Johannesburg30% of South African outlets block AI crawlers.

Small and vernacular outlets lack the leverage to refuse crawlers without losing search visibility.

A new report on South Africa found 30.4% of 263 sites explicitly blocked one, barely up from 29.7% in December.

AI chatbots sent those sites under 1% of their total referral traffic, the report found.

How each outlet framed it
Daily Maverick leans critical
emphasizes AI crawler blocking concentrated among well-resourced publishers—smaller, vernacular outlets systematically exposed

Sources: Daily Maverick