Opens Oct 17.

AI visibility

What AI assistants say about BBC

We asked ChatGPT

“What are the best news sources in the UK? Which would you recommend and why?”

BBC was among the recommendations

Also named:

Sky NewsFinancial TimesThe GuardianChannel 4 NewsReuters

““Best” depends on what you want (breaking updates, business, investigative reporting, regional coverage, opinion, etc.). Below is a short, practical shortlist of well‑regarded UK news brands grouped by purpose, with why I’d recommend them and a citation for each claim. Quick general-purpose / most trusted - BBC News - largest reach in the UK and the most widely relied‑on public service news provider; good for broad, …”

C

60/100 AI-readiness

bbc.com (official site, from public records) · can the AI crawlers read the site? Checked by code, not by a model.

AI assistants can read pages when answering (robots.txt):Blocked from the whole site: ChatGPT (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User), Perplexity (PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User). Those assistants cannot read anything you publish when a buyer asks about you.
AI models may train on the site (robots.txt):OpenAI (GPTBot), Anthropic (ClaudeBot), Google Gemini (Google-Extended), Common Crawl (CCBot), Apple (Applebot-Extended), Meta (Meta-ExternalAgent), ByteDance (Bytespider) are blocked, so future versions of these models will not learn about the brand from its own pages (Common Crawl feeds many models' training sets). A deliberate choice for many brands: it does not stop assistants reading the site when answering, but what they know from memory then comes from other people's pages.
llms.txt for AI assistants:Not found. An llms.txt gives AI tools a reliable, curated summary of who you are.
Homepage reachable:Loads over HTTPS.
Structured data (schema.org):Found 1 JSON-LD block (WebPage, NewsMediaOrganization).
Title and description:Both present and descriptive.
Sitemap:Listed in robots.txt.
One live question to one assistant, asked by PollyX on Oct 15, 2026 and asked again about once a month. Assistants answer differently every time, so this is a sample, not a score. The full check asks 12 buyer questions of nine assistants and records every page each one reads. How AI visibility is measured

Is BBC the first recommendation, and how is it described?

That was one question to one assistant. The full check asks nine assistants 12 buyer questions each, shows where BBC is first, listed or absent, who is named instead, which pages the assistants read, and what to publish to change it.

Run the full check · €16.99 Ask it yourself, free
Looking for what real people say? See the BBC brand sentiment snapshot.

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