The GEO checklist for South African marketing teams: 33 checks, with the reason for each

A GEO checklist is the list of tasks that make your brand more likely to be named and cited when buyers ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews. This one has 33 checks for South African marketing teams, in five groups: measurement, technical, content, sources and brand, each with the reason it matters.

The urgency is local. In our analysis of 96 Google South Africa searches on 11 October 2026, 92 showed an AI Overview above the ordinary results. If generative engine optimisation is new to your team, start there, then come back to this list.

In short

• Measure first. Without a fixed question set and a baseline, you cannot tell which change worked.
• Fix the technical blockers next: text that crawlers cannot read and AI search crawlers blocked by accident.
• Write pages that answer the question first, with dated numbers and named sources.
• Be present on the sources your category's answers already cite.
• Keep your name and description identical everywhere, so assistants do not confuse you with a namesake.

How do you measure GEO?

1. Write down the questions your buyers ask, before you change anything. They are the yardstick for every later step: build your question set.
2. Report branded and unbranded questions separately. Being named when someone asks about you by name proves little: branded vs unbranded questions.
3. Ask every question on several engines, more than once. Answers vary between models and between runs of the same model.
4. Record four things: named at all, named first, share of voice, cited sources. Together they show presence, prominence, competition and why: what AI share of voice is.
5. Never report a percentage from fewer than 30 answers. Below that, one answer moves the figure by more than three points: how to measure GEO.
6. Re-run the same questions after every change. A new question set breaks the comparison: GEO metrics for your dashboard.
7. Check whether Google shows an AI Overview for your key searches. 92 of the 96 South African searches we checked on 11 October 2026 did: state of AI Overviews in South Africa.

What technical checks matter for AI search?

8. Load your key pages with JavaScript off. Our own homepage showed crawlers 66 words until we prerendered it; GPTBot now sees about 2,090: is your website readable by ChatGPT.
9. Allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt. OpenAI states that opted-out sites "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers": robots.txt for AI crawlers.
10. Allow Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot unless you have a reason not to. Anthropic says blocking its search bot may reduce your visibility; PerplexityBot surfaces and links sites in Perplexity's results.
11. Decide on GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended separately. They govern use of your content for model training (Google-Extended also covers Gemini grounding), and Google says Google-Extended does not affect inclusion or ranking in Google Search.
12. Check your CDN and firewall do not block crawlers robots.txt allows. Google's AI features guidance names hosting and CDN blocks explicitly.
13. Give every public page its own title, description and canonical. A page whose canonical points at the homepage tells search engines it is a copy of the homepage.
14. Make structured data match the visible text. Google lists this among its best practices for AI features: structured data for AI search.
15. Treat llms.txt as optional. It is a 2024 proposal, and Google says you need no AI text files for its AI features: what llms.txt is.
16. Verify your site in Google Search Console. Google recommends it for diagnosing technical issues, and it is where Google reports your impressions and clicks.

What content do AI assistants quote?

17. Open each page with a one- or two-sentence direct answer. It is the part an answer can lift whole: how to write content AI assistants quote.
18. Add statistics, each with a date and source. In the GEO paper (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024), adding statistics raised visibility from 19.5 to 25.9.
19. Quote relevant, named sources. Adding quotations scored 27.8 in the same study, against 19.5 for an unchanged page.
20. Cite your sources on the page. Citing sources scored 24.9 in the same study.
21. Do not keyword-stuff. It scored 17.8, worse than leaving the page alone.
22. Publish fair, dated comparison and "best X for Y" pages. 58 of the 59 "best", "cheapest" and similar list searches we checked showed an Overview: GEO for B2B companies.
23. Write for South Africa: rand, local rules, local examples. 60.1% of sources cited in our 96 searches were South African (.za) domains, and only one Overview cited none.
24. Keep key facts in text, with images and video as support. Google's AI features guidance asks for important content in text form.

Where do AI answers get their sources?

25. List the sources your category's answers already cite. They differ by sector: hippo.co.za led insurance (13 references), autotrader.co.za led automotive (17): find the sources AI cites in your category.
26. Rank in the ordinary results for the same questions. In 73 of 86 Overviews, at least one cited site also ranked in the top five: does ranking get you cited.
27. Earn coverage in the publications your answers cite. mybroadband.co.za (12) and businesstech.co.za (9) recurred across our searches: digital PR for AI visibility.
28. Keep your social pages as accurate as your website. facebook.com was cited 54 times and youtube.com 33 times across our 96 searches: why Google's AI cites Facebook, YouTube and Reddit.
29. Build genuine reviews on independent platforms, never paid for. Google prohibits incentives for reviews, and shows no review stars for reviews a business controls about itself.
30. Complete and verify your Google Business Profile. Google lists an up-to-date Business Profile among its AI features best practices: GEO for local businesses.

How do you keep your brand consistent for AI?

31. Use one name and one spelling everywhere. Variations make it harder to tell you apart from a similarly named company: how to stop AI confusing your brand.
32. Add Organization markup with sameAs links to your official profiles. Google says the markup helps disambiguate your organisation; schema.org defines sameAs as a page that "unambiguously indicates the item's identity".
33. Ask assistants "what is [your brand]?" every quarter. That is where confusion shows: on 11 October 2026, Google's AI Overview for our own name cited us and a similarly named company.

Which checks should you do first?

Start with 1 to 7: a baseline costs little and makes everything after it provable. Then 8 to 10, because a blocked or unreadable site cancels every content change. Content and sources come next, and the brand checks run throughout. Re-measure on the same questions after each group, and keep the numbers with their dates.