Covering China from Cyberspace
China Digital Times (CDT) (chinadigitaltimes.net) scores 73 out of 100 on Brand Analyzer, placing it in the Brand-Ready tier among Media & Entertainment brands, Non-profit brands, in the 32nd percentile of 19769 Media & Entertainment brands.
China Digital Times (CDT) is an independent, bilingual media outlet based on documenting and translating censored and sensitive content from Chinese cyberspace. It aims to provide uncensored insight into Chinese politics, society, and culture by aggregating leaked government directives, sensitive terms lists, and censored online commentary. CDT serves journalists, researchers, human rights advocates, China scholars, and readers interested in Chinese censorship and civil society, positioning itself as a rare window into China's information control apparatus.
| Brand Name | China Digital Times (CDT) |
|---|---|
| Domain | chinadigitaltimes.net |
| Industry | Media & Entertainment, Non-profit |
| Main Competitors | China Media Project, GreatFire.org, China Change, Freedom House (China Media Bulletin) (87/100), Citizen Lab, Reporters Without Borders (87/100) |
Moz Domain Authority 72/100 vs category average 53 / leader 100 - a strong backlink profile, so AI systems frequently encounter mentions of the brand.
Ranked #49,760 on the Tranco list of most-visited sites - strong traffic reinforces the brand's prominence to AI models.
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 "To document and translate censored and sensitive content from Chinese cyberspace to provide uncensored insight into Chinese politics, society, and culture." (No meta description) - 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:type, Twitter cards. Adding FAQ schema would further help AI crawlers parse the brand's identity.
AI-crawler access: No robots.txt found (default: all bots allowed, but explicit file preferred) - 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 X (Twitter), Instagram, GitHub; no detected presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube - 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 China Digital Times (CDT)?", Claude could identify the brand as of September 2026. China Digital Times is a bilingual, independent media outlet founded in 2003 by Xiao Qiang, affiliated with UC Berkeley, that tracks and translates Chinese internet censorship, sensitive news topics, and online discourse. It's especially known for compiling leaked censorship dire Best known for Documenting Chinese internet censorship and translating banned or sensitive online content, including its Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon of censorship-evading slang.
When asked "Best brands similar to China Digital Times (CDT)?", Claude would recommend China Digital Times (CDT) as of September 2026. It's a well-regarded, unique source for anyone interested in Chinese censorship, internet culture, or media freedom, so it would come up naturally in that context.
Common questions people ask in Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI search engines.
China Digital Times (CDT)'s main competitors in Media & Entertainment: Freedom House (China Media Bulletin) (87/100), Reporters Without Borders (87/100).
Sources: Brand Analyzer scan
CDT offers translated collections of censored Chinese online commentary, leaked government censorship directives, and lists of sensitive terms, presented in a bilingual format for English- and Chinese-speaking audiences.
China Digital Times (CDT) is an independent, bilingual media outlet dedicated to documenting and translating censored and sensitive content from Chinese cyberspace, offering an uncensored view of Chinese politics, society, and culture.
China Digital Times (CDT) has limited AI-search visibility, scoring 32/100 on Brand Analyzer's AI visibility composite (visibility 10, trust 60, recommendation 37). This estimates how likely AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are to know, trust, and recommend the brand.
China Digital Times (CDT) scores 37/100 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.
CDT is known for aggregating and translating leaked Chinese government censorship directives and sensitive word lists, providing a documented record of how China's censorship apparatus operates in real time.
China Digital Times (CDT) 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.
CDT's content is used by journalists, researchers, human rights advocates, China scholars, and general readers interested in Chinese politics, censorship, and civil society.
CDT is valued by journalists, researchers, and human rights advocates because it uniquely aggregates and translates censored Chinese online commentary and leaked government directives, offering rare access to material otherwise suppressed within China's controlled information environment.
China Digital Times (CDT) scores 32/100 for AI visibility - how well ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can discover, identify and cite the brand.
China Digital Times (CDT) has a weak AI-visibility profile at 32/100 - a proxy for how readily ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews can recognise and cite it. Its strongest area is trust (60/100) and its weakest is visibility (10/100). It benefits from a global traffic rank of #49,760 (Tranco), a Moz Domain Authority of 72/100 and open access for AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, etc.). The main gaps holding it back: no clear Wikipedia entity to anchor it in LLM training data, no strong Wikidata entry and no llms.txt to steer AI to its best pages. In a live check, Claude could already identify China Digital Times (CDT) 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 China Digital Times (CDT): CHILI (73/100), The Children's Museum of Indianapolis (73/100), ChinaJoy (73/100), Chosunbiz (73/100).
A step up - brands to learn from: Zoom (81/100), Zeno Group (81/100).
Category leader: Change.org (97/100).
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