Publisher Lookup
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The Publisher Lookup dashboard lets you evaluate any publisher domain against the subject you're tracking: a brand, a product, or a person. Enter a domain and Spyglasses computes an AI Placement Value Score (AIPVS) that combines the publisher's organic authority with its AI accessibility. Because you're working in the context of your property, the score includes subject-specific metrics like training data uplift.
Use this dashboard to:
- Evaluate media targets before pitching by seeing their combined organic and AI value
- Add publishers to a pitch list you're building for a campaign
- Add publishers to Projects to track whether placements on those domains result in AI citations
Looking Up a Publisher
- Enter any domain in the search bar (e.g.,
techcrunch.com,nytimes.com) - Spyglasses will find or create the publisher record and compute the AIPVS
- The result appears as a row with the publisher's traffic, Domain Rank and AIPVS
If the publisher is new to our system, enrichment runs in the background to fetch organic metrics, logo, and category data. You'll see an "enriching data" notice. Within a few seconds the record will be enriched with the data needed to calculate AIPVS. Domain Rank fills in within a few hours.
Reading a Result
Each publisher row shows:
- Publisher. The logo, domain and name
- Est. Traffic. Estimated monthly organic search visits, from DataForSEO
- Domain Rank. A third-party authority score from DataForSEO, 0 to 100. It is shown for reference and is not part of AIPVS; see Domain Rank
- AIPVS. The composite 0–100 score and its tier: Premium (75–100), Strong (50–74), Moderate (25–49), or Limited (0–24)
Each row has three actions: Add to pitch list, Add to project, and Details.
The Publisher Page
Click Details to open the publisher's own page. It leads with AIPVS, then Est. Traffic, Harmonic Centrality from the Common Crawl web graph, and Domain Rank as a reference, followed by the full three-layer AIPVS breakdown, the citations AI has made to the publisher for your tracked prompts, your placements on it, and the pitch lists it is on. See The publisher page for a full tour.
The three layers of the score:
Organic Authority Baseline
The domain's SEO fundamentals: PageRank percentile, estimated traffic, top ranking positions, commercial value, and category relevance to your brand.
AI Citation Accessibility
Which AI assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, etc.) can access and cite content from this domain, per platform, with full, partial or blocked access.
AI Training Influence
How influential the domain is in AI training data, plus brand-specific metrics:
- DTI (Domain Training Influence). The domain's importance in the web graph
- Uplift. How much more connected the publisher is compared to your property's focal domain: a brand's own domain, or, for a product, the parent company's site that its pages live on. Higher uplift means a placement delivers more training data value.
For a detailed explanation of how each layer is computed, what data sources we use, and how platform weights are determined, see the AI Placement Value Score Methodology.
Adding Publishers to a Pitch List
Click Add to pitch list on any row, or select several rows and use Add to pitch list to add them in one step. Pick one of the property's pitch lists or create a new one on the spot. On the list, each publisher gets a status (Target, Pitched, Placed, Declined), a note, and a count of how often AI already cites it for your prompts. See Pitch Lists.
Pitch lists replace the old watchlist. Publishers you starred before were moved into a pitch list named Watchlist on each brand, so nothing was lost.
Adding Publishers to Projects
Click Add to project on any publisher row to add it to a Project:
- Select an existing project from the dropdown, or
- Create a new PR project inline
This creates a Publisher Goal in the project, which Spyglasses uses to track whether AI assistants cite your brand from that publisher's domain.
Tips
- Compare before pitching: Look up several target publications and compare their AIPVS scores side by side. A Tier 2 publisher with full AI access may deliver more value than a Tier 1 publisher that blocks most AI crawlers.
- Don't read Domain Rank as AI value: A high Domain Rank says the site is well linked. It does not say AI assistants can read it. Check the AIPVS tier before you rank a target on authority alone.
- Keep a shortlist: Add the publishers you're actively considering to a pitch list, so you can work them with a status and a note and add the whole list to a PR project as one goal.
- Check the uplift: The DTI uplift metric is especially useful for smaller brands. A high uplift means the publisher's web graph authority significantly exceeds your own, which makes a placement there more valuable for training data influence.
Score publishers from an AI assistant (MCP)
The same AIPVS scoring is available to a connected AI assistant through the Spyglasses MCP server. Ask it to "evaluate techcrunch.com and forbes.com for my brand" and score_publisher_value returns each domain's score, tier, AI impact multiplier, and three-layer breakdown, optionally in your property's brand context (category relevance + brand uplift). The Evaluate publishers prompt scores and ranks a whole list for you, and add_pitch_list_publishers adds the ones worth pitching to a pitch list.
See MCP → Scoring for the full tool reference, and the AI Placement Value Score methodology for how the score is computed.