A real AI Readiness Check report — scanned Nov 1, 2026 on methodology v10, with the newsroom's identity removed.
Audit & Technical Diagnostic Report
Overall readiness
Low readiness
Your site has not yet put its AI stance on record.
AI crawler stance in robots.txt: not declared · Rights position published: yes · Attribution markup: incomplete
Minimal restriction — this site is broadly crawlable by AI systems. This can reflect a deliberate licensing strategy (e.g. an open-access deal) rather than neglect.
Training Bots Blocked
0/14
incl. aggregator scrapers
Citation Bots Allowed
9/9
Content-Signal
None
not declared
llms.txt
Missing
AI policy found
Decide: allow or block AI training/citation crawlers
robots.txt has no rules for AI crawlers, so they are allowed by default, and there is no llms.txt file.
Deploy the approved robots.txt/llms.txt directives
robots.txt has no rules for AI crawlers, so they are allowed by default, and there is no llms.txt file.
Decide whether to opt out of AI training at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic in one step
OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic have committed to honor one robots.txt group, __usage_ai-training, as an opt-out from generative-AI training (Anthropic now; the others phasing in through 2027). This site does not use it. It covers training only, and Google will also treat it as a Gemini grounding opt-out. Skip it if you license content to any of these four.
Add "User-agent: __usage_ai-training" with "Disallow: /" to robots.txt (already in the recommended file; left commented out there if you reported a licensing deal with one of the four)
OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic have committed to honor one robots.txt group, __usage_ai-training, as an opt-out from generative-AI training (Anthropic now; the others phasing in through 2027). This site does not use it. It covers training only, and Google will also treat it as a Gemini grounding opt-out. Skip it if you license content to any of these four.
Ensure byline/date/publisher fields are consistently filled in the CMS
Schema/JSON-LD check flagged missing fields: publisher (with logo).
Fix or enable the schema template/plugin if the gap is structural, not just data-entry
Schema/JSON-LD check flagged missing fields: publisher (with logo).
Sample robots.txt, once you've decided
It blocks AI training crawlers (including the shared __usage_ai-training opt-out) and allows search and AI citation crawlers. That is one common configuration, not the only correct setup — adjust it to fit your licensing agreements and AI stance before deploying.
Bots from named AI companies that train foundation models on your content. Blocking them prevents unlicensed use of your work for model training.
GPTBot
OpenAI model training
CCBot
Common Crawl — open training dataset
Google-Extended
Google AI model training
Meta-ExternalAgent
Meta AI model training
anthropic-ai
Anthropic model training (legacy name)
ClaudeBot
Anthropic model training
Applebot-Extended
Apple AI model training
Amazonbot
Amazon AI model training
Cohere-ai
Cohere model training
Third-party scraping tools not tied to a named foundation model. These extract content for commercial datasets or aggregation.
Bytespider
ByteDance / TikTok data collection
PetalBot
Huawei search & AI
Diffbot
Commercial content extraction
Omgilibot
Omgili content scraping
img2dataset
Image dataset building tool
Machine-readable ways a site can state how AI may use its content. All are voluntary preferences, not technical enforcement.
Shared AI-training opt-out (__usage_ai-training)
Not declared.
TDM reservation (TDMRep)
No TDM reservation found.
RSL license (Really Simple Licensing)
No RSL license found.
Content-Signal (Cloudflare)
Not declared.
IETF AI preferences (Content-Usage)
Not declared.
ai.txt
Not found.
noai / noimageai meta tag
Not found on sampled pages.
Google snippet controls
nosnippet: no · max-snippet: -1 · data-nosnippet elements: 0
All 14 known AI training crawlers are technically permitted to access the site, and no public signal — neither a robots.txt rule, a shared opt-out token, nor any other declaration — states a preference about training use.
Without a stated position, the newsroom has no documented basis for future licensing conversations and no way to signal to AI companies whether their content should or should not be used for training — though robots.txt rules are voluntary and any crawler may disregard them regardless.
As the single simplest first step, add the shared __usage_ai-training opt-out token to your robots.txt file — four major AI labs (OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic) have committed to honor it as a training opt-out, with support phasing in through 2027, while per-crawler rules remain necessary for everyone else not covered by that commitment; separately, confirm whether your existing AI policy page reflects the newsroom's current position on training and licensing, and consider whether collective licensing mechanisms used by other publishers are worth exploring.
All 9 known AI search and citation crawlers are permitted to access the site, and in a test of two AI search queries the site was cited both times, including a question on state budget coverage where it appeared alongside a state government portal and regional outlets; a repeat of that query as a consistency check gave the same result.
Appearing in AI-generated answers is a positive signal that the newsroom's content is being recognized as a relevant source, but being cited in AI responses does not reliably drive readers back to the site the way a traditional search click does, and two queries are an indication rather than consistent tracking.
Fix the incomplete structured data on article pages — specifically the missing publisher and logo fields — so that AI systems and search engines receive complete, accurate information about the source of every story, which strengthens the newsroom's identity as a citable outlet; also consider adding an llms.txt file to give AI systems a clearer picture of what the site covers and how it wants to be referenced.
The site has an AI policy page that covers both external use of its content by AI companies and internal staff use of AI tools; however, no TDM reservation and no machine-readable usage declarations were found. No public licensing terms were found on this site. This scan cannot see private agreements.
Having a published AI policy is meaningful, but without machine-readable signals that reference or reinforce it, the policy is harder for automated systems to act on, and any staff-produced content that relies heavily on AI generation may not be fully protectable under copyright — making editorial oversight of AI-assisted work a legal as well as a journalistic concern.
Review and update the existing AI policy page to confirm it accurately reflects the newsroom's current thinking on both training use and licensing, then consider adding machine-readable declarations that point automated systems toward that policy; also ensure editorial guidelines for AI-assisted content are current, since heavily AI-generated material generally cannot be copyrighted.
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