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.
Built by three partners — research, brand, and measurement.
Cited Brands was founded by three partners. Joseph K Banda leads the research and handles all press; his two co-founders bring the commercial and technical backgrounds the firm is built on.
Joseph K Banda
Founder · Lead Researcher, SA-AEO-Bench v1.1
Joseph Kambani Banda is the founder of Cited Brands and the lead researcher on SA-AEO-Bench v1.1 — the first pre-registered benchmark of how frontier AI models cite South African brands. He is Cited Brands' on-record spokesperson for the press.
Joseph has spent nine-plus years building product, automation and revenue systems across three continents — most recently as a strategic vendor inside Bloomberg (Cape Town), as founder of Nightstone Hypotheektechnologie in the Netherlands (an AI back-office platform for Dutch mortgage advisers), and as co-founder of two China-based ecommerce operations supplying SA and EU markets. He publishes The Blueprint: Dutch Finance on LinkedIn and holds certifications in Generative AI (Microsoft), Decentralized Finance (Duke University) and Blockchain (University at Buffalo).
He is based in Cape Town and leads Cited Brands' work with South African organisations on AI search visibility — measurement, audits, and the publisher playbooks that follow from the benchmark.
Lionel Wiedenmann
Co-founder
Lionel is managing director of WHITE Communications GmbH, a brand and communications agency based in Munich. He spent more than a decade in senior marketing and communications roles at Tommy Hilfiger and its parent group PVH Corp — including Sr. Director Concept to Consumer in Amsterdam and Sr. Director Marketing & Communications for Asia Pacific, based in Hong Kong and Shanghai. At Cited Brands he brings senior brand-marketing leadership, keeping the research grounded in how brand owners make decisions.
Dr William Banks
Co-founder
William is an independent researcher in AI brand measurement and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). He holds a Doctor of Management from Colorado Technical University, where his dissertation focused on measurement validity, and publishes The Answer Engine Brief — a Substack of original research on how the fast-growing AI brand-visibility industry measures, and mismeasures, brand perception, including his Brand Intelligence Gap series and a controlled study of 864 paired observations across four frontier AI models. His professional background is in data science and analytics; he is currently director of business operations and analytics for the High Reliability Business Line at Infineon Technologies. At Cited Brands he brings measurement-validity rigour to the firm's methodology.
Registered, POPIA-compliant, and Black-owned.
- ✓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.
First pre-registered AEO benchmark
The methodology was locked on the Open Science Framework before any model was queried — hypotheses, prompt set, scoring rubric and budget ceiling fixed at submission. There is no room to p-hack the result.
Position-bias controlled
Every comparison runs Latin Square counterbalancing, and every score carries a bootstrap 95% confidence interval. Competing tools skip this and produce rankings that flip the moment you reverse a question.
No one else measures it like this
Cited Brands is the only firm applying open-science, measurement-validity rigour to how AI engines cite brands — and the only one mapping the SA-specific sources where local AI narratives actually live.