Every number traces to a named source: Search Console and GA4 pulled 2 September 2026, a live Google New Zealand rankings check the same day, Ahrefs, and your SEO Work sheet. "Traffic" here follows your sheet's long-standing definition (users by first channel) so the trend line stays consistent with every past report.
Checked live on Google New Zealand, 2 September 2026: 35 of your 37 tracked terms rank in the top 50, 31 are on page one, 16 sit in the top 3, and 5 are at number 1. Those counts are across the 37 terms on your sheet, which is a tighter set than the all-keyword counts quoted in earlier reports. Your July report counted 32 of 37 on page one from the sheet's own manual check.
The clearest proof the engine still works: three of the four industry pages that went live on 22 July are already at number 1 for "pos for events", "pos for hair and beauty" and "pos for hospitality". Built in July, ranking by August. That is the pattern worth repeating, and the retail page is the one still to catch up.
| Measure | Then | Today |
|---|---|---|
| Referring domains (separate websites linking to you) | 118 in June 2022 | 565 |
| Live backlinks | not tracked then | 852 |
| Organic visitors, monthly average | 430 across 2023 | 773 across 2026 to date |
That authority base is why the industry pages could rank in weeks rather than months. It is built and it keeps working.
Here is the most important thing in this report, and it is the reason your clicks look softer than your rankings.
Google now shows an AI answer above the results on 30 of your 37 tracked searches. Someone searches "best pos system nz", reads Google's AI summary, and never clicks a result. Your visibility has not fallen: August impressions were level with July (77,913 against 77,423), meaning Google showed you just as often. What changed is how many of those people click through at all.
And it converts. Visits from AI assistants have grown from a handful in 2025 to between 8 and 30 a month, and in July GA4 recorded 5 contact actions that came directly from AI assistant referrals (2 form submissions, 2 phone clicks, 1 email click). Back in October 2025 your own enquiry tracking already logged 3 enquiries that month sourced from ChatGPT. This channel is small, real, and growing.
| Move | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| More industry pages | The July four went to number 1 and 2 within weeks. There are more verticals to claim the same way, and each one is a page that both Google and the AI answers can cite. |
| The terms still off page one | "point of sale nz" and "restaurant tablet ordering system" are outside the top 50, and two of the three retail terms sit at 17 to 19. These are winnable with focused content. |
| Answer-shaped content | The way to be cited in an AI answer is to be the page that answers the question cleanly. That is a specific style of writing, and it is what we are building all our content production around now. |
| Structured data gaps | Your llms.txt is strong; the schema markup on some key pages has gaps that make it harder for AI systems to read your product and pricing details confidently. |
| More content, not more links | We are changing how authority gets built: winding down monthly volume link building (your base of 565 referring domains is established) and putting that effort into content instead. |