How The San Diego Union-Tribune appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews
A free AI-visibility snapshot for The San Diego Union-Tribune (sandiegouniontribune.com) — a regional daily based in San Diego, CA.
Overall AI visibility
sandiegouniontribune.com
59/100
Grade D
Across the four AI engines we audit (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews), The San Diego Union-Tribune is rarely cited by the engines we tested, with an overall 59/100 score. The largest open lift is on the engines below where The San Diego Union-Tribune's articles are missing structured signals other regional daily sites of the same size already publish.
ChatGPT
72
Crawler: GPTBot
GPTBot reaches the site and recent articles surface in citations.
Perplexity
53
Crawler: PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot allowed but author entities aren't strongly linked.
Claude
34
Crawler: ClaudeBot
ClaudeBot blocked or anthropic-ai variant disallowed in robots.txt.
Google AI Overviews
78
Crawler: Google-Extended
Google AI Overviews include the site for breaking and explainer queries.
What The San Diego Union-Tribune can ship this week
- 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.
- Add a public reporter bio page for every byline with `Person` schema, beats, and a sample of recent articles.
If you work at The San Diego Union-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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