Every number traces to a named source: Search Console and GA4 for September 2026, Ahrefs and SEMrush pulled 12 October 2026, a live Google New Zealand rankings check run the same day, and your SEO Work sheet. The rankings check ran on 12 October, after the September window closed, so it is dated to that day rather than presented as a September measurement. "Organic visitors" follows your sheet's long-standing definition (users by first channel) so the trend line stays consistent with every past report, and the sheet's last filled column is July 2026.
Checked live on Google New Zealand on 12 October 2026: 27 of your 37 tracked terms rank in the top 50, 19 are on page one, 11 sit in the top 3, and 4 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.
The four at number 1 are "eftpos machine nz", "self serve kiosk", "pos for hospitality" and "pos for hair and beauty", and Eftpos Now is the top result on Google for all four. Two of the four industry pages that went live on 22 July are still at number 1, hospitality and hair and beauty. "pos for events" was at number 1 in the early September check and came back at 20 this time. The retail side is split: "retail pos systems for small business" sits at 4, while two other retail terms did not surface on the day.
The early September check counted 31 of 37 on page one and was run a different way, and your July report counted 32 from the sheet's own manual check, so the three counts are better read as separate snapshots than as a trend. Search Console's average position is a diagnostic we use internally and is not a measure of where you rank, which is why every ranking figure here comes from a live check on Google instead. live Google NZ check
| Measure | Then | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Referring domains (separate websites linking to you) | 118 in June 2022 | 820 on 12 October 2026 |
| Live backlinks | not tracked then | 1,063 |
| Organic visitors, monthly average | 451 across February to December 2023 | 783 across January to July 2026 |
One thing to be straight about on the link figures. The October pull is measured across subdomains, a wider setting than the pull behind the early September report, which read 565 referring domains and 852 backlinks. So 820 and 1,063 are the current reading rather than 255 new domains in six weeks. The four-year direction is real, and the size of that last step is partly a change in how it gets counted.
Links are the slowest part of search to build and the longest lasting once built, which is why four years of it still shows up in how quickly a brand new page can rank.
Here is the most important thing on this page, and it is the reason the click numbers read softer than the rankings.
On the day of the live check, Google was running an AI answer above the ordinary results on 32 of your 37 tracked searches. Someone searches for a POS system, reads the summary at the top, and never clicks a result. September has exactly that shape: impressions fell 11.3% to 71,464 while clicks held almost level at 531, so the share of the people who saw you and came through rose from 0.67% to 0.74%. Against September last year, impressions are up 3.8% while clicks are down 15.7%. Over a twelve month window Google has shown you more often, and fewer of those searches have ended in a visit.
The traffic side of it is small and real. Visits from AI assistants have been tracked on your sheet since July 2025 and have run between 4 and 22 a month, and GA4 counted 14 sessions in September whose referrer was an AI assistant, from ChatGPT (12) and Claude (2). That is a referral-source count; GA4's own AI Assistant channel grouping reads 16 for the same month, and the narrower figure is the one used here. Your own enquiry tracking has picked some of it up: in July 2026 it logged 2 form submissions and 2 phone clicks from AI assistant referrals, and back in October 2025 it logged 3 enquiries that month sourced from ChatGPT. A live rankings check only records whether an AI answer appeared, never whether it quoted you, so that September citation count is the one measure we have of actually being inside those answers.
There is no plan attached to this, just the position as it stands. Here is what the four years built and the state of it on 12 October, so whoever works on the site next knows what they are holding.
| What the work built | The state of it |
|---|---|
| Page one across the category | Just over half the tracked terms are on page one, and the footprint is spread across the homepage, the POS systems page, the four industry pages and the eftpos explainer articles, so no single page carries it. |
| An authority base, 118 to 820 | Four years of link campaigns took referring domains from 118 in June 2022 to 820, alongside 1,063 live backlinks and a Domain Rating of 12. Read it with the subdomains note above. |
| A library of explainer content | The eftpos and POS explainer articles bring in people who did not know your name when they started searching. In September they were the pages adding clicks while the homepage eased. |
| A site built for AI answers | Schema deployed across the site, a hand-written llms.txt, and AI crawlers welcomed rather than blocked. That groundwork is why Eftpos Now was already being cited in AI answers when we measured in early September. |
The September tab sits alongside this one and carries the rest of the handover: the nine tracked terms that did not surface on the day, the three ranking between 18 and 40 that are within reach from where they sit, and the notes on reading Search Console data after today.
Thank you for the four years.