Power and political change, local up
Bolts (boltsmag.org) scores 76 out of 100 on Brand Analyzer, placing it in the Brand-Ready tier among Media & Entertainment brands, Government brands, Non-profit brands, in the 44th percentile of 17961 Media & Entertainment brands.
Bolts is a digital magazine that covers local political power, criminal justice, and voting rights. It focuses on the places, people, and policies that shape public policy from the local level up, offering in-depth journalism on topics often overlooked by national media. Bolts targets politically engaged readers, journalists, activists, and policymakers interested in local government and democratic reform.
| Brand Name | Bolts |
|---|---|
| Domain | boltsmag.org |
| Industry | Media & Entertainment, Government |
| Main Competitors | The Marshall Project (85/100), The Appeal (82/100), Democracy Docket (79/100), Governing (84/100), Stateline, The Trace, ProPublica (83/100) |
Moz Domain Authority 51/100 vs category average 53 / leader 100 - limited third-party links, so AI systems rarely encounter mentions of the brand.
Ranked #375,387 on the Tranco list of most-visited sites - modest traffic makes the brand easy for AI models to overlook.
No Wikipedia presence was found - a major gap, since Wikipedia is among the most heavily weighted sources in AI training data.
The homepage meta description reads "Bolts is a digital magazine that covers the nuts and bolts of power and political change, from the local up." (Meta description: 20 words (ideal length). OG description present and descriptive) - this is the summary AI engines are most likely to quote.
Structured data on the homepage: 1 JSON-LD block(s), Organization schema, Breadcrumb/Website schema, og:title, og:description, og:image, og:type, Twitter cards, canonical. Adding FAQ schema would further help AI crawlers parse the brand's identity.
AI-crawler access: robots.txt present, no AI bot restrictions - robots.txt controls whether engines like GPTBot and ClaudeBot can read the site at all.
Detected tech stack: Cloudflare, WordPress, Ghost.
Social footprint: verified profiles on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn; no detected presence on X (Twitter), YouTube, GitHub - consistent profiles reinforce the brand's identity across the web.
0 Reddit mentions - community discussion signals real-world reputation to AI models.
Live results from asking a general-purpose AI assistant about the brand, checked September 2026.
When asked "What is Bolts?", Claude could identify the brand as of September 2026. Bolts is a nonprofit digital magazine that covers state and local politics in the U.S., with a focus on criminal justice, voting rights, and elections often overlooked by mainstream outlets. Best known for In-depth reporting on local elections, prosecutors, and criminal justice policy across the U.S.
When asked "Best brands similar to Bolts?", Claude would recommend Bolts as of September 2026. It's a respected niche outlet for readers interested in local government and criminal justice journalism, so I'd mention it alongside similar nonprofit news sites.
Common questions people ask in Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI search engines.
Bolts's main competitors in Media & Entertainment: The Marshall Project (85/100), The Appeal (82/100), Democracy Docket (79/100), Governing (84/100), ProPublica (83/100).
Sources: Brand Analyzer scan
Bolts is a digital magazine that covers local political power, criminal justice, and voting rights. It focuses on the places, people, and policies that shape public policy from the local level up.
Sources: Bolts official site
Bolts has limited AI-search visibility, scoring 31/100 on Brand Analyzer's AI visibility composite (visibility 20, trust 36, recommendation 45). This estimates how likely AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are to know, trust, and recommend the brand.
Sources: Bolts official site
Bolts offers digital magazine journalism, including in-depth articles and a dedicated vertical tracking what's on the ballot, focused on criminal justice, voting rights, and local political power structures.
Sources: Bolts official site
Bolts produces in-depth journalism on criminal justice, voting rights, and local political power structures. It reports on the places, people, and policies that shape public policy, and tracks what's on the ballot in local elections.
Sources: Bolts official site
Bolts scores 45/100 on Brand Analyzer's AI recommendation signal, indicating it is less likely to be surfaced when AI assistants like ChatGPT suggest Media & Entertainment options. Recommendation depends on crawlability, structured data, and category authority.
Sources: Bolts official site
Bolts can improve AI discoverability by strengthening structured data (Organization and FAQ schema), maintaining an accurate Wikipedia/Wikidata entity, earning authoritative citations, and keeping content crawlable for AI bots. Brand Analyzer measures these as visibility, trust, and recommendation signals.
Sources: Bolts official site
Bolts is used by politically engaged readers, journalists, activists, and policymakers who are interested in local government, criminal justice reform, and voting rights.
Sources: Bolts official site
Bolts is known for its in-depth, local-focused journalism on criminal justice and voting rights, areas often underreported by national media, and for tracking local ballot measures and elections.
Sources: Bolts official site
Bolts scores 31/100 for AI visibility - how well ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can discover, identify and cite the brand.
Bolts has a weak AI-visibility profile at 31/100 - a proxy for how readily ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews can recognise and cite it. Its strongest area is recommendation likelihood (45/100) and its weakest is visibility (20/100). It benefits from a Wikidata knowledge-graph entry, a global traffic rank of #375,387 (Tranco) and a Moz Domain Authority of 51/100. The main gaps holding it back: no clear Wikipedia entity to anchor it in LLM training data and no llms.txt to steer AI to its best pages. In a live check, Claude could already identify Bolts from memory (September 2026) - a sign these signals are paying off.
The score combines seven dimensions - name quality, digital presence, visual identity, messaging clarity, trust foundation, AI discoverability, and brand authority - into a single objective benchmark.
Ranked closest to Bolts: Bolliger & Mabillard (76/100), Bodi eko (76/100), Bompiani (76/100), Bons Plans Malins (76/100).
A step up - brands to learn from: Zoom (81/100), Zeno Group (81/100).
Category leader: Change.org (97/100).
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