Kiwi Artisan

The Objective

Kiwi Artisan makes truffle oils, infused olives, gourmet nuts and gift boxes, sold through kiwiartisan.co.nz and stockists around New Zealand.

The goal was simple to say and harder to do, when New Zealanders ask an AI tool where to buy truffle oil, olives, nuts or a foodie gift, Kiwi Artisan should be the brand in the answer. That meant showing up in more answers, being described well when it did, and holding its own against the other brands turning up alongside it.

What We Did

We kicked things off in August 2026 with a full AI Search audit, working through all 329 pages of the Shopify site and scoring it across technical, content, authority and tracking. It landed at Level 2 out of 4, and most of what was holding it back sat underneath the content. Close to 90 pages had no structured data at all, most products carried their schema twice, and many collection pages were missing a main heading.

Getting those foundations right came first. Every page now has schema, from the FAQs through to the stockist list, the broken and doubled-up markup has been cleaned out, and the brand is named the same way everywhere it appears.

There was no AI search tracking in place, so we set it up from scratch. Otterly.AI watches what AI tools say about the brand, a GA4 and Looker Studio dashboard shows what happens when people click through, and a simple "how did you hear about us" field on the site's post-purchase survey phelps show where customers are finding the brand.

We wanted the tracking to reflect how real people ask, so the prompts came from real survey data, not us. We surveyed Kiwi Artisan's customers and the wider New Zealand public on how they'd ask an AI tool for truffle oil, olives, nuts or a gift box, then checked their wording against Google Search Console. That gave us 100 prompts in Otterly, split by product line with a competitor set for each, so a strong truffle month can't hide a quiet one in gifting.

From there it's become a monthly rhythm. We dig into the Otterly results for each product line, hold them up against the live site, and turn what we find into a prioritised content plan for Kiwi Artisan's marketing team to put live. Six pages were reworked in the first month, and the plans since have taken in a rebuilt corporate gifting page, the first proper copy on the spicy collection, deeper nut product pages, and a cheese platter guide that ties the nuts, olives and salts together.

Some of the best wins have been small. The gift bundles page never used the words "hamper" or "gift box", which is exactly how people ask, so we fixed that. And when we noticed nobody was showing up on smoked olive prompts, the Manuka Wood Smoked Olives page content got built out to claim the space

Alongside the content, we've mapped the outside sites AI tools trust in each category, from Metro and the NZ Herald to a handful of well-cited Reddit threads, so Kiwi Artisan knows where to show up next. We re-audited the whole site after the first month to make sure the fixes stuck, and every month wraps up with a report comparing each product line to the month before, so it's clear what's moving and what isn't.

The Result

Brand coverage rose in every product line between Month Two and Month Three on identical prompts: truffle from 64% to 69%, olives from 60% to 66%, nuts from 37% to 44% and gifting from 23% to 26%. Kiwi Artisan now holds 73% share of voice on olive prompts, 69% on nuts and 52% on truffle, ahead of every tracked competitor in each.

When AI engines name Kiwi Artisan, they almost always name it first (an average position of 1.1 or better across truffle, olives and nuts) and speak well of it, with net sentiment between +64 and +69 in every category, higher than the main competitor in each. AI referral traffic doubled in the first month, from 29 to 58 sessions.

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