Local news for the Quad Cities
Quad City Times (qctimes.com) scores 85 out of 100 on Brand Analyzer, placing it in the Strong Brand tier among Media & Entertainment brands, in the 89th percentile of 29672 Media & Entertainment brands.
Quad City Times is a daily newspaper based in Davenport, Iowa, covering news, sports, and events for the Quad Cities region spanning Iowa and Illinois, including Davenport, Bettendorf, Moline, and Rock Island. Founded in 1855, it is owned by Lee Enterprises and focuses on local journalism, including politics, sports, and community events, positioning itself as the authoritative hyperlocal news source for the region.
| Brand Name | Quad City Times |
|---|---|
| Domain | qctimes.com |
| Industry | Media & Entertainment |
| Founded | 1855 |
| Headquarters | Davenport, Iowa |
| Parent Company / Owner | Lee Enterprises |
| Main Competitors | Dispatch-Argus (85/100), WQAD-TV (84/100), KWQC-TV6 (86/100), WHBF-TV (OurQuadCities) (62/100), Telegraph Herald (76/100) |
Moz Domain Authority 72/100 vs category average 51 / leader 100 - a strong backlink profile, so AI systems frequently encounter mentions of the brand.
Ranked #56,455 on the Tranco list of most-visited sites - strong traffic reinforces the brand's prominence to AI models.
Quad City 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 "Read breaking news, sports and events from Davenport, Bettendorf, Moline, Rock Island and the the Quad Cities Region of Iowa and Illinois." (Meta description: 22 words (ideal length). OG description present and descriptive) - this is the summary AI engines are most likely to quote.
Structured data on the homepage: 2 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 present, no AI bot restrictions - robots.txt controls whether engines like GPTBot and ClaudeBot can read the site at all.
Social footprint: verified profiles on X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, YouTube; no detected presence on 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 Quad City Times?", Claude could identify the brand as of October 2026. The Quad City Times is a daily newspaper serving Davenport, Iowa and the surrounding Quad Cities region, covering local news, sports, and community events. It's part of Lee Enterprises' network of regional newspapers. Best known for Being the main daily newspaper covering the Quad Cities area (Davenport, Bettendorf, Rock Island, Moline).
When asked "Best brands similar to Quad City Times?", Claude would recommend Quad City Times as of October 2026. It's a legitimate, long-standing regional newspaper, so it would be relevant if someone asked about local Midwest news outlets or Lee Enterprises properties.
Common questions people ask in Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI search engines.
Quad City Times's main competitors in Media & Entertainment: Dispatch-Argus (85/100), WQAD-TV (84/100), KWQC-TV6 (86/100), WHBF-TV (OurQuadCities) (62/100), Telegraph Herald (76/100).
Sources: Brand Analyzer scan
Quad City Times is a daily newspaper headquartered in Davenport, Iowa, that has served the Quad Cities region of Iowa and Illinois since 1855. It is owned by Lee Enterprises and provides news coverage for communities including Davenport, Bettendorf, Moline, and Rock Island.
Sources: Quad City Times official site
Quad City Times has moderate AI-search visibility, scoring 52/100 on Brand Analyzer's AI visibility composite (visibility 43, trust 54, recommendation 65). This estimates how likely AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are to know, trust, and recommend the brand.
Sources: Quad City Times official site
Quad City Times was founded in 1855. Quad City Times operates in the Media & Entertainment category. It is analyzed by Brand Analyzer across seven brand dimensions and AI-search visibility.
Sources: Wikidata
Quad City Times offers news reporting, sports coverage, and event listings for the Quad Cities region, available through its website qctimes.com, covering local politics, community issues, and regional happenings in Davenport, Bettendorf, Moline, and Rock Island.
Sources: Quad City Times official site
Quad City Times scores 65/100 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: Quad City Times official site
Quad City Times is known for being a long-standing, hyperlocal news source for the Quad Cities area, providing in-depth regional coverage of local politics, sports, and community events that larger national outlets typically do not cover.
Sources: Quad City Times official site
Quad City 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: Quad City Times official site
Quad City Times is owned by or part of Lee Enterprises. Quad City Times operates in the Media & Entertainment category.
Sources: Wikidata
Quad City Times is used by residents, community members, and stakeholders in the Quad Cities region of Iowa and Illinois who seek local news, sports updates, and information about community events.
Sources: Quad City Times official site
Quad City Times scores 52/100 for AI visibility - how well ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can discover, identify and cite the brand.
Quad City Times 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 (65/100) and its weakest is visibility (43/100). It benefits from a Wikidata knowledge-graph entry, a global traffic rank of #56,455 (Tranco) and a Moz Domain Authority of 72/100. 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 Quad City 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 Quad City Times: Dispatch Argus (qconline.com) (85/100), Poets & Writers (85/100), Q-SYS (85/100), Quantic Dream (85/100).
A step up - brands to learn from: Yuga Labs (91/100), Yr (91/100).
Category leader: Change.org (97/100).
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