Kuroma
AI Readiness benchmark for Publishing / News Media
Across 905 audited domains we have classified as Publishing / News Media, the median AI Readiness score is 40 out of 100. That is 1 points above the median for all 30,738 audited domains in the corpus (39).
How the scores are distributed
Half of the 905 audited Publishing / News Media domains score between 34 and 46. The corpus-wide interquartile range, across all 30,738 audited domains, is 32 to 45.
Which factors this industry fails most often
The rubric scores 19 factors. A factor counts as failed here when a site scores below 50 out of 100 on it. The last column is how many audits each rate was calculated from. Question Coverage & FAQ Presence and Media Accessibility are not scored on every kind of page: a rankings table or a paginated index has no question to answer and no image to caption. Citation-Worthiness, E-E-A-T Signals and Question Coverage & FAQ Presence lean on English-language patterns, so on a page written in another language they are scored out of a smaller total. Those rows therefore leave out every audit of a page the factor was not scored on the same scale, and every audit that did not record enough about the page for us to tell. Every other row counts every audit in this industry that scored the factor.
| Factor | Fails in Publishing / News Media | Fails corpus-wide | Difference | Audits counted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Citation-Worthiness AI Readiness · 7.5% of the total score · counted only on pages in a language it measures in full |
95% | 94% | +1 | 160 |
| E-E-A-T Signals Authority Signals · 7% of the total score · counted only on pages in a language it measures in full |
93% | 89% | +4 | 160 |
| Unique Value Proposition AI Readiness · 5.1% of the total score |
92% | 94% | -2 | 905 |
| Structured Data Quality On-Page Content · 4.5% of the total score |
92% | 96% | -4 | 905 |
| Question Coverage & FAQ Presence On-Page Content · 6.5% of the total score · counted only on pages this factor applies to, in a language it measures in full |
87% | 85% | +2 | 143 |
| Trust & Brand Signals Authority Signals · 9% of the total score |
83% | 74% | +9 | 905 |
| Media Accessibility On-Page Content · 1.8% of the total score · counted only on pages this factor applies to |
83% | 87% | -4 | 823 |
| External Citations & References Authority Signals · 9% of the total score |
81% | 83% | -2 | 905 |
| Answer Box Potential AI Readiness · 7.2% of the total score |
80% | 68% | +12 | 905 |
| Schema Markup Completeness Technical Optimization · 1% of the total score |
71% | 63% | +8 | 905 |
| AI Discoverability AI Readiness · 3% of the total score |
43% | 34% | +9 | 905 |
| Crawlability & Accessibility Technical Optimization · 13% of the total score |
42% | 46% | -4 | 905 |
| Content Freshness AI Readiness · 5.7% of the total score |
38% | 49% | -11 | 905 |
| Heading Hierarchy On-Page Content · 2.8% of the total score |
38% | 28% | +10 | 905 |
| Raw HTML Availability AI Readiness · 1.5% of the total score |
24% | 24% | 0 | 905 |
| Page Performance Indicators Technical Optimization · 2% of the total score |
20% | 20% | 0 | 905 |
| Mobile Optimization Technical Optimization · 4% of the total score |
19% | 14% | +5 | 905 |
| Content Depth & Comprehensiveness On-Page Content · 6.5% of the total score |
14% | 14% | 0 | 905 |
| AI Readability Score On-Page Content · 3% of the total score |
13% | 8% | +5 | 877 |
Where Publishing / News Media diverges from everyone else
Relative to the whole corpus, this industry is distinctively weak on Answer Box Potential (+12 points), Heading Hierarchy (+10 points), Trust & Brand Signals (+9 points).
It is distinctively strong on Content Freshness (-11 points), Structured Data Quality (-4 points), Media Accessibility (-4 points).
Answer Box Potential: fails on 80% of the 905 Publishing / News Media audits it was measured on
The real mechanism is passage self-containment: heading-scoped sections that stand alone match retrieval chunking, and fixing context-severed passages measurably cuts retrieval failures.
Heading Hierarchy: fails on 38% of the 905 Publishing / News Media audits it was measured on
Heading-scoped sections match how retrieval systems chunk pages, so clean hierarchy helps at the retrieval and chunking stage even though it is neutral at the answer-generation stage.
Trust & Brand Signals: fails on 83% of the 905 Publishing / News Media audits it was measured on
On-page trust badges are untested as a class; the evidenced trust channel is off-site reviews. Retained for publisher accountability (who publishes this, declared where a machine can read it) and for basic legitimacy signals such as contact routes and published policies.
Audited Publishing / News Media sites with a public report card
Each of these sites has a public AI Readiness report card from a real audit. Scores are point-in-time; the card shows what was measured and when.
| Site | Grade | Score | Audited |
|---|---|---|---|
| 聯合新聞網 (udn.com) | Grade A | 70/100 | 8 Sep 2026 |
| 머니투데이 (mt.co.kr) | Grade A | 69/100 | 20 Aug 2026 |
| 首頁 (jointpublishing.com) | Grade A | 67/100 | 20 Aug 2026 |
| Marie Claire (marieclaire.com) | Grade A | 67/100 | 20 Aug 2026 |
| VICE is the definitive guide to enlightening information (vice.com) | Grade A | 67/100 | 20 Aug 2026 |
| TechCrunch (techcrunch.com) | Grade A | 67/100 | 20 Aug 2026 |
| 문화일보 (munhwa.com) | Grade A | 66/100 | 20 Aug 2026 |
| 内外タイムス公式サイト (naigaitimes.com) | Grade A | 65/100 | 20 Aug 2026 |
| eco-business.com | Grade A | 65/100 | 20 Aug 2026 |
| 海外FXおすすめ口座ランキング！比較 (ongakusenkasha.co.jp) | Grade A | 64/100 | 20 Aug 2026 |
| Singapore Mediation SolutionsSingapore Mediation Solutions (singaporemediationsolutions.org) | Grade A | 63/100 | 20 Aug 2026 |
| アルファポリス (alphapolis.co.jp) | Grade A | 62/100 | 15 Sep 2026 |
Browse every audited site in the public audit archive.
See the full ranked list of 50 Publishing / News Media sites →
How to read this
- What the sample is. The 905 domains we have audited and classified as Publishing / News Media. That is a sample of the industry, not a census: it is the set of sites our crawler has reached and scored, and it carries whatever bias that selection has.
- Rubric version 2026-08-13. Every figure here comes from audits scored on this single rubric generation. Scores from different generations measure different things, so they are never mixed. Compatible generations: 2026-08-13.
- Why there are no company names. These are aggregates. We do not publish which domains sit at the bottom of a distribution, and the queries behind this page cannot return a domain name.
- Publishing floor. We publish an industry only once it reaches 100 audited domains, and a factor's failure rate only once 30 audits in the industry count toward that factor. Below either floor the number would move with a handful of sites, so we withhold it.
- What the audit can and cannot see. This audit measures citation readiness: how easily AI engines can crawl, extract, and quote these pages. It cannot see the off-site brand footprint (mentions, reviews, third-party coverage) that gates whether AI engines retrieve a brand at all; Kuroma's visibility scans and off-site signals track that side. Read the full methodology.