Your AEO Assessment: latimes.com
Overall AEO Maturity score: 2 out of 5
Your top 3 priorities
Here's where latimes.com can make the fastest gains in AEO visibility, accuracy, and traffic. If you only did three things, do these:
Add depth to existing content pages — current pages average only 7 words, far too thin for AI models to extract meaningful answers. Aim for at least 300 words per page with substantive, useful info...
Add metadata to key pages — ensure your most important pages each have a unique title tag, meta description, and h1 heading. Complete metadata on key pages significantly boosts discoverability by b...
Expand analytics coverage across all pages — with only ~11% of pages instrumented, LA times cannot accurately measure AI-referred traffic or AEO impact. Deploy analytics consistently across at leas...
What your AEO Assessment covers
Your personalized AEO assessment measures how well latimes.com is positioned for AI-driven discovery. It evaluates your site’s performance across four key categories—Content, Technical, Authority, and Measurement—to show how effectively AI systems can understand, cite, and recommend your brand.
Content
Content: Build the source AI trusts
We evaluated how your content performs across freshness, structure, depth, and clarity to see how well it helps AI understand what you do and why you matter.
Content Category Score
Latimes has a foundational web presence with a few content pages, but there's a significant opportunity to expand and enrich content to become a go-to source for AI-driven answer engines. Building out more substantial content pages is the key next step.
Publish more content pages
Expand beyond the current 2 content pages to at least 10 by creating blog posts, guides, or resource pages that address common audience questions. More pages give AI engines more material to surfac...
Add depth to existing pages
Current pages average only 7 words, which is too thin for AI models or search engines to extract meaningful answers. Aim for at least 300 words per page with substantive, useful information.
Refresh content regularly
None of the analyzed content shows recent updates. Publishing or refreshing content within the past 12 months signals relevance to both search engines and AI answer engines.
Question Coverage Percentage
Coverage of the 100 most likely questions your target audience will ask related to the topics visible on your site.
Technical
Technical: Structure wins
We evaluated how well your site uses schema, other metadata, accessibility, and speed, and more to help LLMs understand the structure and meaning of your content and establish one part of your authority in AI-driven search.
Technical Category Score
Latimes has foundational infrastructure in place — HTTPS, a valid sitemap, and robots.txt. However, SEO metadata and structured data coverage were not detected across sampled pages, limiting AI engine discoverability. Addressing metadata is the top priority.
Identify your brand on homepage
Ensure your brand name appears clearly in the homepage title tag, H1 heading, and meta description. This is the most fundamental signal that helps search engines and AI models recognize who you are.
Add metadata to key pages
Ensure your most important pages — such as section fronts, about, and contact pages — each have a unique title tag, meta description, and H1 heading. Complete metadata on key pages significantly bo...
Expand site-wide metadata coverage
Work toward at least 70% of all pages having title tags, meta descriptions, and H1 headings. Leveraging CMS templates to auto-populate these fields can make this scalable across a large publishing ...
Schema Coverage Percentage
Share of pages with schema.org metadata for improved LLM and search engine understanding.
Authority
Authority: Earn trust, everywhere
We evaluated how your site establishes authority by looking at how and how frequently others talk about you, the associated sentiment, and more.
Authority Category Score
LA Times has a strong legacy presence with a Wikipedia page, active social profiles, and recognition across major AI platforms. Key opportunities include adding a contact page, implementing structured author attribution, and improving how AI platforms convey the brand's modern...
Add a contact page
Create a dedicated contact page with clear information such as email, phone, or physical address. This is a foundational trust signal for both search engines and AI systems.
Expand structured author bylines
Add visible author bylines with bios and credentials to at least 15% of content pages, and implement Person schema markup. This helps AI platforms attribute content to credible journalists.
Strengthen brand sentiment online
Proactively publish customer success stories, engage publicly with audience feedback, and communicate transparently about editorial initiatives to lift overall brand sentiment across authoritative ...
Authority Coverage Percentage
Percent of top 50 industry sites that mention you.
Measurement
Measurement: From rankings to representation
This score reflects how well you monitor your visibility across AI systems; from tracking brand mentions and citations to understanding sentiment and share of voice.
Measurement Category Score
LA Times has Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads in place, which is a solid start. However, analytics coverage across pages is limited, and no dedicated AEO tracking tools or practices were detected. Expanding measurement infrastructure is the key next step.
Expand analytics across all pages
Your analytics tools currently cover roughly 11% of pages. Ensuring consistent deployment across at least 80% of your site is essential to accurately track AI-referred traffic and measure AEO impact.
Adopt dedicated AEO monitoring tools
Consider implementing a purpose-built AEO monitoring tool to systematically track AI citation rates, LLM brand mentions, and AI-referred traffic. Manual checking across multiple AI platforms doesn'...
Start tracking LLM-specific metrics
If not already in place (we cannot tell from the outside), begin monitoring AI bot traffic via server logs, LLM-referred human traffic from platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity, and brand mention ...
Measurement Coverage
Presence of externally visible signs on your website that you are using measurement tools.