two apart from the start.
ChatGPT ads are open to NZ businesses
OpenAI said earlier this year it would take ChatGPT ads beyond the US, starting with Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Christchurch agency Empire9 has now written up what running them here looks like. Their performance manager says the minimum spend is NZ$25 a day. Businesses set up their own account with a few verification steps.
The ads are small. You get a short line of text and a little image, shown to people on free and lower-priced ChatGPT plans. They aren't triggered by keywords the way Google ads are. ChatGPT matches them to what the person is talking about. Empire9's example: ask for the best things to do in Christchurch, and a local tourism business's ad might appear.
Empire9's early view is that these ads suit people who are still researching rather than ready to buy. They also say organic ChatGPT traffic went up after clients started paying. Treat that as one agency's impression. They sell the service and published no numbers.
Last month Shopify launched a ChatGPT Ads app that builds ads from your product listings. It's still not clear whether it works for NZ stores, so the self-serve ads account is the route that's confirmed for now.
If you're curious, a small test at the minimum spend won't break the budget. Go in expecting awareness, not a pile of orders.
Keep paid and free ChatGPT visits apart
This is the part that matters even if you never buy an ad. Empire9 found that ChatGPT's own reports and Google Analytics don't agree on how many people clicked through. Their fix is to add tracking tags to every ad link. These are the small labels on the end of a web address that tell Google Analytics where a visit came from. With them, paid clicks can show up as their own "ChatGPT paid" source.
Without them, paid and unpaid visits blur together. A rise in ChatGPT traffic could then be your own ad budget at work. It would look the same as AI assistants recommending you on merit. Those two things need very different responses.
If you or your agency run ChatGPT ads, tag every link before the first campaign goes live. If you don't, it's still worth knowing that "ChatGPT" in your reports may not mean the same thing it did six months ago.
What 131 search experts say still matters
Cyrus and Dawn Shepard of Zyppy asked 131 experienced search marketers what most affects Google rankings in 2026. This is a survey of opinion, not a measurement of Google. It's still a useful check on where the people who do this every day put their effort.
More than half put relevance in their top three. By that they mean a page that actually answers what the searcher wanted. Links from trusted, related websites came a close second, named by 55%. Content quality was third at 48%, with original research and first-hand information rated highest. AI content churned out in bulk with little added value was rated as a negative.
A few smaller results stood out. Brand signals, such as how often people search for your business by name, made the top ten. Meta descriptions, the short summary under a search result, were rated as having almost no effect. Site speed was one of the most disputed factors in the whole survey.
The same habits show up in what we see AI assistants rewarding. They want a clear answer to the buyer's real question, and other credible sites that mention you. For a store owner, that means product and guide pages that answer the questions customers actually ask in your shop or inbox. It also means being mentioned by NZ sites your customers already read, like a local magazine's gift guide or a trade association listing.
The survey authors say a follow-up on Google's AI answers is coming. We'll write it up when it lands.
What we're watching
Google is testing payments to some publishers whose pages feed its AI answers, according to Digiday's reporting and Google's confirmation. It's invite-only and aimed at publishers, not stores, so there's nothing to do. What's interesting is that Google is measuring how much each page contributes to an AI answer. If that report ever opens up to all sites, it would be a useful number to watch.
We're also still waiting to see whether Shopify's ChatGPT Ads app will sync New Zealand catalogs.
If you'd like a hand checking whether your analytics can tell paid AI visits from earned ones, we're happy to take a look.
Sources
- Empire9, "Is ChatGPT Advertising Worth Your Ad Spend?", September 2026 - https://empire9.co.nz/blog/chatgpt-ads/
- OpenAI, "Testing ads in ChatGPT" - https://openai.com/index/testing-ads-in-chatgpt/
- Shopify App Store, ChatGPT Ads (developer: OpenAI) - https://apps.shopify.com/chatgptads
- Cyrus Shepard and Dawn Shepard, Zyppy Signal, "Google Ranking Factors Expert Survey 2026", 9 September 2026 - https://signal.zyppy.com/p/google-ranking-factors-expert-survey
- Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land, "Google tests paying publishers for using its content in AI Mode, AI Overviews and Gemini", 14 September 2026 - https://searchengineland.com/google-tests-paying-publishers-for-using-its-content-in-ai-mode-ai-overviews-and-gemini-488382
- Digiday, "Google rolls out pay-per-value AI licensing program to publishers", September 2026 - https://digiday.com/media/google-rolls-out-pay-value-ai-licensing-program-to-publishers/
