Bright10 warns many South African businesses are invisible to AI search despite ranking on Google

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA — 11 July 2026 — Bright10, a web design and branding studio in Cape Town, is advising South African businesses to check whether AI search tools can find them, warning that many companies that rank well on Google are absent from the answers produced by ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews.

The studio calls the practice answer engine optimisation, or AEO. It differs from traditional search engine optimisation. SEO aims to place a site on the results page, while AEO concerns whether an AI names a business inside a written answer. A site can rank near the top of Google and still be left out when a user asks the same question through an AI tool.

Plenty of owners tell me they rank on Google, so they assume they are covered. Then we ask ChatGPT the same question their customers ask, and the business is not mentioned at all. The fix is usually not a new website. It is making the facts on the page clear enough for a machine to read and repeat.

— Andrew Taylor, founder of Bright10

According to Bright10, the reasons a business is skipped are usually straightforward. Key facts are often locked inside images or PDF files that machines cannot read. Pages frequently fail to state plainly what the business does, where it operates and who it serves. Many sites also lack structured data, which helps software interpret the content on a page.

The studio recommends stating in plain text, near the top of each page, what a business does, where it works and who it serves; moving important facts out of images and PDFs into readable copy; adding clear headings and structured data; and publishing direct answers to the questions customers actually ask.

Bright10 runs a free website audit at bright10.co.za/audit that scores a live site out of 100 on search visibility, speed, content and AI-visibility signals and emails the report. The studio notes that owners can also gauge their position by asking ChatGPT or Gemini for a recommendation in their category and town, then checking whether their business is named.