Pink Bins and Team Empathy have been at this together for a long time: the backlink log starts in August 2021 and the full engagement kicked off with the September 2022 foundations build. Here's the arc in one view.
Every number on this page traces to a named source. The monthly figures and the rankings check come from the 12 October 2026 pull; the long-run totals, the 12-month revenue and the 16-month AI visit count come from the 2 September 2026 pull and carry their own windows above. Alongside those: your SEO Work sheet, our monthly reports and Ahrefs. The +411% figure is from the published case study at teamempathy.co.nz/work/pink-bins. Every Search Console and GA4 figure is what the tools recorded rather than audited sales, GA4 revenue counts website checkout only, and your phone and quote jobs land on top of every dollar figure here.
The terms that pay the bills still belong to you, and the picture has moved since July. On the live Google New Zealand check of 12 October 2026, 31 of your 35 tracked keywords were ranking, 24 of them in the top 10, 13 in the top 3 and seven at number 1: skip bin hire auckland, bin hire auckland, cheapest skip bins auckland, pink bin company, pink rubbish bin, bin hire manukau and asbestos disposal bags nz. At the July report 27 sat in the top 3, read from your sheet's manual 31 July check rather than this automated live check, so the two are not quite like for like. Against the automated check of 2 September, which put 19 in the top 3, the very top has thinned while the base has held. That position was built from the 2022 foundations build onward and has been defended through a delivery pause and two Google core updates.
And it converts to money. Across the 12 months to August 2026, organic search put $353,906 through your website checkout, roughly $29,500 a month against a $1,000 a month plan. September tracked $20,030 from 44 purchases, up 5.9% on August's $18,915. Read that rise carefully: August took 46 purchases, so the lift is average order value rather than more jobs won, $455 an order against $411. Since GA4 revenue tracking went live in July 2023 the organic total is $904,970, which is 80% of everything your website has tracked in revenue, and September on its own ran at 58%. GA4
| Period | Organic revenue tracked (GA4) | Organic purchases |
|---|---|---|
| Since July 2023 (tracking start) | $904,970 | 2,344 |
| Last 12 months (Sep 2025 to Aug 2026) | $353,906 | 883 |
| September 2026 | $20,030 | 44 |
| Of which non-branded (estimated), the 12 month figure | ~$263,711 | Method: each month's non-branded share of Search Console clicks applied to that month's organic revenue |
Positions move in both directions, and the engine responds when we point it at a problem. portaloo hire came off position 26 in February 2026 and averaged 10.6 in Search Console through September on 7 clicks, although the 12 October live check read it far lower at 72, the kind of single-reading gap we re-check before drawing anything from it. green waste disposal auckland went the other way: it sat at 6 in August and came back at 24 on the 12 October check, with a Search Console average of 18.0 and no clicks for September. That one is now on the list to pull back.
Since February 2026, 27 articles have gone through the content refresh programme (23 live, with July's last four sitting with Jay for upload at the July report), and the sheet logs what happened to each one:
| Article | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| How Much Recycling Actually Gets Recycled In NZ? | 23 clicks / month (Apr 2026) | 60 clicks / month (May 2026) |
| What is Recycling? | Average position 29.3 (Dec 2025) | Position 6.7 (Mar 2026) |
| Lithium Batteries disposal guide | 0 clicks at position 16.7 (Dec 2025) | 11 clicks / month at position ~7 (Jun 2026) |
| Flexi bags guide | 16 clicks / month | 32 clicks / month |
The blog now carries real commercial weight: in September, five of the ten pages Google sent you the most clicks were blog and question pages, answering the price, logistics and disposal questions people actually search. This matters double in the AI era, because those question-answering pages are the ones ChatGPT and Google's AI tend to draw on. Search Console
Organic clicks fell through the first half of 2026 and then turned: 2,145 in August to 2,255 in September, the first rise after a run of soft months. The rankings machine did not break. The commercial head terms are still clustered at the top, and the whole-site average position is better than a year ago, 9.5 in September against 12.8 in September 2025, averaged across every search you appear for. What fell is the share of searchers who click anything at all: click-through rate went from 2.94% a year ago to 1.85% now, while Google showed you to almost exactly the same number of people, impressions down only 2.8% year on year.
Three forces are doing that, and naming them matters because each has a different answer:
| Force | Evidence | The answer |
|---|---|---|
| AI answers absorbing clicks | Impressions are almost flat year on year while click-through rate fell from 2.94% to 1.85%. On the day of the 12 October check, Google put an AI answer above the results on roughly 14 of your 35 tracked searches. Read that as a snapshot rather than a score: we ran the check twice on the same day and got two different counts, because whether the box appears moves day to day. The check records only that it appeared, never what it said | Be the brand those answers draw on, which is what the work programme below is aimed at |
| A tough market that is still there | Google showed you to almost exactly the same number of people as a year ago, impressions down 2.8%. The market and the price competition are genuinely tough, as you have told us yourself, and the click numbers are not the thing measuring that | Hold the rankings so you win a bigger share of a market that is still there, and that part is working |
| The 2025 pause | SEO and link work paused July to December 2025; the momentum cost showed up with a lag | The relight engine has been rebuilding since December, and article-level results show it responding |
Meanwhile most of the traffic is being bought or posted for: in September, paid channels drove 6,102 sessions and organic social 7,055, against 2,794 from organic search, and organic search still out-earned every other channel at $20,030 of the $34,595 the site tracked. Organic search brings under a fifth of the visits and over half the money, which is the economics worth protecting.
Pink Bins is unusually well positioned for AI search for a local services business. AI crawlers are fully welcomed on your site and the schema foundations we built are genuinely good. On the prompt testing we ran by hand ahead of the 2 September pull, Pink Bins turned up across Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini, and your own agency partner tested prompts independently and screenshotted the same. That is a hand-run test on a given day rather than a running measurement, and the monthly check records only whether an AI answer appeared on a search, never what it said or who it named. What is measured is the traffic: AI assistants sent 38 visits in September against 22 in August, on top of 368 across the 16 months to August. August recorded your first tracked purchase from an AI assistant referral, and September did not repeat it. Small, real, and only measured since last year: it is the channel where the next four years get won.
The work sitting on the table, roughly in order of impact:
| Move | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Suburb service pages | There are no suburb pages at all today; "skip bin hire [suburb]" searches and AI answers have nothing local to cite |
| Money terms one push from the top | On the 12 October check: skip bin hire (position 5, and 1,363 impressions in September), skip bins auckland (5) and portaloo hire auckland (8). High-volume terms sitting just below the top 3 |
| A curated llms.txt | The current auto-generated file shows AI crawlers only a handful of URLs from a 170-post site; a curated one hands them your best answers |
| Schema and sitemap cleanup | Product schema on the money pages needs repair, and ~400 junk URLs in the sitemap dilute what crawlers see |
| More content, not more links | Monthly volume link building is retired. Your base of 1,060 live backlinks across 769 referring domains is built and holding Domain Rating 24, so that effort goes into extra article refreshes and new answer content instead, at no change to your plan |