Research · 29 October 2026

South African online shops and AI search: 30% leave out key product facts

We checked 497 South African online shops the way AI shopping assistants read them.

What we found

• 26% give AI assistants no product data at all.
• 30% have no product data or leave out the price or stock.
• 33% have at least one real problem for AI shopping.
• 1% have product pages that are almost empty without JavaScript, which AI crawlers don't run.

The live figures, updated every hour: khanyo.app/report/south-africa

What to do

• WooCommerce: WooCommerce writes product data itself unless a theme removed it; our plugin puts it back and adds brand, barcode, shipping and returns.
• Custom-built shops: one template in the product page template, filled from the product records, covers every product.
• Other platforms: look for a structured-data or rich-snippets setting or app that outputs schema.org Product with price, currency and availability.

How we counted

497 South African online shops with a product page we could check, checked by Khanyo's research crawler up to 29 October 2026. Each shop counts once (its latest check). We read the page the way AI crawlers receive it (no JavaScript) and the shop's robots.txt as RFC 9309 requires; nothing is estimated. Full method: khanyo.app/how-it-works

Check your own shop

The check takes about a minute and shows exactly which product details AI assistants can read on your shop, and the fix: khanyo.app/