Keep stories alive
Forbidden Stories (forbiddenstories.org) scores 78 out of 100 on Brand Analyzer, placing it in the Brand-Ready tier among Media & Entertainment brands, Non-profit brands, in the 64th percentile of 38857 Media & Entertainment brands.
Forbidden Stories is a Paris-based non-profit organization, founded in 2017, dedicated to continuing and publishing the investigative work of journalists who are threatened, imprisoned, or killed. It operates a secure submission system called SafeBox, allowing at-risk reporters worldwide to safely share ongoing investigations with a network of journalists who ensure the stories are completed and published, even if the original reporter is silenced. The organization collaborates with media outlets and press freedom advocates globally.
| Brand Name | Forbidden Stories |
|---|---|
| Domain | forbiddenstories.org |
| Industry | Media & Entertainment, Non-profit |
| Founded | 2017 |
| Headquarters | Paris |
| Main Competitors | International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (80/100), Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (83/100), Committee to Protect Journalists (88/100), Reporters Without Borders (87/100), Bellingcat (82/100) |
Moz Domain Authority 60/100 vs category average 50 / leader 100 - a strong backlink profile, so AI systems frequently encounter mentions of the brand.
Ranked #160,738 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 "Forbidden Stories Forbidden Stories is Joining Forces with UC Berkeley to Launch a Flagship LabExclusive Global Survey: Journalists Under Attack Share How to Fight Back“It’s someth…" (No meta description. 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), Breadcrumb/Website schema, og:title, og:description, og:image, og:type, Twitter cards, canonical. Adding Organization and 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: Nginx, WordPress, Ghost.
Social footprint: verified profiles on Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, YouTube; no detected presence on Facebook, 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 October 2026.
When asked "What is Forbidden Stories?", Claude could identify the brand as of October 2026. Forbidden Stories is a Paris-based nonprofit journalism network that continues and publishes the investigative work of reporters who have been killed, jailed, or threatened for their work. It coordinates collaborative projects among international journalists, most notably the Peg Best known for The Pegasus Project investigation into NSO Group's spyware being used to surveil journalists, activists, and politicians globally.
When asked "Best brands similar to Forbidden Stories?", Claude would recommend Forbidden Stories as of October 2026. It's a well-known and respected name in collaborative investigative journalism and press freedom advocacy, so it would naturally come up alongside organizations like ICIJ or OCCRP.
Common questions people ask in Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI search engines.
Forbidden Stories's main competitors in Media & Entertainment: International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (80/100), Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (83/100), Committee to Protect Journalists (88/100), Reporters Without Borders (87/100), Bellingcat (82/100).
Sources: Brand Analyzer scan
Forbidden Stories is a non-profit organization, headquartered in Paris and founded in 2017, whose mission is to ensure that the investigative work of threatened, jailed, or killed journalists is continued and published, so that silencing a reporter cannot silence their story.
Sources: Forbidden Stories official site
Forbidden Stories has limited AI-search visibility, scoring 42/100 on Brand Analyzer's AI visibility composite (visibility 30, trust 48, recommendation 56). This estimates how likely AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are to know, trust, and recommend the brand.
Sources: Forbidden Stories official site
Forbidden Stories was founded in 2017. Forbidden Stories operates in the Media & Entertainment category. It is analyzed by Brand Analyzer across seven brand dimensions and AI-search visibility.
Sources: Wikidata
Forbidden Stories is headquartered in Paris. Forbidden Stories operates in the Media & Entertainment category.
Sources: Wikidata
Forbidden Stories provides a secure mechanism called SafeBox that allows threatened investigative journalists in dozens of countries to safely share their ongoing investigations. If a journalist is attacked, imprisoned, or killed, Forbidden Stories coordinates with networks of other journalists and media organizations to complete and publish the stolen or interrupted investigation, ensuring the work reaches the public.
Sources: Forbidden Stories official site
Forbidden Stories offers SafeBox, a secure platform for threatened journalists to share ongoing investigations so the work can be completed and published if they are harmed. It also facilitates collaborative investigative journalism projects, partners with media organizations and academic institutions (such as a flagship lab with UC Berkeley), and conducts surveys and research on threats faced by journalists.
Sources: Forbidden Stories official site
Forbidden Stories scores 56/100 on Brand Analyzer's AI recommendation signal, indicating it is reasonably likely to be surfaced when AI assistants like ChatGPT suggest Media & Entertainment options. Recommendation depends on crawlability, structured data, and category authority.
Sources: Forbidden Stories official site
Forbidden Stories is known for its SafeBox system, which safeguards investigative journalism by enabling at-risk reporters to securely back up their work so it can be finished and published by others if they are silenced through violence, imprisonment, or death. It is also known for collaborative cross-border journalism projects that continue the work of murdered or jailed reporters.
Sources: Forbidden Stories official site
Forbidden Stories 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: Forbidden Stories official site
Forbidden Stories is used by threatened and at-risk investigative journalists worldwide who need a secure way to preserve and continue their work. It also engages media organizations, press freedom advocates, and academic partners, as well as the general public who rely on the continuation of independent investigative journalism.
Sources: Forbidden Stories official site
Forbidden Stories scores 42/100 for AI visibility - how well ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can discover, identify and cite the brand.
Forbidden Stories has a limited AI-visibility profile at 42/100 - a proxy for how readily ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews can recognise and cite it. Its strongest area is recommendation likelihood (56/100) and its weakest is visibility (30/100). It benefits from a Wikidata knowledge-graph entry, a global traffic rank of #160,738 (Tranco) and a Moz Domain Authority of 60/100. The main gaps holding it back: no clear Wikipedia entity to anchor it in LLM training data, thin schema.org structured data and no llms.txt to steer AI to its best pages. In a live check, Claude could already identify Forbidden Stories from memory (October 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 Forbidden Stories: Forbidden Planet (78/100), Forbes Bulgaria (78/100), Forced Entertainment (78/100), Forces War Records (78/100).
A step up - brands to learn from: Zoom (81/100), Znews (81/100).
Category leader: Change.org (97/100).
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