Live in 10 minutes · 7-day free trial · No card required

Turn local readers
into subscribers.

One script tag adds an AI assistant to your site that answers in your voice, captures named subscribers, and pays you 25% of local-ad revenue. Works at any scale — from a single masthead to a national title. Publishers can also license reporting into Manifest Editions — original AI briefings with your byline and a revocable license.

30 seconds, no signup. Cite-only — Mani refuses to answer what it can't ground.

Apply as a publisher partner

I'm a

Editions live in 140+ US cities · 25% revenue share · You keep the license

Your audience

Named subscribers come back to you, not to a platform. Export anytime.

Your license

Synthesis runs only on reporting you've licensed. Revoke it — every Edition comes down.

Your revenue share

25% of local-ad revenue earned alongside your content, paid monthly.

140+ US cities of live local data 250K+ businesses & civic records 25% revenue share to you

Built by Arooj Ahmad · we're early — here's what we believe: read the manifesto →

Manifest creates AI agents for any site with a local audience — solo bloggers, newsletter writers, indie publications, metro and regional dailies. You have the readers and the trust. Manifest gives you the AI layer a product team would take a year to build — on your domain, in your voice, with editorial guardrails on by default. One script tag, live in 10 minutes.

140+

US cities with live local data

250K+

Local businesses & civic records Mani can cite

25%

Local-ad revenue share — yours to keep

Try Mani on any article

Paste a URL. Watch Mani read it.

No install, no signup. Drop in any public article — yours, a competitor's, a national daily — and see the digest, opener prompts, and grounded chat your readers would get.

Live demo

Talk to Mani right now

This is the real product running live on this page. Ask about Manifest, partnership details, pricing, or any local question. This is exactly what your readers will experience.

Mani is online Powered by Manifest

Your readers get this same experience — embedded on your domain, in your brand, with your content as context.

Problems & Solution

Your problem Our solution

The problem

The same dynamic that took print classifieds is now taking the local-question moment.

Your reader has a follow-up question on a city-desk story. They leave your domain, ask an AI, and get an answer that may or may not cite you — on a surface you don't own, in a funnel you don't control, with no path back to your subscriber list.

The local-information layer underneath your metro — the businesses, the records, the meetings, the events — is being aggregated and monetized by platforms that have no obligation to your newsroom or your local advertisers. You have the audience. You have the advertiser relationships. You have the local sales force. You don't have an engineering team to build the answer in time.

manifest

One platform replaces what your team would build in eighteen months:

Grounded local-question engine on your domain
Citable city guide & directory layer
Named-subscriber capture inside the chat moment
Eligible for AI crawler indexing (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini)
25% of the local-ad layer — auto-paid
Editorial guardrails & brand voice on by default

How it works

Live in 10 minutes, earning by month one →

We handle the heavy lifting. One script tag, one onboarding call, one dashboard. Then Mani runs.

Start for free

Step 01

Embed Mani on your site

Copy one script tag and paste it into WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, Webflow, or anything custom. We'll join you on a free setup call to get it perfect — usually under ten minutes from signup to live.

Step 02

Mani answers, then captures

Readers get cited answers in under 2 seconds, grounded in your reporting and the live local data layer. Engaged ones land on your subscriber list with the article that drove them attached. Routed via webhook to your ESP. Full transcript every time.

Step 03

Earn 25% of the local-ad layer

Local businesses across each metro you cover self-serve into Mani's recommendations and pay $25–$299/mo. Your 25% share is itemized in the dashboard and paid monthly via Stripe Express — no ad sales team required.

Features

Most newsrooms leave this off and let the welcome series in their existing ESP do the work. Turn it on if you'd rather Mani send a single, voice-controlled follow-up the next day. Either way every captured subscriber lands in your inbox the moment it happens.

Start for free

And so much more you need to do your best work.

Editorial guardrails by default

Refusal language, brand voice, and topic guards configurable from your dashboard. Mani only answers from sources it can cite.

Your data is yours. Period.

Reader transcripts and captured subscribers stay in your account. We do not train foundation models on your content or sell visitor data.

Brand-safe, accessible, fast

Async, non-blocking script tag. WCAG 2.1 AA keyboard & screen-reader paths. Zero render-blocking impact on Core Web Vitals.

