We tested 88 South African businesses. One was ready.

The finding that surprised us

We expected to find businesses blocking AI. Almost none were.

Letting AI crawlers in was the single highest scoring category in the whole study, averaging 8.7 out of 10. Thirty five of the 88 scored full marks. The door is wide open almost everywhere.

Then we looked at what was behind the door. Three quarters had no guide file telling an AI system what the business actually is. Two thirds had no question and answer content. Half had neither.

Where the scores landed

Four out of five businesses scored under 60. Nearly a quarter were effectively invisible.

What is actually missing

Average score in each category, out of 10, across all 88 businesses. The gap between the top row and the bottom row is the whole story.

Not one business in the study scored full marks on question and answer content. The best anyone managed was 9 out of 10, and only nine businesses reached 8 or higher.

It is not a platform problem

More than half the sites we tested were built on WordPress, the most widely used website platform in the world. Those sites averaged 48.8 out of 100, almost exactly the same as everything else. This is not something a better platform fixes on its own.

Being well known does not save you

Businesses with strong independent reputation, real reviews, press coverage and directory listings, averaged 52.4 out of 100. Businesses with weak reputation averaged 41.5. Better, but still failing. One restaurant in the study has won international awards and still could not answer a single practical question about itself through its own website.

Which industries scored worst

How we tested

Every business was scored the same way, across ten equally weighted categories, and tested live against both ChatGPT and Gemini in a fresh private session so the answer reflects what a genuine first-time stranger sees. Where a business was audited more than once, only its first audit is counted here, so every score reflects the site untouched.

No business is named in this study. The scores are published as aggregate figures only.

What this means if you own a business

The odds are that your website is somewhere in the 40s. That is not a criticism of whoever built it. The rules changed recently, quietly, and almost nobody has caught up yet.

The encouraging part is that the biggest gaps in this study are also the most fixable ones. The three worst scoring categories are all things that can be added to an existing site without redesigning it or changing how it looks to your customers.