AEO grade · nytimes.com

Will AI engines citenytimes.com?

Quick grade · 62/100

nytimes.com has serious AEO gaps. AI engines may not be reading or trusting your pages the way you think. The fixes are mostly cheap — schema, llms.txt, and crawl-time signals.

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What we checked

HTTPS10 pts
TLS responds correctly. AI crawlers won't be blocked at the network layer.
robots.txt + AI bots15 pts
robots.txt blocks one or more AI engine crawlers. You are intentionally invisible to that audience.
llms.txt10 pts
No /llms.txt published. The llmstxt.org spec is the explicit channel for telling AI engines what to index. Missing this is the cheapest fix on this page.
sitemap.xml10 pts
No /sitemap.xml at the standard location. AI engines fall back to link-following, which under-discovers deep pages.
Open Graph image10 pts
og:image is set. Social and AI-engine link previews will render with a branded card.
JSON-LD schema20 pts
JSON-LD detected. Schema.org markup is the single highest-leverage signal for AI Overview eligibility.
<title> length5 pts
Title length (66 chars) sits in the AI-Overview-friendly 50–60 char band.
meta description5 pts
Meta description 267 chars — over 160 truncates mid-thought in AI Overviews.

Quick grade checks 8 signals at the homepage level. The full VectorCite audit scores 47 signals per page and runs against real buyer queries you specify.

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