Aotearoa’s search landscape is evolving and a new Kiwi Search Habits Survey indicates that some Kiwis may be adopting generative AI and voice faster than expected.
Thank you to the following members of the IAB New Zealand Emerging Technology Council for their contribution to this article, and thank you to Richard Conway MD & Founder of Pure SEO for his expertise.
Adnan Khan Managing Partner, Stitch
Francis Xavier Programmatic Media Lead, Google
Scott Allan, Joint Head of Media, Stanley Street
Melvin Hadi Activation Director, Together
The poll of 250 adults living in the upper North Island (fielded 26 March 2025 via Pollfish) offers a check-in on how some Kiwis are discovering information, researching products and evaluating trust across traditional engines and AI chatbots. Below are the highlights and what they mean for brands and agencies.
Five stats that matter
- Search is an always-on utility: 82.4% of respondents use a search engine several times a day.
- Google’s moat still holds for now: 96.8% nominate Google as their primary engine; Bing and DuckDuckGo barely register.
- Voice & vision enter the mainstream: Nearly half (48.4%) already use voice search, and a third (33.2 %) have tried visual search such as Google Lens.
- ChatGPT has broken through: 48.4% have used ChatGPT, and 39.2 % have used an AI chatbot instead of a traditional engine at least once.
- Trust is level-pegging: 79.6% trust search results “moderately” or “completely”, and 36.4% say they trust chatbots the same, suggesting parity rather than scepticism.
What the numbers signal
- The discovery funnel is fragmenting: Consumers are comfortable triangulating answers across Google, voice assistants, and chat interfaces. For marketers, that means optimising content architecture (structured data, schema markup, concise FAQ copy) so that it can be parsed equally well by search crawlers and large language models.
- Generative AI is already influencing product research: While 69.2 % still go to search engines “often or always” before a purchase, 42.4% sometimes ask a chatbot first. Brands that feed first-party data into retail-media and conversational-commerce integrations will be best placed to show up in those AI-generated “shortlists”.
- Trust remains the currency: Open-ended comments reveal healthy scepticism of hallucinations, but users ultimately depend on whichever channel gives the fastest, clearest answer. Surfacing attribution citations, brand authority signals, customer reviews—inside both search snippets and chatbot plug-ins will help retain credibility.
Expert take
We’re seeing the classic Rogers Adoption Curve accelerate. Once half the market has tasted generative AI, the rest won’t be far behind. The opportunity for New Zealand businesses is to treat AI chat as an adjacent search channel, one that rewards depth, clarity and structured data" - Richard Conway, Founder & MD, Pure SEO and IAB New Zealand Member.
So where next?
- Schema everywhere: Prioritise product-level schema and FAQ Page markup to power both SGE (Search Generative Experience) and third-party chatbots.
- Voice optimisation: Conversational keywords (who/what/where) and location signals matter as smart-speaker penetration rises.
- Measurement reboot: Traditional last-click models miss the growing influence of AI tools in the “messy middle”. Consider marketing mix modelling and multi-touch attribution that captures chatbot referrals.
- Test and learn: Start by taking a few frequently asked questions relevant to certain times of the year, like holidays or special events e.g. holiday hours, delivery cut-offs at Christmas, winter health tips etc., and add them into AI chat tools such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot. Monitor how helpful these responses are to customers, see what's working best, and make improvements as you go.