Multi-site & group support

Group publishers and chains roll Mani out across a portfolio of papers from one master account — per-title branding, consolidated reporting.

Multi-user newsroom access

Invite editors, ad ops, and audience-development team members. Role-based access, per-user dashboards, full audit log.

Real-human support

Email team@onmanifest.com and a real human responds within one business day — usually within hours. We'll install the widget for you on most platforms.

Manifest Editions

Your reporting, synthesized into local Editions

The widget answers the reader who asks. Editions reach the reader who searches — Mani turns your published reporting into original local briefings, on the web and in the Manifest app, every one linking back to you.

Synthesized, never copied

Mani weaves several of your articles into one original, region-specific briefing — at least three sources each, no single source dominating. A transformative work, not a reworded copy.

Built to be found

Each Edition is published for the local-intent searches readers actually make — self-canonical, with Article structured data and a visible Sources block that links every reader back to your original articles.

You watch it accrue

Editions, reach, and the clicks back to your site land in your dashboard. Synthesis runs only on reporting you've licensed — revoke the license and every Edition comes down.

The Mani widget stays exactly where it is — the on-domain place readers ask. Editions are the companion surface that carries your reporting to where readers search.

Become an Editions partner

7-day free trial · No card required · You keep the license

AI & local journalism

The thing eating local journalism is the thing that accelerates it.

AI didn't kill the local-question moment — it moved it off your domain. Manifest moves it back, and turns the same shift you've been bracing against into the channel that grows your subscribers, your citations, and your revenue.

Grounded, not generative

Your reporting becomes the answer

Mani only answers from sources it can cite — your articles plus the live local data layer — and refuses politely when it can't. The AI surface readers were leaving for now runs on your newsroom.

Eligible where readers ask

GPTBot, Claude-Web, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended

Canonical URLs, JSON-LD, a split sitemap, and a robots.txt that explicitly invites every major AI crawler — with live per-bot crawl counts in your dashboard. The same engines pulling readers away can start pulling from you instead.

Subscribers + ad revenue

A funnel you actually own

The chat moment captures named subscribers with the article that drove them attached, and the same surface earns you 25% of the local-ad layer underneath the cities you cover — turning the AI shift into a compounding revenue line, not a leak.

Pricing

Turn local audiences into named subscribers

Manifest grows your subscriber list and your local-ad share while you focus on reporting.

140+ US cities of live local data

All in One

One plan for every publisher — from a single writer to a full newsroom

$20 /month after free trial

Cancel anytime. No questions asked. Lifetime price lock.

Start your 7-day free trial

No credit card needed. Reminder before your trial ends.

What's included:

Unlimited conversations & content
25% revenue share on local-advertiser spend in your markets
Eligible for AI crawler indexing — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity (free forever)
Editorial dashboard — live crawl counts, transcripts, captured subscribers
Monthly Stripe payouts — direct to your bank
Cancel anytime — month-to-month, no contracts

Get started

Start your free trial

Fill out the form below and your Mani widget will be ready to embed in under 10 minutes. 7 days free, no credit card needed.

Site or publication name

The name of your blog, newsletter, newsroom, or publishing organization.

Display name (optional)

What your readers see on the widget. You can change this anytime.

Your name

The primary contact for your account.

Your dashboard login link will be sent here.

Phone (optional)

Only used if you'd prefer a call to set things up. Never shared.

Your market

The city where your audience is. You can serve multiple markets later.

Your website (optional)

Where you'll embed the Mani widget. You can add this later.

Free for 7 days No credit card $20/mo after trial Cancel anytime

Who it's for

Who Manifest is for

If you publish for a city, a metro, a neighborhood, or a niche local audience — at any size, from a single writer to a national title — Manifest is the AI layer you would build given a year and a product team.

Flagship

National titles with metro desks

National papers whose readers come for the city desk, the politics desk, the property desk. Editorial guardrails on by default, AI crawler distribution into ChatGPT & Perplexity (cite-eligible, with live crawl counts in the dashboard), and named-subscriber capture from every archived story.

Metro dailies

Single-metro daily papers — the paper of record for one city. Mani answers from your archive plus the live local data layer for that metro and routes named subscribers into your existing CRM.

Regional dailies covering multiple counties

Regional publishers covering a cluster of counties. Mani serves a separate, locally-grounded answer surface for each ZIP and consolidates captured subscribers into one publisher-level list.

