#29. Weekly AI For Newsroom Roundup. Is AI visibility becoming the norm finally?

Hello! This is Sergei.

I have no idea how it works, but once I shipped new feature on AI For Newsroom, I started to see a lot of posts, news, comments about the topic behind that new feature: AI visibility.

A few days ago I launched a free AI Visibility Checker on AI For Newsroom. It analyzes robots.txt rules for AI crawlers, sitemap accessibility, homepage crawlability, metadata and schema, JavaScript rendering, and a number of editorial signals by parsing your homepage and a sample article. Feel free to test your website.

Almost immediately, the topic started showing up across my feeds again. Partly because Google continues to push AI Mode forward, but also probably because publishers are beginning to realize that visibility in AI-generated answers is becoming a strategic issue (hard truth, huh).

One thing I’ve noticed while working with news organizations (and we discussed this a lot before): many publishers block AI bots without realizing there are different types of AI bots. Blocking training crawlers is a 100% reasonable decision. Blocking retrieval crawlers is a different story. In theory, those are the bots that help your content appear in AI search results and AI-generated answers. In many cases, the fix is surprisingly simple: reviewing and updating your robots.txt file (yeah, Google can skip it, but anyway) or even create some new files like AI.txt or LLM.txt.

But the bigger challenge is editorial. If we want to be visible in AI search — and not wanting that increasingly feels like saying “we don’t care about Google” in the early 2010s — technical accessibility alone won’t be enough.

AI systems favor content that is easy to understand, extract, and cite. That means clearer structure, stronger topic focus, direct answers, factual specificity, explanatory formats, and content that helps answer questions rather than simply report events.

The interesting part is that none of this is actually new. Newsrooms have been experimenting with explanatory journalism, constructive journalism, service journalism, and other various formats for years. AI visibility may simply be another reason to double down on practices that already create value for readers.

I don’t think this genie is going back into the bottle, so we should focus on how to make it useful.