This is Clearwater's search and AI visibility measured on 27 July 2026, before the new website goes live. Every number here is re-pulled from source. It exists so that in three months, and in twelve, we can prove exactly what changed.
We cannot show year-on-year progress yet. Search Console data for Clearwater begins 11 February 2026 and Google Analytics begins March 2026, part way through the month. There is no earlier history to compare against, so any before-and-after we publish before February 2027 would be measuring our own tracking, not Clearwater's performance.
That has one practical consequence, and it is the most important line in this document. Rachel's booking records from last season are not a nice-to-have. They are the only complete commercial baseline that exists for the seasons already gone. Our tools cannot reconstruct them.
A second caution, for the same reason. Comparing the last 90 days with the 90 days before it looks like a decline. It is not. The recent window is New Zealand winter and the earlier one is summer. For a seasonal wildlife operator those two periods are simply not comparable, and we will not present them as if they were.
In the last 90 days Clearwater earned 565 organic clicks from 12,606 impressions. Google discloses the individual queries behind 281 of those clicks and anonymises the remaining 284, so we can only split what it shows us.
Of the disclosed clicks, 219 came from people searching the brand by name and 62 came from non-brand queries, spread across just 26 search terms. Discovery by someone who has never heard of Clearwater is running at well under one click a day.
We are deliberately not calling the 284 anonymised clicks non-brand. They cannot be attributed either way, and inflating the starting number would only make our own progress look smaller later.
| Query | Clicks | Impr. | Pos. |
|---|---|---|---|
| dunedin wildlife tours | 10 | 430 | 5.3 |
| wildlife tours dunedin | 9 | 218 | 3.5 |
| dunedin wildlife tour | 5 | 102 | 3.3 |
| garrett hopper | 3 | 19 | 10.3 |
| new zealand wildlife tours | 3 | 317 | 16.6 |
| otago peninsula wildlife tour | 3 | 123 | 5.0 |
| penguin tours dunedin | 3 | 152 | 8.5 |
| cape saunders | 2 | 270 | 7.7 |
| dunedin penguin tours | 2 | 54 | 9.8 |
| otago peninsula tour | 2 | 49 | 8.3 |
Not one penguin, albatross or sea lion species term appears. The hero territory is entirely unclaimed.
New Zealand is 57% of clicks. The earlier research blended volume across seven international markets, which overweighted overseas demand. The new workbook keeps NZ, US, UK and AU as separate, visible columns.
The money page is leaking. The tour page converts 2,278 impressions into 44 clicks, a 1.9% click-through rate, while the homepage absorbs 446 of all 565 clicks. The homepage currently has no H1 heading at all, and there is no structured data anywhere on the site.
We took all 49 approved research prompts and ran each one live on 27 July 2026, recording whether Clearwater's own website appears in the sources an AI assistant draws on, and who owns each answer instead. This is repeatable: the same 49 prompts, run the same way, measure movement.
Our own site is cited in 2 of 49 answers. Both wins are commercial "best wildlife tour" questions.
Where we already win. Ask an AI assistant for the best wildlife tour in Dunedin, or the best wildlife tours on the Otago Peninsula, and Clearwater is named and described first and favourably. That reputation is real and worth defending.
Where it costs us. Elm Wildlife appears in 9 of the 49 answers. Clearwater appears in 2. The operator that left the Cape Saunders farm in 2020 out-cites the operator that holds that access today by more than four to one. Worse, on two prompts the AI states outright that Elm still operates the same farm and beach. That is wrong, and it is answering a question asked by people deciding where to book.
