How Isthmus appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews
A free AI-visibility snapshot for Isthmus (isthmus.com) — a alt-weekly based in Madison, WI.
Overall AI visibility
isthmus.com
62/100
Grade D
Across the four AI engines we audit (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews), Isthmus is rarely cited by the engines we tested, with an overall 62/100 score. The largest open lift is on the engines below where Isthmus's articles are missing structured signals other alt-weekly sites of the same size already publish.
ChatGPT
75
Crawler: GPTBot
GPTBot reaches the site and recent articles surface in citations.
Perplexity
56
Crawler: PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot allowed but author entities aren't strongly linked.
Claude
37
Crawler: ClaudeBot
ClaudeBot blocked or anthropic-ai variant disallowed in robots.txt.
Google AI Overviews
81
Crawler: Google-Extended
Google AI Overviews include the site for breaking and explainer queries.
What Isthmus can ship this week
- Cross-link each article from at least two evergreen topic pages so AI engines can find it after the homepage rotates it off.
- 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.
If you work at Isthmus — or any other alt-weekly — the same audit, but live and continuous on every article you publish, is what Mani does.
Start a 7-day free trial →
$20/mo after trial. No card to start. See integrations.