South Africa, Sept. 2 -- Nearly seven in ten South African news websites take no specific action to block AI crawlers from scraping their content, according to a new report launched today by the Media Leadership Think Tank (MLTT) at the University of Pretoria's Gordon Institute of Business Science (Gibs), the Journalism Relay Project, and the International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM).

The Protocol Gap: South Africa, the second in a three-country series following a report on Brazil, examined the robots.txt files of 263 South African news websites to determine how publishers are managing access by AI bots that scrape content to train large language models and power AI-generated search results and assistants.

The study found tha...