Ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot to recommend a company and you will usually get a short, confident answer rather than a page of links to sift through. That change in how people search is why Johannesburg agency Top Click has put real weight behind answer engine optimisation, a service built to help South African brands turn up inside those AI answers instead of being left out of them.
The shift is easy to underestimate. Where a buyer once typed a query and scanned the results, many now ask an assistant for a shortlist or a straight recommendation and act on it. If a brand is missing from that answer, it never enters the conversation at all. Top Click treats this as a visibility problem worth managing on purpose, much like the years brands have already spent working on where they sit in Google.
Importantly, the agency sees this as an extension of search work rather than a replacement for it. Answer engine optimisation, in its view, sits on top of solid search engine optimisation, because the same signals that earn strong organic rankings tend to be the ones AI systems trust when deciding what to cite. Top Click is blunt that many newcomers now selling the service have never done proper SEO, and that a business is better served by a team that can do both.
For local companies the timing may be an advantage. The South African market is often quieter on this front than larger ones, so a brand that gets its structured data, entity information and third-party citations in order early can become a default recommendation in its category before rivals treat AI visibility as urgent.
The work itself breaks into clear pieces. It opens with an audit that measures how often a brand currently surfaces in AI answers against its competitors. It then tracks the prompts and share of voice around a business, tidies up entity and schema data so machines read the brand consistently, and reshapes key pages into answer-first content that assistants can quote cleanly. FAQ sections and structured markup, crawler access for AI bots including an llms.txt file, and citation building through digital PR round out the approach. Top Click’s AI SEO services then tie all of it to monthly reporting on citations, share of voice, AI referral traffic and sentiment, so progress is measured rather than assumed. The agency is careful to add that nobody can guarantee what an assistant will say, and treats any promise otherwise as a warning sign.
There is a working example behind the thinking. Top Click points to beach tent brand SunNinja, which it reports climbed to the top of Google’s organic results and to the number one spot across Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok, on the back of deep on-site SEO and steady link building. The lesson the agency draws is straightforward: strong search foundations tend to pull AI visibility along with them.
Existing clients can take the AEO work as an add-on to the SEO already running, while newcomers usually begin with a standalone audit. Top Click’s advice to anyone weighing up an AEO agency is to look for a genuine track record in search rather than a recent rebrand around a new acronym, and it keeps its own engagements senior-led and month to month, with no long lock-ins.
You can read more about the service on the Top Click website at https://topclick.co.za/aeo/.
Media Contact
Top Click
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +27 11 440 6268
Website: https://topclick.co.za/
