AI SEO for South African businesses: getting your facts into AI answers

What the AI search tools say they need

You don't have to guess, because the companies behind them publish it.

Google says there are no additional requirements and no special optimisations needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. A page has to be indexed and able to show in Search with a snippet. Google also says you don't need special schema, and you don't need new AI text files.

OpenAI's crawler for ChatGPT search is called OAI-SearchBot, and OpenAI recommends allowing it in your robots.txt if you want your site to appear in ChatGPT's search results.

Perplexity's crawler, PerplexityBot, is there to surface and link websites in Perplexity's results, and Perplexity also asks sites to allow it.

Microsoft reports how often your pages are cited in Copilot and in Bing's AI summaries through the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools.

Put together: be indexed, let the right crawlers in, and say your facts plainly. That's the job.

What we do on every new site we build

• Structured data that describes your business and matches what's on the page, which is what Google asks of it.
• An llms.txt file, a proposed plain-text summary of your business for AI tools. Google says its AI features don't need one. We add it anyway, because it's a short, accurate summary that takes minutes to write and costs you nothing.
• A robots.txt that lets AI search crawlers in, so OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot can read your site.
• The words. We write them on every package, and we write them so a person, Google or an AI can tell in one read what you do, where you do it and what it costs.

What each package adds

The website itself is built free on every package, from R490 a month. Compare all four.

How you'll know what's happening

Since 31 August 2026, every site in Search Console has a report of how often its pages appear in Google's generative AI features, by page, country, device and date. It counts impressions, not clicks. Bing's AI Performance report counts citations in Copilot and Bing's AI summaries, with the pages cited and the searches behind them. On Growth, Google Analytics also shows visits that arrive from AI assistants; our guide to tracking AI traffic in Google Analytics explains what that can and can't see.

No tool shows every mention of your business in every AI answer. Anyone who sells you a "citation rate" should tell you exactly how they measured it.

What we won't promise

We won't promise that ChatGPT recommends you, that you'll appear in an AI Overview, or that you'll rank anywhere. Those decisions belong to Google, OpenAI, Perplexity and Microsoft. Google's own guide to hiring an SEO says no one can guarantee a number one ranking. What we promise is the work in your package, every month, and a report that shows it.

We do it on our own site first

You can check all of this on positionxero.com without taking our word for it. Our robots.txt lets the AI crawlers in, we publish an llms.txt and our prices as a plain file, and every page we want found carries structured data. View the source on any of them.

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