It is found in a broad swath running from southwest to northeast, from the Cape Peninsula and Namaqualand to Mpumalanga.

[2] The ground woodpecker was described in 1782 by the English ornithologist John Latham from a specimen collected from the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.

[3] When the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin updated Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae for the 13th edition in 1788 he included a short description of the ground woodpecker, cited Latham's work and coined the binomial name Picus olivaceus.

[5][6] The generic name Geocolaptes combines the Classical Greek geō meaning "ground" with the genus name Colaptes that had been introduced by the Irish zoologist Nicholas Aylward Vigors in 1825.

[9] It breeds in spring and early summer (August to November), nesting is in a tunnel excavated in the vertical bank of a stream or watercourse.