Who gets cited on ChatGPT today
We tore down the three New Zealand brands closest to you: OM Rub, Koru Nutrition (Koru FX) and Zen Pain Relief. The finding is better than we expected. None of them owns a single category term. Not one.
| Signal | X-ZONE | OM Rub | Koru Nutrition | Zen Pain Relief |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Domain Rating | 18 | 6 | 7 | 0.1 |
| Referring domains | 470 | 486 | 662 | 391 |
| Live backlinks | 622 | 712 | 1,221 | 398 |
| Organic keywords (NZ) | 10 | 4 | 15 | 0 |
| Of those, non-branded | most | 2 | 0 | 0 |
Ahrefs Site Explorer, 13 August 2026, New Zealand. Koru has 40% more referring domains than you and less than half your Domain Rating, which means your links are worth materially more than theirs. Note also that Ahrefs sees only 10 organic keywords for xzone.nz against 2,429 distinct queries in your own Search Console, so treat every Ahrefs traffic figure in this table as a measure of third-party visibility, not of real traffic. We have not quoted their traffic estimates for that reason.
That is the whole competitive case. The category demand we mapped in the Strategy tab, roughly 10,140 commercial searches a month, is being fought over by pharmacy chains and imported brands (Chemist Warehouse, Fisiocrem, Antiflamme, Voltaren, Tiger Balm) and by nobody local who makes what you make. The brand that decides to answer those searches first does not have to beat a competitor to do it.
| Signal | X-ZONE | OM Rub | Koru Nutrition | Zen Pain Relief |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Platform | Shopify | Shopify | Shopify | WordPress |
| Pages in sitemap | 80 | 118 | 100 | 26 |
| Products | 16 | 32 | 25 | 0 listed |
| Blog posts | 43 | 27 | 36 | 2 |
| Median words / page | 2,356 | 756 | 4,746 | 673 |
| Product schema | Yes | Yes | None | None |
| FAQ / question schema | None | None | None | None |
| AI bots named in robots.txt | None | None | None | None |
Live crawl, 14 August 2026. Word counts are the median across a stratified sample of product, blog and content pages. All three Shopify stores publish Shopify's new agents.md file for AI crawlers, which is a platform default rather than anything any of you configured.
| Brand | Their play | Where they are exposed |
|---|---|---|
| Koru Nutrition | The strongest brand builder of the four. Long pages (4,746 median words), 25 products, 662 referring domains, and they convert their own name well. Almost certainly buying demand through advertising and capturing it on brand search. | Zero structured data anywhere, including on the product page that ranks first for a 1,600-a-month term. Zero non-branded rankings. If their ad spend stops, their search presence largely stops with it. |
| OM Rub | Twice your product count and clean technical basics, with Product, Brand and Offer schema in place. Holds a toehold on "muscle rub" at position 3. | Thin content, 756 median words against your 2,356. Domain Rating of 6 despite 486 referring domains, so the links are weak. No ingredient or education story to be cited for. |
| Zen Pain Relief | Little to speak of. 26 pages, 2 blog posts, no product listings in the sitemap, no meaningful schema. | Domain Rating 0.1 and zero organic keywords. Not currently a competitor in search. |
You hold the strongest link profile, the most blog content, working product schema, and the only genuine ingredient story in the set. What you have not done is point any of it at the questions people actually ask. Koru has shown that brand demand can be built in this category. Nobody has yet shown that category demand can be won, because nobody has tried.
Three moves fall straight out of this teardown, in the order we would do them.
| Move | Why this, why now |
|---|---|
| 1. Claim the question layer | None of the four brands has FAQ or question schema on a single page, and none has addressed AI crawlers in robots.txt. This is days of work, not months, and it is the most direct route into an AI-generated answer. Doing it first means you are the only brand in the category machine-readable as an answer source. |
| 2. Own the ingredient ground | You already rank 5.1 for tūpākihi off one article, and you make products from eleven native herbs with independent lab results behind them. Koru cannot follow you here, because they do not have the story. This is the moat, and it is the one thing in the category that compounds. |
| 3. Take the unglamorous commercial terms | Wheat bags, heat packs, massage oil, liniment. Roughly half your genuinely commercial demand, formats you already sell, and not one of the three competitors ranks for any of it. These are the terms with a wallet behind them. |
Authority signals from Ahrefs Site Explorer, 13 August 2026, New Zealand. Technical and content signals from a live crawl of all four sites on 14 August 2026; word counts are the median across a stratified sample of product, blog and content pages. Ahrefs sees only a fraction of a small New Zealand site's real footprint, so its traffic estimates are deliberately not quoted here. Every figure on this page is broken out in The data.