The species name honors Boheti bin Amrani, a native crew supervisor and chief preparator who was an important contributor to the German expeditions that first excavated the Tanzanian sites.

[1] Australodocus was originally described as a diplodocid, because it had double (bifurcate) neural spines on some of its vertebra, a characteristic normally associated with diplodocoid sauropods.

However, several later studies by John Whitlock and colleagues found that Australodocus is actually a member of the sauropod clade Titanosauriformes, possibly closely related to Brachiosaurus.

The presence of a higher number of macronarian sauropods in the Tendaguru environment compared to numerous diplodocoids in the Morrison Formation may be due to previously known differences in environment, with the Tendaguru being dominated by conifer forest, and the Morrison being dominated by open plains of low-browse flora.

[2][3] Tschopp et al. (2015) recovered Australodocus as a diplodocine diplodocid, closely related to Supersaurus and Dinheirosaurus (which may be a synonym of the former), but stressed that the low number of titanosauriform taxa used in the cladistic analysis made such a placement untenable due to the shared somphospondylous internal structure of Australodocus and somphospondylian titanosauriforms.