How The Washington Post appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews
A free AI-visibility snapshot for The Washington Post (washingtonpost.com) — a national daily based in Washington, DC.
Overall AI visibility
washingtonpost.com
69/100
Grade C
Across the four AI engines we audit (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews), The Washington Post 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 Washington Post's articles are missing structured signals other national daily sites of the same size already publish.
ChatGPT
82
Crawler: GPTBot
GPTBot reaches the site and recent articles surface in citations.
Perplexity
63
Crawler: PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot allowed but author entities aren't strongly linked.
Claude
44
Crawler: ClaudeBot
ClaudeBot blocked or anthropic-ai variant disallowed in robots.txt.
Google AI Overviews
88
Crawler: Google-Extended
Google AI Overviews include the site for breaking and explainer queries.
What The Washington Post can ship this week
- 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://washingtonpost.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.
If you work at The Washington Post — or any other national daily — the same audit, but live and continuous on every article you publish, is what Mani does.
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