How The Tennessean appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews
A free AI-visibility snapshot for The Tennessean (tennessean.com) — a regional daily based in Nashville, TN.
Overall AI visibility
tennessean.com
67/100
Grade C
Across the four AI engines we audit (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews), The Tennessean is inconsistently cited by the engines we tested, with an overall 67/100 score. The largest open lift is on the engines below where The Tennessean's articles are missing structured signals other regional daily sites of the same size already publish.
ChatGPT
48
Crawler: GPTBot
GPTBot likely blocked or pages return JS-only shells.
Perplexity
92
Crawler: PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot ingests the archive; bylines and datelines are extracted.
Claude
73
Crawler: ClaudeBot
ClaudeBot crawls clean HTML; Anthropic citations appear for evergreen pieces.
Google AI Overviews
54
Crawler: Google-Extended
AIO surfaces the site occasionally; missing FAQ + speakable hurts.
What The Tennessean can ship this week
- Allow `GPTBot`, `PerplexityBot`, `ClaudeBot`, `anthropic-ai`, `Google-Extended`, and `Applebot-Extended` in `https://tennessean.com/robots.txt`.
- 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.
If you work at The Tennessean — 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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