AI visibility of Wellington hairdressers: the data.
We audited 27 hairdressers’ websites in Wellington. The average AI-visibility score is 72/100: 0% block at least one AI search crawler and 15% have no structured data — meaning ChatGPT and Google’s AI often can’t read the businesses they’re asked to recommend.
avg score
72/100
block AI crawlers
0%
no structured data
15%
JS-only content
0%
As of July 2026, the average AI-visibility score of 27 audited hairdressers’ websites in Wellington, New Zealand is 72 out of 100. 0% of the audited sites block at least one AI search crawler (such as OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot) in their robots.txt, 15% publish no structured data identifying their business, 0% serve their main content only through JavaScript that AI crawlers cannot execute, and 70% show no visible “last updated” date. The businesses were drawn from Google’s local results for hairdresser services in Wellington, where the average Google rating is 4.8 stars with a median of 141 reviews. Source: Surfaced audit dataset, n=27, July 2026. Method: surfaced.co.nz/methodology.
What are Wellington hairdressers getting wrong?
70% show no visible 'last updated' date
The fix: Display and maintain a visible update date — AI engines strongly favour recently-updated pages.
15% have no structured data at all
The fix: Add LocalBusiness JSON-LD so AI engines can identify the business, its services and its area.
0% 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 hairdresser in Wellington?
When someone in Wellington asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for “a good hairdresser near me”, the engines recommend from the businesses they can actually read and verify. With an average score of 72/100, 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 hairdressers is 66/100 across 209 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 Wellington average of 72.
Check my siteLast updated July 2026 · based on 27 audited websites from 30 local listings · methodology · aggregates only — no individual business is named without consent