We built the canonical dataset of how AI engines cite South African brands.
Cited Brands is a South African company building the reference layer for AI search reputation. We started from a pilot — 6,204 citations across 20 of the biggest SA brands, three frontier LLMs, one weekend. We found that the average SA brand controls only 8% of its own AI search narrative. Then we built the platform to fix it.
Founding team
Operator + GTM lead — built and ran the May 2026 pilot that proved the thesis. Partnered with Dr. William Banks, Director of Business Operations & Analytics at Infineon Technologies (Fortune Global 500, €14.7B revenue), whose defense-grade reliability standards set our methodology bar.
Compliance
- ✓Registered South African private company (CIPC)
- ✓POPIA Information Officer registered with SA Information Regulator
- ✓B-BBEE Level 1 — verification pending
- ✓Data residency: SA + EU only (POPIA §72 compliant)
Every number on every page is reproducible.
We publish the methodology. Latin Square debiasing on comparison queries, 0.2% unparseable rate target on citation extraction, quarterly tagged Git commits for every dataset release. If you want to reproduce a number, we'll send you the exact query and timestamp.