Google is putting AI-written answers at the top of South African search results, but South Africans are among the least likely people in the world to use AI to look things up.

Last week, we showed you what SA actually uses ChatGPT for, and between July and September 2026, only 15.3% of the messages South Africans sent to ChatGPT were about seeking information, compared with 20.1% worldwide, ranking South Africa 128th of 152 countries in OpenAI's own data.

And the gap is growing: since the same period in 2024, that share has risen 3.5 percentage points globally but slipped in South Africa, to 16.1%.

So here’s a question for you: If we also showed you just last week that Google’s ad revenue is slipping because of its own AI on top of Google Search, are they (at least from a South African perspective) killing their own business?

Google's AI Overviews already appear in local search results, and its fuller AI Mode launched here in August 2025.

AI answers carry a cost for Google itself. When an AI summary answers the question on the results page, fewer people scroll down and click, and that includes the ads Google earns its money from. Last quarter, Google's parent Alphabet said search ad growth slowed more than expected because more people were using AI Mode, where it is still working out how to show ads.

The cost to everyone else is higher. For more than 20 years, the deal between Google and the people who create the web has been simple: publishers let Google read their pages, and Google sends them visitors. AI answers break that deal, because Google uses those pages to write a summary while sending fewer people to them.

A Pew Research Centre study of more than 68,000 real Google searches found that users clicked on a result in just 8% of searches that showed an AI summary, compared with 15% of searches without one. Only 1% clicked a link inside the summary itself, and people were more likely to end their browsing session altogether.

Publishers are pushing back. Penske Media and education company Chegg have both sued Google over AI Overviews, and South African publishers have pressed Google for answers on how the summaries affect their traffic. Google disputes Pew's method and says its data shows AI results send people to a wider range of websites.

Search Engine Land reported Pew Research Center's click study, which tracked the real browsing of 900 American adults. TechCentral reported AI Mode's launch in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, noting that South Africans already saw AI Overviews in their results. Hypertext reported a Google AI executive suggesting AI Mode would "soon" become the default way to search. Our full breakdown of the OpenAI data is in how South Africa uses ChatGPT.

Put the pieces together and Google's AI push looks hard to justify in South Africa. It costs Google ad clicks, it costs local publishers the visitors that keep them going, and the best available evidence suggests South Africans have not moved their searching to AI.

One caution: OpenAI's data measures ChatGPT, not how South Africans feel about Google's own AI answers, so it is a strong signal rather than proof. But it is the clearest signal there is, and it points one way.

South Africans use ChatGPT for work instead. 40.1% of local messages are work-related, against 30.7% globally, and the single biggest work task is editing documents.

That has 2 practical lessons for local businesses. First, the advice that you must optimise your website to appear in ChatGPT's answers matters less here than in most markets, at least for now.

Second, the real threat to South African websites is not ChatGPT but Google, because its AI answers are already taking clicks from local search results whether local users asked for them or not.

Check your own Google traffic, track which searches now show an AI answer, and build direct ways to reach your audience, such as a newsletter or WhatsApp channel, that do not depend on Google sending them to you.

You might also like our piece on ChatGPT ads arriving in SA, AI-built software clones, and SA's AI policy.

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