When in doubt, follow the money
Follow the Money (ftm.nl) scores 81 out of 100 on Brand Analyzer, placing it in the Strong Brand tier among Media & Entertainment brands, Non-profit brands, in the 73rd percentile of 25695 Media & Entertainment brands.
Follow the Money (ftm.nl) is a Dutch investigative journalism platform founded in 2009 and headquartered in Amsterdam. It is member-funded, carries no advertising, and focuses on exposing hidden interests and power structures in areas such as healthcare, housing, and politics. Positioned as an independent journalistic watchdog, it serves as a counterforce to concentrated power, targeting Dutch citizens, professionals, students, and business subscribers interested in in-depth, non-commercial reporting.
| Brand Name | Follow the Money |
|---|---|
| Domain | ftm.nl |
| Industry | Media & Entertainment, Non-profit |
| Founded | 2009 |
| Headquarters | Amsterdam |
| Main Competitors | De Correspondent (81/100), Investico, ProPublica (83/100), Bellingcat (82/100), Zembla |
Moz Domain Authority 61/100 vs category average 52 / leader 100 - a strong backlink profile, so AI systems frequently encounter mentions of the brand.
Ranked #112,786 on the Tranco list of most-visited sites - modest traffic makes the brand easy for AI models to overlook.
Follow the Money appears on Wikipedia but without a dedicated company entity, so AI models can confuse it with similarly named subjects.
The homepage meta description reads "'When in doubt, follow the money'. Of het nu om de zorg, de woningmarkt of de politiek gaat, wij leggen de belangen bloot. Word lid!" (Meta description: 25 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, 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 mentions GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot - all allowed - robots.txt controls whether engines like GPTBot and ClaudeBot can read the site at all.
Content is NL-only, limiting citation in English-language AI answers.
Social footprint: verified profiles on LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, GitHub; no detected presence on Facebook, X (Twitter) - 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 Follow the Money?", Claude could identify the brand as of October 2026. Follow the Money (ftm.nl) is a Dutch platform for investigative journalism, funded primarily through member and reader contributions rather than advertising, focusing on financial, corporate, and political wrongdoing in the Netherlands. Best known for Independent, member-funded investigative journalism into financial and corporate misconduct in the Netherlands.
When asked "Best brands similar to Follow the Money?", Claude would recommend Follow the Money as of October 2026. It's a well-regarded and distinctive example of reader-funded investigative journalism in the Dutch media landscape, so I'd mention it if someone asked about similar outlets.
Common questions people ask in Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI search engines.
Follow the Money's main competitors in Media & Entertainment: De Correspondent (81/100), ProPublica (83/100), Bellingcat (82/100).
Sources: Brand Analyzer scan
Follow the Money is a Dutch investigative journalism platform founded in 2009 and based in Amsterdam. It is a member-funded, non-profit media organization with no advertisers, focused on uncovering hidden interests in areas such as finance, healthcare, housing, and politics.
Sources: Follow the Money official site
Follow the Money has moderate AI-search visibility, scoring 52/100 on Brand Analyzer's AI visibility composite (visibility 38, trust 60, recommendation 68). This estimates how likely AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are to know, trust, and recommend the brand.
Sources: Follow the Money official site
Follow the Money was founded in 2009. Follow the Money operates in the Media & Entertainment category. It is analyzed by Brand Analyzer across seven brand dimensions and AI-search visibility.
Sources: Wikidata
Follow the Money is headquartered in Amsterdam. Follow the Money operates in the Media & Entertainment category.
Sources: Wikidata
Follow the Money offers investigative journalism content, including in-depth articles and reports on finance, economics, healthcare, housing, and politics, accessible through its website. It operates a membership model that funds its editorial operations, with offerings for individual, student, and business subscribers.
Sources: Follow the Money official site
Follow the Money scores 68/100 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; a Wikipedia presence helps.
Sources: Follow the Money official site
Follow the Money is known for its in-depth investigative reporting on finance, economics, healthcare, and housing in the Netherlands, and for being funded entirely by its members rather than advertisers, which it presents as a guarantee of journalistic independence.
Sources: Follow the Money official site
Follow the Money 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: Follow the Money official site
Follow the Money is used by Dutch citizens and professionals interested in independent, investigative journalism, including students and business subscribers who want detailed reporting on topics such as politics, healthcare, and the housing market.
Sources: Follow the Money official site
Follow the Money scores 52/100 for AI visibility - how well ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can discover, identify and cite the brand.
Follow the Money has a limited AI-visibility profile at 52/100 - a proxy for how readily ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews can recognise and cite it. Its strongest area is recommendation likelihood (68/100) and its weakest is visibility (38/100). It benefits from a Wikidata knowledge-graph entry, a global traffic rank of #112,786 (Tranco) and a Moz Domain Authority of 61/100. 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 Follow the Money 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 Follow the Money: Farnam Street (FS.blog) (81/100), Frost Science (81/100), FuturLab (81/100), FX (81/100).
A step up - brands to learn from: Yuga Labs (91/100), Yr (91/100).
Category leader: Change.org (97/100).
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