The capital city's source of news
Illinois Times (illinoistimes.com) scores 78 out of 100 on Brand Analyzer, placing it in the Brand-Ready tier among Media & Entertainment brands, in the 57th percentile of 25222 Media & Entertainment brands.
Illinois Times is a community newspaper based in Springfield, Illinois, founded in 1975. It provides local journalism covering news, politics, arts, entertainment, and culture for Springfield and the surrounding Sangamon County area. The publication positions itself as an independent source of in-depth local reporting, including investigative journalism and political commentary, aiming to fill coverage gaps left by larger media outlets.
| Brand Name | Illinois Times |
|---|---|
| Domain | illinoistimes.com |
| Industry | Media & Entertainment |
| Founded | 1975 |
| Headquarters | Springfield, Illinois |
| Main Competitors | The State Journal-Register (78/100), Chicago Reader (84/100), Riverfront Times (77/100), NUVO, Belleville News-Democrat |
Moz Domain Authority 58/100 vs category average 52 / leader 100 - a strong backlink profile, so AI systems frequently encounter mentions of the brand.
Ranked #203,366 on the Tranco list of most-visited sites - modest traffic makes the brand easy for AI models to overlook.
Illinois Times appears on Wikipedia but without a dedicated company entity, so AI models can confuse it with similarly named subjects.
The homepage meta description reads "NEWSLETTER Trending Previous Issues opinion > More Opinion > More Rich Miller > More Food and Drink > More Music > More Arts and Culture Best of Springfield® Related…" (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), Organization schema, Breadcrumb/Website schema, + Microdata, 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: Nginx, WordPress, Ghost.
Social footprint: verified profiles on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram; no detected presence on X (Twitter), LinkedIn, 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 Illinois Times?", Claude could identify the brand as of October 2026. Illinois Times is an alternative weekly newspaper covering Springfield, Illinois, focusing on local news, politics, arts, and culture. It has served the Springfield area for decades as an independent voice alongside the mainstream daily paper. Best known for Being Springfield, Illinois' alternative weekly newspaper covering local news, politics, and arts.
When asked "Best brands similar to Illinois Times?", Claude would recommend Illinois Times as of October 2026. It's a well-known regional alt-weekly, so I'd mention it if someone asked about local or alternative media outlets in Illinois.
Common questions people ask in Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI search engines.
Illinois Times's main competitors in Media & Entertainment: The State Journal-Register (78/100), Chicago Reader (84/100), Riverfront Times (77/100).
Sources: Brand Analyzer scan
Illinois Times is a community newspaper based in Springfield, Illinois, founded in 1975. It focuses on local journalism covering news, politics, arts, and culture for the Springfield and Sangamon County area.
Sources: Illinois Times official site
Illinois Times has limited AI-search visibility, scoring 49/100 on Brand Analyzer's AI visibility composite (visibility 38, trust 54, recommendation 61). This estimates how likely AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are to know, trust, and recommend the brand.
Sources: Illinois Times official site
Illinois Times was founded in 1975. Illinois Times operates in the Media & Entertainment category. It is analyzed by Brand Analyzer across seven brand dimensions and AI-search visibility.
Sources: Wikidata
Illinois Times offers local news articles, political commentary and opinion pieces (including a recurring column by Rich Miller), arts and culture reporting, food and drink coverage, music coverage, a 'Best of Springfield' feature, and a newsletter distributed to subscribers.
Sources: Illinois Times official site
Illinois Times produces local journalism including investigative reporting, political commentary, and coverage of arts, entertainment, food and drink, and culture for the Springfield, Illinois region. It publishes regular issues and a newsletter to keep readers informed about community events and local government.
Sources: Illinois Times official site
Illinois Times scores 61/100 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: Illinois Times official site
Illinois Times 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: Illinois Times official site
Illinois Times is used by residents of Springfield, Illinois and Sangamon County who are interested in local news, political analysis, and arts and entertainment coverage relevant to their community.
Sources: Illinois Times official site
Illinois Times is known for its in-depth local reporting on Springfield and Sangamon County, including political analysis (such as its Rich Miller column), arts and culture coverage, and its 'Best of Springfield' community recognition feature.
Sources: Illinois Times official site
Illinois Times scores 49/100 for AI visibility - how well ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can discover, identify and cite the brand.
Illinois Times has a limited AI-visibility profile at 49/100 - a proxy for how readily ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews can recognise and cite it. Its strongest area is recommendation likelihood (61/100) and its weakest is visibility (38/100). It benefits from a Wikidata knowledge-graph entry, a global traffic rank of #203,366 (Tranco) and a Moz Domain Authority of 58/100. 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 Illinois Times 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 Illinois Times: Il Fatto Alimentare (78/100), International Live Events Association (ILEA) (78/100), Industrial Light & Magic (78/100), Imangi Studios (78/100).
A step up - brands to learn from: Zoom (81/100), Zeno Group (81/100).
Category leader: Change.org (97/100).
Brand Analyzer is built by DataEase AI. Track your brand in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.