The annual report, launched by SquirrelPR, now tracks digital media performance across 13 African countries, up from five markets last year. 

It examines traffic, trust signals, audience behaviour, search influence and platform authority across the continent.

Speaking at the launch of the Ranked 2026 report, Jonah Solomon, co-founder and chief executive officer of SquirrelPR, said the project began after an overseas user asked a question about which Nigerian journalists should receive a press release.

“When we started Ranked report, it was after we launched SquirrelPR, and a user overseas called us and said, I see over 1000 journalists on this platform, but who should I send my release to in Nigeria?”

He said what began as a manual solution later became a structured ranking product first focused on Nigeria before expanding across Africa.

“We started with Nigeria and when we rolled it out, we realised that the publishers themselves found it more valuable than even the PR managers were targeting.”

This year’s edition covered Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Democratic Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Tunisia, among others.

Traffic Falling, Influence Shifting

Presenting the keynote address, Keni Akintoye, CEO and lead strategist at KT Communications, said the media industry must stop relying only on traffic numbers to judge success.

“For years, we understood digital media performance through a familiar lens, which is traffic, reach impressions, bounce rates,” he said.

“But today, the signals are different.”

Akintoye said audiences now consume information through search summaries, social feeds, aggregated platforms and algorithmic recommendations, usually without visiting the original publisher’s website.

“The consuming content, forming opinions, doing all they used to do without arriving at the source.”

He added that influence has not disappeared, but moved.

“It is no longer who publishes. It is who is believed.”

According to him, credibility is becoming more valuable than clicks in an era impacted by artificial intelligence and fragmented attention.

“The future of African media will not be defined by who is loudest. It will be defined by who is most intentional.”

What the Data Showed

Solomon said the Ranked 2026 report used 12 months of historical data sourced from Similarweb, Ahrefs, Google Analytics, Google Trends and other tools.

A total of 131 news platforms were tracked. Across Nigeria, combined traffic dropped from more than one billion visits to 769 million visits.

He said the decline should not be seen as newsroom failure.

“It simply means that the audiences have moved upstream, and you need to find out how to reach them.”

He added that domain authority, a measure of how trusted and established a website is in search ecosystems, was stronger and more stable than traffic, making it a more reliable indicator of influence.

“Traffic becomes less reliable, then Domain Authority has emerged as the most consistent indicator of influence.”

The report also found that several major Nigerian publishers now receive a notable share of traffic from outside the country, while entertainment and cultural sites continue to attract stronger local audiences.

Nigeria Category Leaders

In entertainment and lifestyle, leading names included Google, BellaNaija and other established outlets.

In technology media, Techpoint Africa was the traffic leader, followed by TechCabal and emerging platforms such as TechNext and Techeconomy.

In business and finance, Nairametrics led.

For general news and current affairs, Vanguard topped traffic rankings, ahead of Punch, Legit, Sahara Reporters and The Nation.

SquirrelPR 2.0 Unveiled

The event also featured the launch of SquirrelPR 2.0, a rebuilt version of the company’s communications platform.

James Ezechukwu, co-founder and chief technology officer, said the upgraded system now includes an AI press release generator, language translation tools, media discovery, instant journalist messaging, project management functions and client management features for PR agencies.

“Our goal as SquirrelPR is to be the core operating system for PR in Africa,” he said.

The company also introduced a monitoring solution designed to help organisations track media mentions and public conversations in real time.

The event, which was planned for 60 attendees, had guest registrations exceeding 80, showing an increasing interest in data-led communications and media intelligence.

Closing the event, Ezechukwu said: “The reward for good work is more work.”

As of July 2025, the internet infrastructure giant now blocks all AI crawlers by default unless they’ve either paid for access or received explicit permission from the content owner.

The company’s new product, Pay Per Crawl, lets publishers charge AI firms a fee every time they crawl their content. If a crawler doesn’t pay, it gets hit with a “402 Payment Required” response, a rarely used HTTP status code that could become the foundation of a new internet revenue model.

Cloudflare powers nearly 20% of the internet. This shift, if widely adopted, could cut off AI companies from training on a vast portion of the web, unless they pay.

Major publishers, including Condé Nast, TIME, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, Gannett, and others such as Reddit, Pinterest, and Stack Overflow, have already signed on. 

Many of them have seen advertising and referral traffic dwindle in recent years as AI-generated summaries and chatbot answers have increasingly replaced the need to click through to the original source.

“This is just the beginning of a new model for the internet,” said Stephanie Cohen, Cloudflare’s Chief Strategy Officer. “The change in traffic patterns has been rapid, and something needed to change.”

That change is reflected in the data. According to Cloudflare, Google’s crawl-to-click ratio has collapsed from 6:1 to 18:1 in the last six months, suggesting users are increasingly finding what they need directly within the search results, especially via AI Overviews. OpenAI’s ratio is far more extreme at 1,500:1.

Historically, search engines indexed the web with the tacit understanding that referrals would follow, generating value for content creators. But AI firms have upended that agreement, lifting vast amounts of content to train their models and offer summarised responses, all while bypassing the original creators entirely.

Some firms go further by ignoring established web standards like robots.txt, which is intended to block unauthorised scraping. Despite publishers’ attempts to draw boundaries, many AI companies insist they haven’t broken any laws.

The legal pushback has already begun. The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023 for copyright infringement. Reddit recently took legal action against Anthropic for allegedly harvesting user comments without permission, even though scraping was explicitly prohibited via robots.txt. BBC and Ziff Davis have filed similar lawsuits.

This escalating issue is happening in parallel with massive drops in web engagement. In the U.S., 60% of searches now end without a single click, and click-through rates have plunged by 30% between 2024 and 2025. 

Publishers are being squeezed at both ends, their traffic is drying up, and their content is being repurposed without compensation.

Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince framed the initiative as both a defensive and visionary move: “This is about safeguarding the future of a free and vibrant internet.” He pointed at a long-term plan to create a transparent and open marketplace for content access, where AI firms would be required to negotiate fair rates for crawling and training.

For now, Pay Per Crawl is available as a private beta. Cloudflare handles both authentication and payments, serving as the intermediary between web publishers and AI companies.