Website readiness for New Zealand lawyers: the data.
As of July 2026, the average rules-v1.0 website-readiness score across 444 audited websites in the New Zealand lawyers category is 68/100. Under that historical ruleset, 4% triggered its crawler check and 36% had no detected structured data. The crawler figure requires a v2 re-scan before it can be interpreted using the current taxonomy.
average score
68/100
historical v1.0 crawler flag
4%
no structured data
36%
City by city
| City | Sites audited | Avg score | Historical crawler flag |
|---|---|---|---|
| Christchurch | 30 | 70/100 | 3% |
| Palmerston North | 28 | 65/100 | 11% |
| Wellington | 26 | 69/100 | 4% |
| Tauranga | 26 | 68/100 | 15% |
| Dunedin | 26 | 69/100 | 0% |
| Waitakere | 26 | 68/100 | 0% |
| Auckland | 25 | 71/100 | 0% |
| Hamilton | 25 | 68/100 | 4% |
| New Plymouth | 25 | 69/100 | 4% |
| Queenstown | 24 | 73/100 | 8% |
| North Shore | 23 | 74/100 | 9% |
| Nelson | 22 | 68/100 | 5% |
| Napier | 20 | 65/100 | 0% |
| Hastings | 20 | 67/100 | 5% |
| Rotorua | 20 | 66/100 | 5% |
| Invercargill | 18 | 67/100 | 6% |
| Manukau | 18 | 71/100 | 0% |
| Whangarei | 16 | 70/100 | 6% |
| Timaru | 16 | 61/100 | 0% |
Why does AI visibility matter for lawyers?
Discovery access and useful initial HTML can affect whether a system can retrieve a page, but this historical readiness score does not show whether ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity currently names a business. That requires repeated answer monitoring. Use this benchmark to understand common website gaps, not as a ranking or recommendation-rate league table.
Are you above or below 68?
Run the current rules-v2 audit on your own site — free, about 20 seconds, no signup. Treat it as a fresh diagnosis, not a direct v1 comparison.
Check my siteLast updated July 2026 · based on 444 audited websites · methodology · aggregates only, no individual business is named