How Star Tribune appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews
A free AI-visibility snapshot for Star Tribune (startribune.com) — a regional daily based in Minneapolis, MN.
Overall AI visibility
startribune.com
58/100
Grade D
Across the four AI engines we audit (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews), Star Tribune is rarely cited by the engines we tested, with an overall 58/100 score. The largest open lift is on the engines below where Star Tribune's articles are missing structured signals other regional daily sites of the same size already publish.
ChatGPT
55
Crawler: GPTBot
GPTBot is allowed but article-level structured data is thin.
Perplexity
36
Crawler: PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot blocked or paywalled before the lede.
Claude
80
Crawler: ClaudeBot
ClaudeBot crawls clean HTML; Anthropic citations appear for evergreen pieces.
Google AI Overviews
61
Crawler: Google-Extended
AIO surfaces the site occasionally; missing FAQ + speakable hurts.
What Star Tribune 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 Star Tribune — 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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