Group publishers & newspaper chains

Hearst, Lee, Gannett, McClatchy, Tribune Publishing, Adams, CherryRoad, MNG and similar groups. Roll out Mani across a portfolio of papers from one master account — per-title branding, consolidated reporting, group-level revenue share.

Independent & family-owned dailies

Family-owned and independently held metro and small-city daily papers — the local paper of record without a national parent. Mani gives the digital strategy desk a shipped product instead of an RFP.

Sunday-edition & daily-equivalent papers

Papers running daily plus a flagship Sunday edition, or 4–6 day publishing schedules covering a single metro. The same archive, advertiser base, and local sales force — the same need to defend the local-question moment.

Partner trust & data use

Smarter for everyone — never at your expense

Mani gets smarter for every partner site in the cities you cover, but never at the expense of your audience or your reporting.

Stays 100% private to your account

· Captured subscribers (name, email, phone, originating article) — yours, full transcript, exportable.
· Full chat transcripts and visitor IPs / user agents.
· Partner-identified rows — no other partner can see your widget's traffic.
· Webhook payloads, signed with your secret, delivered only to you.

Shared with the city aggregate (anonymized)

· PII-stripped question text (emails, phones, URLs, names removed).
· Intent category and city slug.
· Whether Mani answered, fell back, or had no grounding hit.
· Used to improve answers across every partner widget in the city.

K-anonymity by default

City-wide trends are only revealed once a city has at least 2 partners and 5 queries in the rolling window. No single partner is ever identifiable from a city aggregate.

How attribution works

Every dollar, traced to the article that earned it

No black-box math, no “trust us” revenue line. Four mechanisms, all visible in your dashboard, all reconciled against real Stripe payments.

Reader lands on your site

When the Mani widget loads on your domain, we log an embed_load event tagged with your partner_key. That key rides along in the chat session and persists in a session cookie, so every interaction in that visit is yours.

Reader becomes a subscriber

When that visitor gives an email or creates an account inside the chat moment, your partner_id is stamped onto their user record — first-touch, sticky. They are your subscriber forever, even if they later visit ten other Manifest publishers. The originating article is captured on the same record.

Local business or post enters the network through that subscriber

If your subscriber later creates a listing or boosts a post on Manifest, the post inherits referred_by_partner_id = your partner ID automatically. Geographic fallback: if a business signs up directly in your covered city with no referral chain, the city match assigns them to you anyway.

Stripe charges, you get 25%

When that boost subscription's invoice.paid hits our Stripe webhook, we record the exact dollar amount as a partner_revenue_event tied to your partner ID and the originating post — idempotent on the Stripe invoice ID, so retries can't double-count. Your dashboard reads that recorded number, not an estimate. Refunds and pauses zero out cleanly.

What you can see in your dashboard, per event

Per subscriber

Email, name, phone, originating article URL, first-touch timestamp, full chat transcript that captured them.

Per dollar

Date, business name, post boosted, Stripe invoice ID, gross dollar amount, your 25% share, payout batch it rolled into.

Per article

Embed loads, chat sessions originated, subscribers captured, downstream actions (searches, posts created, businesses booked).

CSV export available for every table. Stripe Express dashboard linked from your account — you can independently verify every payout against the underlying invoices.

FAQ

Common questions

From two sources: your own published reporting and the live local knowledge layer we built. Your articles, archive, and section feeds back every answer. That's combined with verified business directories, event listings, government APIs, public records, weather, and OSM data from 140+ US cities. Every answer is grounded in something Mani can cite — no hallucinations, no guesswork. If Mani can't cite, it refuses politely.

Yes — and it costs you nothing extra. Every article you publish on Manifest gets a canonical URL, Article + LocalBusiness JSON-LD, an entry in our split sitemap index, and a slot on your auto-generated publisher AI index page. Our robots.txt and /llms.txt explicitly invite GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-Web, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, Copilot, and the rest. Your dashboard's AI Distribution panel shows you live crawl counts per bot in the last 7 days. Free forever, even if your subscription pauses.

Local businesses across the metros you cover pay $25–$299/month to be surfaced when readers ask relevant local questions Mani can route. You receive 25% of every dollar those businesses spend in markets you serve. It's calculated automatically and paid monthly through Stripe, with full transaction detail visible in your dashboard.

