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 41 out of 100. That is level with the median for all 30,309 audited domains in the corpus.
How the scores are distributed
Half of the 905 audited Publishing / News Media domains score between 36 and 47. The corpus-wide interquartile range, across all 30,309 audited domains, is 36 to 49.
Which factors this industry fails most often
The rubric scores 19 factors. This table shows 15 of them: the rest were counted on fewer than 30 audits in this industry, which is too few to publish a rate from. 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. Media Accessibility is not scored on every kind of page: a rankings table or a paginated index has no question to answer and no image to caption. That row therefore leaves out every audit of a kind of page the factor does not apply to, and every audit that did not record a kind of page we could read. 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Answer Box Potential AI Readiness · 7.2% of the total score |
99% | 97% | +2 | 905 |
| Trust & Brand Signals Authority Signals · 9% of the total score |
89% | 83% | +6 | 905 |
| Media Accessibility On-Page Content · 1.8% of the total score · counted only on pages this factor applies to |
87% | 86% | +1 | 793 |
| External Citations & References Authority Signals · 9% of the total score |
72% | 70% | +2 | 905 |
| Schema Markup Completeness Technical Optimization · 1% of the total score |
72% | 63% | +9 | 905 |
| Structured Data Quality On-Page Content · 4.5% of the total score |
71% | 77% | -6 | 905 |
| Content Freshness AI Readiness · 5.7% of the total score |
46% | 52% | -6 | 905 |
| AI Discoverability AI Readiness · 3% of the total score |
45% | 36% | +9 | 905 |
| Heading Hierarchy On-Page Content · 2.8% of the total score |
42% | 39% | +3 | 905 |
| Mobile Optimization Technical Optimization · 4% of the total score |
20% | 14% | +6 | 905 |
| AI Readability Score On-Page Content · 3% of the total score |
16% | 12% | +4 | 905 |
| Page Performance Indicators Technical Optimization · 2% of the total score |
16% | 18% | -2 | 905 |
| Content Depth & Comprehensiveness On-Page Content · 6.5% of the total score |
15% | 16% | -1 | 905 |
| Raw HTML Availability AI Readiness · 1.5% of the total score |
14% | 16% | -2 | 905 |
| Crawlability & Accessibility Technical Optimization · 13% of the total score |
0% | 0% | 0 | 905 |
Where Publishing / News Media diverges from everyone else
Relative to the whole corpus, this industry is distinctively weak on Schema Markup Completeness (+9 points), AI Discoverability (+9 points), Trust & Brand Signals (+6 points).
It is distinctively strong on Structured Data Quality (-6 points), Content Freshness (-6 points), Page Performance Indicators (-2 points).
Schema Markup Completeness: fails on 72% of the 905 Publishing / News Media audits it was measured on
Controlled tests show no AI-citation lift from schema.org markup, and Google states no special structured data is needed for AI features. Near-zero weight is kept only for classic rich results and Bing grounding.
AI Discoverability: fails on 45% of the 905 Publishing / News Media audits it was measured on
Rescoped to on-page machine-readability signals (semantic HTML, licensing clarity). The dead ai-plugin manifest check was removed and llms.txt stays informational only, because no major engine reads it.
Trust & Brand Signals: fails on 89% 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 basic legitimacy signals (contact, policies, HTTPS) that remain sensible hygiene.
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 2026-08-02. 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: 2026-08-02.
- 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.