A four-month-old company called The Prompting Company just secured $6.5 million to solve something most businesses haven't even noticed yet.
They help brands show up when customers ask ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity for product recommendations instead of typing into Google.
If that sounds niche, the numbers tell a different story. Retailers could see up to 520% increase in traffic from AI chatbots in 2025 compared to 2024. That's not a trend. That's the internet reorganising itself around conversational interfaces.
How people discover products is changing right now
Your customers in Auckland, Sydney or anywhere across Australia and New Zealand aren't just using Google anymore.
They're asking AI models for recommendations during their research. They're using ChatGPT to compare products. They're prompting Claude to shortlist solutions before they ever visit a website.
Traditional search engine optimisation in Auckland or anywhere else assumed people would type keywords and click through results pages. That behaviour is shifting faster than most businesses realise.
What is generative engine optimisation?
While SEO focused on ranking in search results, generative engine optimisation (GEO) is about getting cited by AI models during natural conversations.
There are no paid placements. No keyword bidding. Just the structure and quality of your content as interpreted by language models.
The Prompting Company's approach is direct: Their platform identifies questions AI agents ask, creates structured answers and routes agents to optimised pages. They're hosting about half a million pages and driving double-digit millions in monthly traffic for clients including Rippling, Rho and a Fortune 10 company.
How local Aussie and Kiwi business can benefit from this
If you're running a business anywhere across Australia and New Zealand, this affects how your customers find you.
As a Sydney web development agency, we get more enquiries through ChatGPT than we do via traditional Google search. Similarly for your business, if your marketing and SEO strategy doesn't consider how AI agents parse content you are leaving opportunity on the table.
As a web design and development agency, Sundeck Studio operates in three countries, Australia, New Zealand and UAE and we have observerd how search engine optimisation in NZ and Australia is evolving beyond traditional search engines. This is why we are preparing our client websits with dual strategies: optimising for both Google and LLM-powered discovery.
The technical reality behind AI traffic
AI agents are already the fastest-growing traffic source on most websites. Not future traffic. Current traffic.
Developers ask ChatGPT for product recommendations inside their workflows. Enterprise buyers use Claude to research software solutions. Consumers prompt Perplexity for purchase advice.
Kevin Chandra, CEO of The Prompting Company, puts it simply: "Over the past year, most of the growth on websites has come from AI bots, not people."
What SEO for ChatGPT actually means
Being discoverable in ChatGPT isn't about gaming algorithms. It's about understanding how language models retrieve and synthesise information.
This means creating machine-readable content architecture. Not just schema markup but fundamentally rethinking how information is presented so AI agents can extract and cite it accurately.
It means optimising for conversational queries. People don't ask ChatGPT "best CRM software." They say "I need a CRM for a 50-person sales team that integrates with our existing tools." Your content needs to answer that specificity.
It means building for attribution. When an AI cites your product, the model needs clear, structured data to reference. Vague marketing copy doesn't work
How AI SEO experts approach this differently
Traditional what we saw with SEO agencies in Sydney or SEO experts in UAE was that they focused on keywords, backlinks and heaps of blog posts.
AI SEO experts add another layer: monitoring which queries drive AI agent visits, what information they extract and how they interpret your content.
The Prompting Company makes it easy, it tracks prompts and hosts pages at scale. But the principle applies regardless of tools: if AI agents can't parse your value proposition, you don't exist in this discovery layer.
The broader shift across platforms
This isn't just about ChatGPT. Every platform with a language model is now a potential discovery channel.
Google's AI Overviews. Perplexity's answer engine. Claude's research capabilities. Microsoft's Copilot. Apple's upcoming AI features.
If your Brisbane SEO agency or any search engine optimisation service provider that treats this as a future consideration rather than current reality then you are missing what's happening in market right now.
What we're building at Sundeck Studio
We wrote about GEO and how it works because we saw this acceleration coming.
For our clients across Auckland, Sydney, Abu Dhabi and beyond, we're integrating GEO principles into website development, content strategy and technical architecture.
Success case study 1
Our recent success story is Tokyo Headspa website that we re-designed and rebuilt. Tokyo headspa operates in 6 locations across Australia and appears as the top result in Google, with multiple citations and bookings coming through from ChatGPT. We structured the website in a way that is readible not only by traditional search engines (such as Google) but also modern AI-based search engines (such as ChatGPT). The results? Organic search of Tokyo Headspa has already superseeded paid ads and search, in simpler words more people are finding their busieness and making bookings through organic search than through ads.
Success case study 2
We practice what we preach. Sundeck Studio itself gets a large number of enquiries through ChatGPT and Claude, even though we appear on page 1 in Google search results in Abu Dhabi and some cities in Australia too, yet majority of the customers found us via ChatGPT or Claude. You can read more about it in my LinkedIn post below.
What to do next
Prepare for a big shift on how business will be discovered across the internet. Prepare your marketing, SEO and social media strategy to align with what is coming. Consult with an expert SEO agency that has expertise and proven results with AI visibility and ask them specifically the next steps they can take to promote your business's AI visibility.
If you do not have a SEO plan and marketing plan in place, this is the best time to implement one, that aligns with how the future of search will work. Speak to one of our SEO Experts in Australia, New Zealand and UAE for a free consultation and how we can help your business to be more visible to your potential customers.