Two checkpoints. First, when our widget loads on your domain, we log an attribution event tagged with your partner key and persist that key in the visitor's session cookie. Second, the moment that visitor gives an email or creates an account inside the chat, your partner ID is stamped onto their user record — first-touch and sticky. The originating article URL is captured on the same record. You see all three (visitor, source URL, conversion timestamp) in your dashboard's Subscribers tab.

First-touch wins. The first Manifest publisher whose widget converts that visitor into a named subscriber owns that subscriber permanently. Subsequent visits to other publishers' widgets log normal traffic events for them but never re-assign the subscriber. This rule is one of the reasons publishers in the same region don't actually compete for revenue under our model — you're racing to be the first useful answer in your reader's life, not stealing each other's audience.

Geographic fallback kicks in. If a business creates a listing or boosts a post in a city you cover and has no other partner referral attached, the city match assigns the revenue share to you anyway. If multiple partners cover the same city, the assignment is deterministic by signup recency. You can see the assignment reason (referral vs geographic) on every revenue line.

For subscribers (humans): there is no expiry — once your partner ID is stamped on a user record, it stays. For pre-signup visitors: the partner key is held in the session cookie for the standard browser session lifetime (until cookie clear or 30 days idle, whichever comes first). For local-business advertiser revenue: every Stripe invoice that pays for a referred post credits you, with no time limit, for as long as that boost subscription stays active.

Yes. The dashboard's Content Attribution view ranks every published article by: embed loads, chat sessions originated, subscribers captured, downstream community actions (searches, posts created, businesses booked), and revenue tied to subscribers it converted. Top performers float to the top so your editors can see what's actually moving the network.

If they sign up via your widget on either device, attribution lands with you the moment they enter an email. If they read on mobile without signing up, then later sign up via a different publisher's widget on desktop, that other publisher gets the first-touch credit — this is unavoidable without invasive cross-device fingerprinting, which we don't do. Practical mitigation: the widget's email-capture moment is the single most important conversion in the system, so we optimize it heavily on every device.

You get the full distribution benefit (canonical URL, JSON-LD, sitemap inclusion, /llms.txt invitation, live crawl counts in your dashboard) but the 25% revenue share is specifically for local-advertiser dollars routed through the network — not for outbound AI traffic, which is free uplift to you. We don't take a cut of any subscriber or reader the AI engines drive back to your domain.

Each article belongs to whichever partner published it on Manifest. Syndication doesn't transfer attribution — if you re-publish someone else's piece on your widget, subscribers captured through it are still yours (the widget is yours), but the original publisher retains attribution on the article record itself. We don't currently mediate syndication splits; that's a contractual matter between the publishers.

Yes, end-to-end. Every revenue line carries the originating Stripe invoice ID, the boosted post ID, the city slug, and the assignment reason (referral vs geographic). You can independently verify every payout against the underlying invoices in your linked Stripe Express dashboard. If you spot a discrepancy, email team@onmanifest.com with the invoice ID — we investigate within one business day and reissue corrected payouts if needed.

For subscribers (people who gave you an email): name, email, phone if provided, originating article URL, full chat transcript, first-touch timestamp, all visible in your dashboard and exportable as CSV. For anonymous visitors: hashed IP, user agent, partner key, page URL, intent category — used only for attribution counts and aggregate analytics, never sold, never used to train foundation models. K-anonymity floor on city aggregates means no individual visitor is ever identifiable from a partner-shared signal.

We email you a reminder before day 7. If you've added a card from your dashboard during the trial, Stripe charges $20 on day 8 and your widget keeps running — cancel anytime, no transaction fee on your 25% revenue share. If you haven't added a card by day 7, the trial ends gracefully: your dashboard pauses, no charge happens, and every captured subscriber, every dollar of earned revenue share, and every setting is preserved indefinitely so you can restart with one click.

You do. Every email, transcript, and captured-subscriber record is yours — visible in your dashboard, exportable as CSV at any time, yours to keep forever. We never sell visitor data, we never train foundation models on your content, and we never surface your reporting inside another publisher's widget.

ChatGPT answers off your domain, with no citations to you, and the reader never enters your subscriber funnel. Newsletter footers convert at roughly one percent. Mani keeps the reader on your site, answers from your reporting, and captures them as a named subscriber inside the chat moment — the article that drove the question attached.

