How The Mercury News appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews
A free AI-visibility snapshot for The Mercury News (mercurynews.com) — a regional daily based in San Jose, CA.
Overall AI visibility
mercurynews.com
69/100
Grade C
Across the four AI engines we audit (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews), The Mercury News is inconsistently cited by the engines we tested, with an overall 69/100 score. The largest open lift is on the engines below where The Mercury News's articles are missing structured signals other regional daily sites of the same size already publish.
ChatGPT
50
Crawler: GPTBot
GPTBot is allowed but article-level structured data is thin.
Perplexity
94
Crawler: PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot ingests the archive; bylines and datelines are extracted.
Claude
75
Crawler: ClaudeBot
ClaudeBot crawls clean HTML; Anthropic citations appear for evergreen pieces.
Google AI Overviews
56
Crawler: Google-Extended
AIO surfaces the site occasionally; missing FAQ + speakable hurts.
What The Mercury News can ship this week
- 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.
- Allow `GPTBot`, `PerplexityBot`, `ClaudeBot`, `anthropic-ai`, `Google-Extended`, and `Applebot-Extended` in `https://mercurynews.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.
If you work at The Mercury News — 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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