America's Best Backpacking and Hiking
The Big Outside (thebigoutside.com) scores 70 out of 100 on Brand Analyzer, placing it in the Developing tier among Travel & Hospitality brands, Media & Entertainment brands, Sports & Fitness brands, in the 21st percentile of 5783 Travel & Hospitality brands.
The Big Outside is a website offering stories, images, and expert trip-planning and gear advice about backpacking, hiking, and outdoor adventures. Founded by a former Backpacker magazine field editor, it provides experience-based content aimed at helping outdoor enthusiasts plan trips and choose gear for adventures in the United States and internationally. The site positions itself as a trusted, expert-driven resource within the outdoor and travel media space.
| Brand Name | The Big Outside |
|---|---|
| Domain | thebigoutside.com |
| Industry | Travel & Hospitality, Media & Entertainment |
| Main Competitors | Backpacker Magazine (88/100), Outside Online (95/100), AllTrails (83/100), REI Co-op Journal (94/100), SectionHiker (77/100), Trailspace, The Trek (83/100) |
Moz Domain Authority 41/100 vs category average 46 / leader 94 - limited third-party links, so AI systems rarely encounter mentions of the brand.
Ranked #1,320,603 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 "The Big Outside has a simple mission: to offer stories, images, and expert trip-planning and gear advice about backpacking, hiking, and outdoor adventures." (Meta description: 23 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, Breadcrumb/Website schema, Product/Article schema, + Microdata, og:title, og:description, 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: Cloudflare, WordPress, Ghost.
Social footprint: verified profiles on X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram; no detected presence on LinkedIn, YouTube, 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 September 2026.
When asked "What is The Big Outside?", Claude could identify the brand as of September 2026. The Big Outside is a website run by outdoor writer and former Backpacker magazine editor Michael Lanza, focused on backpacking, hiking, and outdoor adventure advice, trip guides, and gear reviews. Best known for Detailed backpacking and hiking trip guides and expert outdoor gear reviews written by Michael Lanza.
When asked "Best brands similar to The Big Outside?", Claude would recommend The Big Outside as of September 2026. It's a well-regarded, knowledgeable resource for serious backpackers and hikers looking for trip planning advice and gear recommendations.
Common questions people ask in Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI search engines.
The Big Outside's main competitors in Travel & Hospitality: Backpacker Magazine (88/100), Outside Online (95/100), AllTrails (83/100), REI Co-op Journal (94/100), SectionHiker (77/100).
Sources: Brand Analyzer scan
The Big Outside offers editorial content including trip-planning guides, hiking and backpacking stories, images, skills tips, and gear advice for outdoor adventures in America and internationally.
Sources: The Big Outside official site
The Big Outside is a website focused on backpacking, hiking, and outdoor adventure content, founded by a former Backpacker magazine field editor. It publishes stories, images, and trip-planning resources for outdoor enthusiasts.
Sources: The Big Outside official site
The Big Outside has limited AI-search visibility, scoring 26/100 on Brand Analyzer's AI visibility composite (visibility 0, trust 50, recommendation 45). This estimates how likely AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are to know, trust, and recommend the brand.
Sources: The Big Outside official site
The Big Outside scores 45/100 on Brand Analyzer's AI recommendation signal, indicating it is less likely to be surfaced when AI assistants like ChatGPT suggest Travel & Hospitality options. Recommendation depends on crawlability, structured data, and category authority.
Sources: The Big Outside official site
The Big Outside 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: The Big Outside official site
The Big Outside is used by outdoor enthusiasts, hikers, and backpackers seeking expert guidance, trip-planning resources, and gear advice for adventures in the United States and around the world.
Sources: The Big Outside official site
The Big Outside is known for expert, experience-based trip-planning advice and gear guidance for backpacking and hiking, created by a founder with a background as a Backpacker magazine field editor.
Sources: The Big Outside official site
The Big Outside scores 26/100 for AI visibility - how well ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can discover, identify and cite the brand.
The Big Outside has a weak AI-visibility profile at 26/100 - a proxy for how readily ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews can recognise and cite it. Its strongest area is trust (50/100) and its weakest is visibility (0/100). It benefits from a global traffic rank of #1,320,603 (Tranco), a Moz Domain Authority of 41/100 and open access for AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, etc.). The main gaps holding it back: no clear Wikipedia entity to anchor it in LLM training data, no strong Wikidata entry and no llms.txt to steer AI to its best pages. In a live check, Claude could already identify The Big Outside from memory (September 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 The Big Outside: Arora Group (70/100), Terrible's (70/100), The Exploration Place (70/100), The Manual (70/100).
A step up - brands to learn from: Yellow Dog Software (71/100), World Travel Family (71/100).
Category leader: Cvent (97/100).
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