Your weekly dose of local culture
New Times San Luis Obispo (newtimesslo.com) scores 76 out of 100 on Brand Analyzer, placing it in the Brand-Ready tier among Media & Entertainment brands, in the 49th percentile of 30329 Media & Entertainment brands.
New Times San Luis Obispo is a weekly newspaper serving San Luis Obispo and California's Central Coast, founded in 1986. It covers local news, arts, and culture through print publication and digital platforms, including a Thursday newsletter called News Wire. The publication positions itself as an independent, community-focused alternative to larger media outlets, offering in-depth regional journalism and a weekly readers poll.
| Brand Name | New Times San Luis Obispo |
|---|---|
| Domain | newtimesslo.com |
| Industry | Media & Entertainment |
| Founded | 1986 |
| Headquarters | San Luis Obispo, California |
| Main Competitors | The Tribune (San Luis Obispo) (87/100), Santa Maria Times (85/100), Santa Barbara Independent (90/100), Monterey County Weekly, Santa Barbara News-Press (85/100) |
Moz Domain Authority 57/100 vs category average 51 / leader 100 - a strong backlink profile, so AI systems frequently encounter mentions of the brand.
Ranked #228,723 on the Tranco list of most-visited sites - modest traffic makes the brand easy for AI models to overlook.
New Times San Luis Obispo appears on Wikipedia but without a dedicated company entity, so AI models can confuse it with similarly named subjects.
The homepage meta description reads "Your weekly dose of local news, arts, and culture. Our News Wire newsletter lands every Thursday with the stories shaping the Central Coast. Readers Poll of the Week" (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, Product/Article 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, React.
Social footprint: verified profiles on X (Twitter), Instagram, YouTube; no detected presence on Facebook, 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 New Times San Luis Obispo?", Claude could identify the brand as of October 2026. New Times San Luis Obispo is an alternative weekly newspaper covering news, arts, culture, and events in San Luis Obispo County, California. Best known for Local alternative news and arts/culture coverage for San Luis Obispo County.
When asked "Best brands similar to New Times San Luis Obispo?", Claude would recommend New Times San Luis Obispo as of October 2026. It's a well-known regional alt-weekly, so I'd mention it if someone asked about local SLO County media or alternative newspapers.
Common questions people ask in Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI search engines.
New Times San Luis Obispo's main competitors in Media & Entertainment: The Tribune (San Luis Obispo) (87/100), Santa Maria Times (85/100), Santa Barbara Independent (90/100), Santa Barbara News-Press (85/100).
Sources: Brand Analyzer scan
New Times SLO offers a weekly print newspaper covering local news, arts, and culture, a weekly email newsletter called News Wire (delivered Thursdays), and a recurring Readers Poll of the Week feature.
New Times San Luis Obispo is a weekly newspaper published in San Luis Obispo, California, founded in 1986. It delivers local news, arts, and culture coverage to residents of the Central Coast region through both print and digital formats.
New Times San Luis Obispo has moderate AI-search visibility, scoring 50/100 on Brand Analyzer's AI visibility composite (visibility 38, trust 66, recommendation 53). This estimates how likely AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are to know, trust, and recommend the brand.
New Times San Luis Obispo was founded in 1986. New Times San Luis Obispo operates in the Media & Entertainment category. It is analyzed by Brand Analyzer across seven brand dimensions and AI-search visibility.
Sources: Wikidata
New Times San Luis Obispo scores 53/100 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.
New Times San Luis Obispo 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.
New Times SLO is known for its community-centric, independent journalism covering local news, arts, and culture on California's Central Coast, positioning itself as an alternative to larger media outlets that may overlook local stories.
New Times SLO is used by local residents of San Luis Obispo and the surrounding Central Coast region who are interested in community news, arts, culture, and civic affairs.
New Times San Luis Obispo scores 50/100 for AI visibility - how well ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can discover, identify and cite the brand.
New Times San Luis Obispo has a limited AI-visibility profile at 50/100 - a proxy for how readily ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews can recognise and cite it. Its strongest area is trust (66/100) and its weakest is visibility (38/100). It benefits from a Wikidata knowledge-graph entry, a global traffic rank of #228,723 (Tranco) and a Moz Domain Authority of 57/100. The main gaps holding it back: no clear Wikipedia entity to anchor it in LLM training data. In a live check, Claude could already identify New Times San Luis Obispo 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 New Times San Luis Obispo: Newsshooter (76/100), NewsPoint (76/100), Národní galerie Praha (76/100), National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) (76/100).
A step up - brands to learn from: Zoom (81/100), Znews (81/100).
Category leader: Change.org (97/100).
Brand Analyzer is built by DataEase AI. Track your brand in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.