Six months into running this benchmark, the chart that made me stop scrolling wasn’t the citation counts or the industry breakdowns. It was the Hello Peter scatter. A clean kink at a specific star rating. I sat with it for an afternoon trying to convince myself it was noise. It isn’t.
We’ve been classifying citations from GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro on a hundred South African brands — 232,254 cited URLs across the three models. Most of what we’ve found is what you’d guess from a weekend with the data. A handful of things weren’t. This post is the shape of what we learned, the single most-cited SA publisher named with its exact count, and a pointer to the gated Index Report for the per-brand and per-industry detail.
The Hello Peter kink.
Hello Peter is one of the most-cited SA sources in our entire dataset and the only complaint platform in the SA top set. When you scrape every AI answer about a SA brand and bin the descriptions by the brand’s Hello Peter average, you don’t see a slope. You see a flat line that bends sharply at a specific star value. Above the bend the AI talks about the brand the way it talks about a brand without complaints. Below the bend the AI talks about the brand the way it talks about a brand in trouble — even when the recent reviews on the page are good, even when the response rate is high, even when the company has been publicly addressing the complaints for months. I re-ran the prompts after the first time I saw the chart because I couldn’t believe a kink that sharp was real. The second run produced the same kink in the same place. The most likely explanation is that the public Hello Peter page surfaces the star average prominently and the model treats it as a single summary signal, not a weighted read of the underlying reviews. If that’s right, the actionable bit is short: crossing the threshold is worth more than every other Hello Peter intervention combined. The exact threshold value sits in the Index Report. I’d like to be wrong about it — it would be a much fairer system if I were — but I haven’t been able to falsify it yet.
Where does your brand sit relative to the threshold? The free Brand Scorecard tells you in about a minute.
businesstech.
7,508 citations across the three models — more than the next two SA publishers combined, and the only SA publisher in this position by a margin wide enough that the ranking is stable across every quarterly bench run we’ve done. businesstech.co.za dominates every category we measured except the ones where almost nothing SA gets cited at all.
If your PR partner can’t get you on businesstech, that’s the line item to renegotiate.
The other publishers AI reads.
Positions 2 through 10 live in the Q2 2026 Index Report — in order, with citation counts, with what each site covers, and with how brands actually earn coverage on each. Giving the list away here would help your competitor as much as it helps you.
The Reddit thing.
On identical prompts about identical SA brands in the same week of May, Gemini cited Reddit hundreds of times. GPT-5 cited it zero. Claude cited it zero. The Gemini figure isn’t evenly spread either — it concentrates around consumer categories and around brands where the loudest online discussion happens to be on r/southafrica or a sub-Reddit specific to the brand’s industry.
I can account for the ChatGPT zero. OpenAI changed its retrieval pipeline in late 2025 and Reddit’s share across all OpenAI surfaces fell sharply. That’s public, it shows up in third-party trackers, and our own monthly runs caught the drop in real time.
I can’t account for the Claude zero. Anthropic doesn’t publish its grounding source mix. Claude doesn’t cite Reddit on any of our SA prompts — not the consumer categories where Reddit is the obvious source, not the prompts where we explicitly ask for community discussion, not the queries where a sub-Reddit dominates the open web. The cleanest hypothesis is that Anthropic treats social discussion as low-trust evidence by default, but that’s a guess. If anyone at Anthropic wants to comment for the record, we’ll add their answer here and update the bench notes.
The practical answer for your brand doesn’t depend on the explanation. Reddit is a Gemini play. If your audience uses Gemini, your Reddit presence reaches them. If they use ChatGPT or Claude, it does not.
Industries vs models.
Across our ten pre-registered industries the SA-source share runs by close to 70 percentage points top to bottom — the highest-share category sits comfortably above two-thirds local, the lowest sits in the single digits. The per-industry numbers live in the Index Report. The gap between any two AI models on the same brand is smaller than the gap between any two industries on the same model. That’s the data point most worth absorbing if you only take one thing from this post: which AI you’re trying to win in matters less than which industry you’re in.
Banking, insurance and medical aid are SA-first — AI looks for local sources and finds them. The work in those categories is conventional SA PR. Hotels, restaurants, lodges and most of e-commerce are international-default — AI reaches for TripAdvisor, Booking, Trustpilot, Amazon even when you name a SA-only brand. The work in those categories isn’t SA PR. It’s appearing well on the international platforms AI reads. Trying to compete with Booking on AI’s default surface for hotel queries is a losing battle this year, and probably next year too.
If I had your job for a quarter.
I’d look at the Hello Peter average before anything else. If it’s below the threshold the bench identifies, I’d cancel half the AI-search budget and spend that money on whatever lifts the score — complaint resolution, follow-up requests for review updates, staffing the inbox. Nothing else moves the AI description as quickly as crossing the line.
I’d find out whether my category is SA-first or international-default. If I’m a hotel, my AI-search budget belongs on TripAdvisor, not on a SA PR retainer. If I’m a bank, the opposite.
And I’d ask my PR partner what it would take to land a businesstech feature. If they don’t have a clean answer, that’s information about the partner.
The Q2 2026 Index Report has the full top 10, the per-industry SA-source share, the methodology, and the cost-of-inaction frame for your CFO. Download it free.
Frequently asked questions
Is this just SEO with a new name?
No. SEO ranks pages on a list and the customer picks one. What we measure is which sources an AI assistant reads when it composes a single answer. Domain top-10 ranking still helps. But AI answers narrow choice to two or three named brands — if you’re not one, you’re not considered.
My SEO agency says they cover this.
Most SA agencies have a Profound or Athena seat for per-platform tracking. What they don’t have is a SA-specific reference dataset to measure your brand against. The two layer — agency tracking is your weekly dashboard; the bench is the quarterly truth your tracking gets measured against.
Does the data go stale?
The publisher list is more stable than people expect. businesstech.co.za has been dominant in every measurement we’ve done. Specific counts shift each quarter, which is why the Index Report refreshes quarterly. The trend lines are what matter.
How do I show this to a CFO?
The Index Report includes a cost-of-inaction frame — how many AI queries per month name a competitor instead of you, and what that consideration loss is worth in paid-acquisition equivalent. CFOs respond to that frame because it’s denominated in numbers they already track.
Which SA brands have used this?
The bench measured 100 SA brands and they’re named in the Index Report. For named Scorecard customers we’ll share what we can with permission — book a call and we’ll talk specifics.
One thing that didn’t fit anywhere above and I keep meaning to look
into: the automotive numbers in our first bench run were nonsense —
Toyota came back at 0% visibility, which is impossible on any reading of the
SA car market. We almost killed the whole study before realising we’d
asked the models about “car dealers” when we should have asked
about “car brands”. The fix added a digit of meaningful precision
to half our industry numbers. Two days of debate about whether to retire the
methodology turned out to be two days of debate about whether we’d
written the prompt correctly. Bench is on v1.2 now. The next post in this
series might just be about prompt design.
Last updated 23 May 2026. SA-AEO-Bench v1.2 pre-registered at
osf.io/w4az2.