Making democracy accessible and transparent
Open States (openstates.org) scores 81 out of 100 on Brand Analyzer, placing it in the Strong Brand tier among Government brands, Non-profit brands, Technology brands, in the 87th percentile of 16391 Government brands.
Open States is a free, open-data website and database that provides information on current U.S. politicians, bills, and other legislative data. Founded in 2009, it allows citizens to find their legislators and search legislation across all U.S. states. Operating as a civic tech resource under the Plural project, it offers bulk data downloads and an API for developers, researchers, journalists, and advocacy groups. Its mission centers on making democracy more accessible and transparent through open legislative information.
| Brand Name | Open States |
|---|---|
| Domain | openstates.org |
| Industry | Government, Non-profit |
| Founded | 2009 |
| Parent Company / Owner | Plural |
| Main Competitors | LegiScan (64/100), GovTrack (85/100), Ballotpedia, FiscalNote (92/100), Quorum (88/100), Plural (77/100) |
Moz Domain Authority 63/100 vs category average 47 / leader 95 - a strong backlink profile, so AI systems frequently encounter mentions of the brand.
Ranked #162,173 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 "Find Your Legislators. Search for your representatives & look up legislation across the United States Search Legislation Look up a bill Looking for your existing OpenStates.org…" (Meta description: 55 words. 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, 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, HubSpot.
Social footprint: verified profiles on LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Instagram, YouTube, GitHub; no detected presence on Facebook - 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 Open States?", Claude could identify the brand as of October 2026. Open States is a project that tracks legislative data, such as bills, votes, and legislator information, for all 50 US states, DC, and Puerto Rico, making it accessible via a website and API. It's run by Plural Policy (formerly Open States/Civic Impulse and later part of the Plur Best known for Providing a free, standardized API and database of US state legislative information.
When asked "Best brands similar to Open States?", Claude would recommend Open States as of October 2026. It's a widely used, respected resource among civic tech developers, journalists, and researchers needing state-level legislative data in the US.
Common questions people ask in Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI search engines.
Open States's main competitors in Government: LegiScan (64/100), GovTrack (85/100), FiscalNote (92/100), Quorum (88/100), Plural (77/100).
Sources: Brand Analyzer scan
Open States offers a legislator lookup tool that lets users find their representatives by entering an address, a bill search and tracking tool for legislation across U.S. states, and open legislative data available via bulk download and API for developers and researchers.
Sources: Open States official site
Open States has limited AI-search visibility, scoring 40/100 on Brand Analyzer's AI visibility composite (visibility 18, trust 57, recommendation 58). This estimates how likely AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are to know, trust, and recommend the brand.
Sources: Open States official site
Open States was founded in 2009. Open States operates in the Government category. It is analyzed by Brand Analyzer across seven brand dimensions and AI-search visibility.
Sources: Wikidata
Open States collects and provides open legislative data for the United States, including information on legislators and bills. It enables users to search for their representatives by entering an address and to look up legislation at the state level. The platform also offers bulk data downloads and an API so developers, researchers, and organizations can access and build upon this legislative information.
Sources: Open States official site
Open States scores 58/100 on Brand Analyzer's AI recommendation signal, indicating it is reasonably likely to be surfaced when AI assistants like ChatGPT suggest Government options. Recommendation depends on crawlability, structured data, and category authority.
Sources: Open States official site
Open States is a free website and open-data database that provides current information on U.S. politicians, bills, and other legislative data. Founded in 2009, it allows users to find their elected representatives and look up legislation across all U.S. states. It is part of the broader civic tech ecosystem and now operates under the Plural project, continuing its original mission of making legislative data openly accessible.
Sources: Open States official site
Open States 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: Open States official site
Open States is used by everyday citizens seeking information about their elected representatives, as well as civic tech developers, researchers, journalists, and advocacy organizations that need open legislative data for analysis, reporting, or application development.
Sources: Open States official site
Open States is known for being one of the largest open collections of U.S. legislative data, offering free access to information on legislators and bills through both a public website and an API/bulk download system. It is recognized within civic tech communities as a foundational open-data resource for tracking legislation across all 50 states.
Sources: Open States official site
Open States scores 40/100 for AI visibility - how well ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can discover, identify and cite the brand.
Open States has a limited AI-visibility profile at 40/100 - a proxy for how readily ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews can recognise and cite it. Its strongest area is recommendation likelihood (58/100) and its weakest is visibility (18/100). It benefits from a Wikidata knowledge-graph entry, a global traffic rank of #162,173 (Tranco) and a Moz Domain Authority of 63/100. 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 Open States 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 Open States: Open Government Partnership (81/100), Alberta Ombudsman (81/100), OPERS (81/100), Ontario Power Generation (OPG) (81/100).
A step up - brands to learn from: Yr (91/100), Yoti (91/100).
Category leader: ABC News (96/100).
Brand Analyzer is built by DataEase AI. Track your brand in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.