Why Authenticity Matters For Your Business Online Visibility: And What You Can Do About It.
People want authenticity. People choose you again and again because they trust you. AI becoming so woven into the digital world does not take away this need. In fact, it creates an even greater need for it. We want to trust that the world we see is "true" and authentic. Your website is your greatest asset to build as a foundation for authentic visibility online. And amazingly, AI seems to reflect this need. This is proven by our recent case study, see below for more details.
What We Mean by Authenticity
To start we feel we should define authenticity. The oxford dictionary defines it as the quality of being true or what somebody claims it is. I interpret this as authneticity itself being unique to each person, and it is whatever you determine it to be fore you, and being true to that. So what does authenticity mean to us? Our values around authenticity is being true to our word, using our own voice and personality. Being the process of always recalibrating to our values for what that looks like at luminera.
The Problem: People Assume You Didn't Write It
The problem is not actually that it is getting harder and harder to differentiate between what is created by people, and what is AI. The problem is that people no longer trust that you wrote it. People are automatically wary and questioning "is this AI?" and then next Do you find yourself doing this? I know I do.
EY asked over 500 New Zealanders. 85% are deeply concerned about AI-driven misinformation. The global figure was 74%. So Kiwis are more worried than most. Only 28% of us think AI's benefits outweigh the negatives, against 51% globally. [1]
At Luminera we want to be part of the culture that encourages and supports a future where AI is used as the tool that it is. Not something that replaces our human creativity, or that we become so reliant on quick answers, and these fast dopamine hits of (often incorrect) information. I see it speeding up the world in a whole other way, thinking about children specifically, I wonder how frustration levels may rise in the future?!
Want to find out about our AI Search Visibility Services?
Case Study: 12 Days to an AI Overview
A current client of ours, Empathy Angels: we have just built them a new testimonials page. It went live 12 days ago. And Google is now quoting the testimonial page inside their AI answer overview for the query, "Is Empathy Angels legit?"
This means that adding the testimonials page made the answer about her true and sourced. The answer to the query ‘is Empathy Angels legit,’ now rests on citable third-party evidence where it previously rested on her own copy this is a structural improvement.
This shows:
1. It only took 12 days for this page to make an impact! Most SEO and what we ourselves have also seen is that it can take 3-6 months to see results, we are curious if this is indicating another shift in search? That things are speeding up maybe? What we do now is having an impact faster…? This is just a theory, we will keep you updated as we continue to research this in real time.
2. Their business has shown up for a query about them being legit and have won this query, something that wasn't happening before this page was uploaded.
3. Authentic reviews are gold for AI search!
4. This new page and their website is shaping what AI says about their business, and is quoting it confidently now, as a verified source.
5. It was creating a dedicated page that shifted how AI was referring to their business in this query.
6. The importance of regularly updating your website.
In relation to why authenticity matters, this case study shows how quickly simple changes, adding new pages with authentically written text, can contribute to businesses being found in AI search more easily. It also shows just how much extra information AI will share, and it is important to ensure that this information is correct.
Empathy Angels is a free, confidential empathetic listening service facilitated by trained empathy practitioners, online via Zoom, for adults aged 18 and over anywhere in New Zealand. Go check them out, and you can book a free session here!
Want to know what AI search knows about your business?
Most business don’t know what AI is saying about them to the people who search for them. When you know, you can make changes, and make sure its accurate.
How We Cultivate Authenticity at luminera
We write our own content. For our clients who their voice is their brand, e.g a birth worker, we encourage them to write their own content. From there we go ahead and restructure and format, etc. No one can capture your voice the way you can, and while yes, we are optimising for Search, when a person lands on your page at the end of the day they are the ones choosing to buy or not. This is why we keep a holistic approach to how we work. It's about keeping current, showing your website is alive. This signals to search that you are a viable organisation.
We come and photograph you on site. This means real photography, not stock images. To update your website, Google Business Profile and social media with current images of you in action.
Local signals that tie you to your community. We are local SEO specialists in Kerikeri, New Zealand. A large part of the way we work is in local search, getting you found in your local area.
What We Won't Promise You. We don't make any false claims around what we can deliver. We won't ever claim to be able to get you ranked number one within a certain time frame. This is because we cannot guarantee this, and this authority is built over time, as it is earned, it cannot be bought.
We are upfront about our pricing. We have no extra costs, we are clear about what services we provide.
What can you do about authenticity on your website?
You can ask yourself this question, how can I be more true and clear in what my business values are in an informative way? Then update this into your website. Our case study shows that actively updating your website builds authority and keeps your page current. When this is written authentically in your own words (or words of other people in this case testimonials) AI search maybe more likely to cite your web page in their search. While we cannot ever guarantee the precise results, we can make changes that are strong indicators to AI and Google search that you are a verifiable, legitimate organisation that is worth them recommending. A 2024 study by researchers at Princeton University and IIT Delhi found that three content changes; citing sources, adding quotations and adding statistics, lifted a page's visibility in AI-generated answers by 30 to 40 percent on the study's main visibility measure, with gains of up to 37 percent for adding statistics in a live test on Perplexity.ai. [2]
What you can do right now:
Go through your website and update your content
You can add a testimonials page
You could update your FAQ’s
You could take some fresh photos and upload them
Other things to note here, we apply schema code and run and do technical website fixes to ensure that your pages are visible to AI crawler bots. If you would like to hear more about how we can do that for you, check out our services.
How are you staying true and authentic in the digital world? Let us know in the comments below. Maybe you will inspire another!
If you would like to hear more about how we work, connect with us here
Sources:
[1] [EY Future Consumer Index — Winning over New Zealand consumers: rethinking cost, trust and AI](https://www.ey.com/en_nz/future-consumer-index/winning-over-new-zealand-consumers-rethinking-cost-trust-and-ai), April 2025.
[2] Aggarwal, P., Murahari, V., Rajpurohit, T., Kalyan, A., Narasimhan, K., & Deshpande, A. (2024). GEO: Generative engine optimization. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (pp. 5–16). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3637528.3671900
