How The Columbus Dispatch appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews
A free AI-visibility snapshot for The Columbus Dispatch (dispatch.com) — a regional daily based in Columbus, OH.
Overall AI visibility
dispatch.com
63/100
Grade D
Across the four AI engines we audit (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews), The Columbus Dispatch is rarely cited by the engines we tested, with an overall 63/100 score. The largest open lift is on the engines below where The Columbus Dispatch's articles are missing structured signals other regional daily sites of the same size already publish.
ChatGPT
76
Crawler: GPTBot
GPTBot reaches the site and recent articles surface in citations.
Perplexity
57
Crawler: PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot allowed but author entities aren't strongly linked.
Claude
38
Crawler: ClaudeBot
ClaudeBot blocked or anthropic-ai variant disallowed in robots.txt.
Google AI Overviews
82
Crawler: Google-Extended
Google AI Overviews include the site for breaking and explainer queries.
What The Columbus Dispatch can ship this week
- Publish a `/llms.txt` at the root that maps your beats, reporter bios, and the canonical URL for each topic.
- Mark paywalled body content with `cssSelector` exclusions but leave the lede + first 200 words free — that's what answer engines quote.
- Server-render every article. JS-only shells fail GPTBot's HTML fetch and quietly drop you out of citations.
- Add `<script type="application/ld+json">` NewsArticle schema with `speakable`, `dateline`, and `isAccessibleForFree` to every story page.
- Add an XML sitemap entry for every article within an hour of publish so crawl latency for AI bots stays under 60 minutes.
If you work at The Columbus Dispatch — or any other regional daily — the same audit, but live and continuous on every article you publish, is what Mani does.
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