AI visibility of New Plymouth builders: the data.
We audited 22 builders’ websites in New Plymouth. The average AI-visibility score is 71/100: 5% block at least one AI search crawler and 18% have no structured data — meaning ChatGPT and Google’s AI often can’t read the businesses they’re asked to recommend.
avg score
71/100
block AI crawlers
5%
no structured data
18%
JS-only content
0%
As of July 2026, the average AI-visibility score of 22 audited builders’ websites in New Plymouth, New Zealand is 71 out of 100. 5% of the audited sites block at least one AI search crawler (such as OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot) in their robots.txt, 18% publish no structured data identifying their business, 0% serve their main content only through JavaScript that AI crawlers cannot execute, and 68% show no visible “last updated” date. The businesses were drawn from Google’s local results for builder services in New Plymouth, where the average Google rating is 4.9 stars with a median of 4 reviews. Source: Surfaced audit dataset, n=22, July 2026. Method: surfaced.co.nz/methodology.
What are New Plymouth builders getting wrong?
68% show no visible 'last updated' date
The fix: Display and maintain a visible update date — AI engines strongly favour recently-updated pages.
18% have no structured data at all
The fix: Add LocalBusiness JSON-LD so AI engines can identify the business, its services and its area.
5% block at least one AI search crawler
The fix: Allow OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Bingbot and Googlebot in robots.txt — training-only bots can stay blocked without losing citations.
0% serve their content only via JavaScript
The fix: Server-render the key pages — AI crawlers don't run JavaScript, so a JS-only site reads as a blank page.
Why does this matter for a builder in New Plymouth?
When someone in New Plymouth asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for “a good builder near me”, the engines recommend from the businesses they can actually read and verify. With an average score of 71/100, most of the local market is effectively invisible to those answers — which means the few businesses that fix their basics take a disproportionate share of AI recommendations. That gap is the opportunity.
Compare: the national average for builders is 71/100 across 257 sites.
Are you one of the visible ones?
Run the exact same audit on your own site — free, 20 seconds, no signup. You’ll see your score against the New Plymouth average of 71.
Check my siteLast updated July 2026 · based on 22 audited websites from 30 local listings · methodology · aggregates only — no individual business is named without consent