I checked 80 NZ and AU
agency websites.
Only 5 had the full AI basics.

I keep seeing the same thing. A business pays for a beautiful site or an SEO retainer, and when I check it, AI engines can barely tell what the business does: no schema, no llms.txt, thin copy, nothing an AI could quote. So I checked whether the agencies selling SEO, AI search and websites do any better on their own sites. Some do. Most don't have the full set.

The short answer

Across 80 NZ and AU agency homepages, only 5 had all 12 basic AI-search foundations in place. SEO agencies averaged 10 of 12, and firms that lead with AI search, GEO or AEO averaged 9.7, no better. Website and brand studios averaged 6.2. Most of the gaps are quick, cheap fixes.

Why I ran this

I'd been looking at a lot of business sites built or looked after by agencies, including some genuinely lovely work from award-winning studios. Run through my checker, plenty had no structured data, no llms.txt and nothing tight enough for an AI to lift as an answer. That made me wonder whether the agencies themselves bother. If the people selling SEO, AI search and websites skip the basics on their own sites, their clients probably end up with the same gaps.

I'm also one of those people, so my own site went through exactly the same check, at the same time. It's shown in the charts for comparison, not counted in any of the agency numbers.

How I checked 80 agency sites

On 19 October 2026 I ran each homepage through the same logic as my free AI Visibility Check Chrome extension (version 1.2), in a real Chrome browser so JavaScript-built pages rendered properly. I found the firms through award lists, directories and searches like "SEO agency Auckland" and "GEO agency Australia", then sorted them into three groups:

• AI-search specialists (10: 1 NZ, 9 AU): SEO firms and consultants whose homepage title, headline or description leads with AI search, GEO or AEO. These are the people selling exactly this work.
• SEO agencies (31: 11 NZ, 20 AU): SEO and search-led digital marketing agencies and consultants, many with search-award wins.
• Website and brand studios (39: 22 NZ, 17 AU): award-winning design and branding studios, web-build shops and big-network creative agencies.

Alongside the extension's overall score, I counted 12 foundations. They're the basics, not advanced work:

• Any schema markup (JSON-LD)
• Organization or Person schema
• FAQ schema
• An llms.txt file
• A reachable sitemap.xml
• Content visible without JavaScript
• A single H1
• At least one answer-first passage
• At least one question-style heading
• Citable stats, figures or sources
• Complete Open Graph (social) tags
• A homepage of 300+ words

Limits worth knowing: this is homepages only, one point in time, and a free tool's view rather than a full audit. The AI-search group is small (10 firms), so read its numbers as a pattern, not a precise rate. I've left agency names out on purpose. The point is the pattern, not who's in it. I removed a handful of sites that were parked, broken, not based in NZ or Australia, or turned out not to be agencies (one was a solo fractional CMO), which left a clean 80. I dropped two of the extension's checks from the counts (partial AI-crawler rules and decorative images with empty alt text) because they over-flag. For the record, only 1 of the 80 sites actually blocked an AI search crawler outright. Blocking isn't the problem. Missing basics are.

How do SEO, AI-search and web agencies compare?

SEO-led firms are well ahead of the studios. But the firms that lead with AI search aren't ahead of ordinary SEO agencies on their own homepages, and nobody in any group averaged the full 12.

My own site has all 12, which puts it in a very small group: only 5 of the 80 agencies did too, all of them SEO-led. I'm not claiming that makes mine the best site here. Any scoring tool has its own quirks, and a different checker would shuffle the order a little. The point is simpler: if you sell this work, your own homepage should have the basics in place. All 12 is the standard I set for clients, and it's what my Foundations package sets up.

Which AI foundations are agency sites missing?

FAQ schema and llms.txt are the most common gaps in every group. After that, the studios fall away sharply: over half have no schema at all.

Are agencies selling SEO without doing it on their own site?

Plenty are. This is the part that surprised me most. These are the 41 firms whose job is search. On their own homepages:

• 36 of 41 are missing at least one basic, and 13 are missing three or more.
• 17 have no llms.txt and 25 have no FAQ schema, two of the simplest ways to help AI engines read and quote a page.
• 9 of the 10 firms that lead with AI search, GEO or AEO miss at least one basic. 70% have no FAQ schema, 40% have incomplete social tags and 30% have no answer-first passage: nothing short and direct for an AI to quote, on a page selling AI quotability.
• On average, the AI-search specialists had 9.7 of 12, no better than ordinary SEO agencies on 10.

None of this means they can't do good work for clients. But if an agency hasn't sorted its own house, it's fair to ask how it will sort yours. Run their homepage through the free check before you sign.

Every site, ranked

Each bar below is one homepage, sorted by how many of the 12 foundations it has. The SEO-led firms cluster at the top. The studios spread all the way down, and the bottom of the chart is all studios, several of them household names in NZ and Australian advertising and design.

The extension's overall score tells the same story, more gently. It grades the whole page, SEO and AI together, so a short page with few things to fail can still look respectable. Even so, 65 of the 80 sites scored lower on the AI half than on the SEO half.

Why do beautiful sites still miss the basics?

The website and brand studios averaged 6.2 of 12. 54% had no schema at all, 79% had no llms.txt and 38% had a homepage under 300 words. They're also no better than the businesses they build for: in a separate scan of 60 NZ B2B brands three days earlier, 49% had schema, 32% had Organization schema and 15% had llms.txt. The studios came in at 46%, 36% and 21%. Different scripts and samples, so treat that as indicative. The reasons are mostly structural:

• The brief is visual. Awards judge craft, motion and brand. No awards jury opens the page source to check for schema.
• SEO is "phase two". It gets parked for launch, then handed to someone else, then forgotten.
• Minimal copy is the style. Big type, few words, lots of imagery. Great for people, not much for an engine to read.
• Nobody owns it. The studio thinks marketing will do it. Marketing thinks the studio did it.
• Changes sit in a queue. Even when the gaps are spotted, studios often keep the code to themselves and fit fixes in around bigger jobs, so simple changes can take weeks to go live.

What should you check if an agency built your site?

1. Run a free check. Use the AI Visibility Check on your homepage and one key service page. It takes 30 seconds.
2. Look for schema. If it says "No structured data", AI engines are guessing who you are.
3. Visit yoursite.com/llms.txt. A 404 means AI tools have no map of your best pages.
4. Read your homepage like an AI would. Is there one plain paragraph that says what you do, for whom and where? If not, there's nothing to quote.
5. Check your agency's own site too. If they sell SEO or AI search, their homepage should pass the same check.
6. Ask who can make changes, and how fast. If every fix has to queue with your web studio, get that sorted first.

How fast can these gaps be fixed?

Faster than most people expect. The technical half (schema, llms.txt, sitemap, headings and social tags) usually takes a week or two once I have access to the CMS or code. The content half (answer-first passages, question-led headings and real, citable numbers) builds over the first month or so. That's what my SEO and AEO foundations package covers. You can run it as a one-off Foundations Sprint, done hands-on in 4 to 6 weeks, or as a Foundations retainer from NZ$1,400 a month.

The other half of fast is turnaround. I keep my client list small on purpose, so urgent fixes don't sit in a queue behind bigger accounts. More on that in specialist vs agency. The method behind this site is free in the AI Search Playbook.

Where this fits: This is part of AEO foundations, the work I do first for New Zealand and Australian B2B teams. The whole method, step by step, is in the AI Search Playbook.