The team

Why we built this

Arooj Ahmad

Founder, Manifest

The first time it happened, in the late 1990s, the metro daily owned the city's classifieds, the city's local display, and the reader's first stop for what was happening on the corner. Then the web arrived, the digital exec inside the building was told to figure it out, and twenty-four months of in-house product work was the difference between defending the franchise and watching it leave.

It is happening again. The local-question moment — the reader who finishes the city-desk story and asks "what's the latest on the council vote, and where do I email about it?" — is moving to AI search, on a surface the newsroom doesn't own, with no path back to the subscriber list. The publisher has the audience, the advertiser relationships, and the local sales force. The publisher does not have an engineering team to ship a citable city guide, a directory layer, and a subscriber-capture surface in time.

Manifest is that layer. One script tag, on your domain, in your voice, with editorial guardrails on by default. Mani turns the local-question moment into a named subscriber on your list and a 25% revenue share on every local advertiser your sales team brings into the directory. Live in about ten minutes. The work your digital team would have done in eighteen months — shipped this week.

Start your subscriber funnel today.

7 days free, no credit card. Live in 10 minutes.

Start your 7-day free trial

Or email team@onmanifest.com with any questions.

Start your 7-day free trial

No credit card · $20/mo after trial · cancel anytime

Turn local readers into subscribers.

Paste a URL. Watch Mani read it.

Talk to Mani right now

Your problem Our solution

The same dynamic that took print classifieds is now taking the local-question moment.

One platform replaces what your team would build in eighteen months:

Live in 10 minutes, earning by month one →

Embed Mani on your site

Mani answers, then captures

Earn 25% of the local-ad layer

Everything you need to turn readers into named subscribers

Instant, conversational capture

Grounded in your real reporting

Eligible for AI crawler indexing

Your masthead, your voice

25% revenue share, on autopilot

Automatic 24-hour follow-up — off by default

And so much more you need to do your best work.

Editorial guardrails by default

Your data is yours. Period.

Brand-safe, accessible, fast

Multi-site & group support

Multi-user newsroom access

Real-human support

Your reporting, synthesized into local Editions

Synthesized, never copied

Built to be found

You watch it accrue

The thing eating local journalism is the thing that accelerates it.

Your reporting becomes the answer

GPTBot, Claude-Web, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended

A funnel you actually own

Turn local audiences into named subscribers

Start your free trial

Who Manifest is for

National titles with metro desks

Metro dailies

Regional dailies covering multiple counties

Group publishers & newspaper chains

Independent & family-owned dailies

Sunday-edition & daily-equivalent papers

Smarter for everyone — never at your expense

Stays 100% private to your account

Shared with the city aggregate (anonymized)

K-anonymity by default

Every dollar, traced to the article that earned it

Reader lands on your site

Reader becomes a subscriber

Local business or post enters the network through that subscriber

Stripe charges, you get 25%

What you can see in your dashboard, per event

Common questions

Where does Mani's data come from?

Do my articles get into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini too?

What technical work is required on my end?

How does the revenue share actually work?

How does Manifest know a subscriber actually came from my publication?

What if a reader visits multiple publishers' Mani widgets — who gets the credit?

What if a local business signs up to advertise without ever clicking through my widget?

How long is the attribution window?

Can I see which articles are driving subscribers and ad revenue?

What about cross-device — if a reader reads on mobile and signs up later on desktop?

Do I get credit for AI distribution — when ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity cites my reporting?

What if my reporter republishes an article that was originally on another partner's site?

Can I dispute or audit an attribution?

What gets stored about my readers, and where can I see it?

Do I have to sell ads or run an ad operation?

What happens after my free trial ends?

Will this slow down my site or hurt Core Web Vitals?

Will Mani look generic, or like our masthead?

Will Mani ever recommend competing publications on our site?

Who owns the subscribers and transcript data?

Are you GDPR / CCPA compliant?

Are there setup fees or hidden costs?

What's the catch with $20/mo?

Can I get a refund if it doesn't work for us?

When and how do I get paid?

Does this work with our CMS?

Is the widget accessible (ADA / WCAG)?

What if we get stuck during setup?

Turn local readers
into subscribers.