| Territory | Prompts | Our site cited | Who owns these answers today |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wildlife tours (general) | 15 | 2 | adventure-life, airnewzealand, albatross.org.nz, alltrails, birdingnz, bluepenguins.co.nz, clear |
| Yellow-eyed penguin | 12 | 0 | a-z-animals, airnewzealand, bluepenguins.co.nz, britannica, britz, doc.govt.nz, dunedinnz.com, e |
| Otago Peninsula planning | 6 | 0 | albatross.org.nz, awesometours.co.nz, bluepenguins.co.nz, chaseday.com, doc.govt.nz, dunedinnz.c |
| Royal albatross | 5 | 0 | albatross.org.nz, allaboutbirds.org, doc.govt.nz, dunedinnz.com, lonelyplanet, newzealand.com, n |
| NZ sea lions & seals | 4 | 0 | NOAA, US, doc.govt.nz, dunedinnz.com, healthebay.org, maui-rentals, newzealand.com, nzpocketguid |
| Cruise shore excursion | 4 | 0 | iconictours.co.nz, newzealand.com, porttoport, porttoport.co.nz, royalcaribbean, shoreexcursions |
| Ethical & conservation | 3 | 0 | bluepenguins.co.nz, getyourguide, newzealand.com, sanctuary.org.nz, theopera.co.nz, yellow-eyedp |
Five of the seven territories score zero. Cruise, ethical and conservation, sea lions, albatross and Otago Peninsula planning are completely open.
Zero before June 2026. The channel switched on and is climbing, which is why the AI work is not a future bet.
Organic is 14% of 5,188 sessions. Paid search is currently the largest channel.
Every keyword was re-pulled from three independent sources across four markets and reconciled, replacing a single blended figure that could not be audited. Thirteen keyword families were being counted more than once and are now folded into a single parent.
| Keyword | Territory | NZ | US | UK | AU | Total | KD | Rank now |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| otago peninsula | Otago Peninsula planning | 2,900 | 480 | 210 | 390 | 3,980 | 4 | — |
| yellow eyed penguin | Yellow-eyed penguin | 1,900 | 1,900 | 480 | 320 | 4,600 | 18 | — |
| hoiho | Yellow-eyed penguin | 1,600 | 480 | 140 | 110 | 2,330 | 12 | — |
| new zealand sea lion | Sea lions & seals | 480 | 480 | 110 | 140 | 1,210 | 9 | — |
| penguins dunedin | Yellow-eyed penguin | 1,000 | 10 | 10 | 35 | 1,055 | 0 | — |
| albatross colony dunedin | Royal albatross | 880 | 20 | 35 | 70 | 1,005 | 0 | — |
| albatross dunedin | Royal albatross | 880 | 20 | 20 | 90 | 1,010 | 1 | — |
| nz sea lion | Sea lions & seals | 480 | 20 | 20 | 30 | 550 | 10 | — |
| yellow eyed penguin dunedin | Yellow-eyed penguin | 170 | 20 | 20 | 20 | 230 | 6 | — |
| new zealand wildlife tours | Wildlife tours (Dunedin/Otago) | 15 | 70 | 40 | 50 | 175 | 0 | — |
| where to see penguins in dunedin | Yellow-eyed penguin | 110 | 15 | 15 | 15 | 155 | 0 | — |
| dunedin wildlife tour | Wildlife tours (Dunedin/Otago) | 140 | 15 | 10 | 10 | 175 | 33 | 7 |
Two corrections worth naming. Otago Peninsula is the largest term in the whole book at 3,980 combined monthly searches and a difficulty of just 4, and the earlier research demoted it to a supporting term on a contact page. Hoiho, the Māori name for the yellow-eyed penguin, triangulates to 2,330 rather than 880, and was marked as secondary. Both now get real pages.
Scored against the four pillars of the Team Empathy AEO Maturity Model. Certified AI-Ready means reaching Professional on all four, which is 80 out of 100.
Domain Rating. Clearwater is last, behind the operator that stopped running the Cape Saunders tour six years ago. Authority is the slowest pillar to move, which is what the contracted backlink work is for.
The encouraging part. Almost nothing here is broken. It is absent. A site with no schema, no species pages and no FAQ answers is a site where every fix is additive, and additive is far cheaper and faster than undoing damage.
The staging site is publicly crawlable. The development build has no noindex instruction, a permissive robots.txt, and it publishes a complete sitemap of every page. Google can index a full duplicate of Clearwater's website on the developer's domain, and analytics already shows visitors arriving from it. The fix is one line, or a password.
This is a platform migration, not a redesign. The live site runs Silverstripe and the new build is WordPress. Every URL changes, 79% of clicks currently land on a single page, and there are no canonical tags in place. A complete redirect map and a pre-launch crawl are essential. We have seen a migration of exactly this shape cost another client several months of organic revenue, and that is entirely avoidable here.