Week by week, what AI products do with a journalist's byline when asked to summarise an article. The same instruction every time — summarise this article — through the public web interfaces, one fresh session per cell. Four things are recorded about each summary: does it name the author (A), the outlet (O), the article's own date (D), and does it link to the page (L). A name inside a link title does not count; a name in the summary does.
Two arms. Fixtures: eight fixed pages on
this site, a1 to a8 under /f/, three
of them carrying the colophon, the rest not, with invented bylines disclosed
in robots.txt. They never change, so each week reads the same
pages again; their addresses are listed on the front page
as text, not linked. Grid: sixteen fresh articles a week,
two from each of eight fixed outlets, every article carrying its author's
name in the visible text and in the page's structured data.
Products: ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, DeepSeek — public web
interfaces, default settings.
A O D L — named in the summary · ✗ did not open in five attempts · — not yet run. Shaded rows carry the colophon.
| Product | 28 Sep |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT | — |
| Gemini | — |
| Copilot | — |
| DeepSeek | — |
| Index | 28 Sep |
|---|---|
| Google Googlebot asked not to crawl /f/ | — |
| Bing submitted at the start | — |
| Page | 28 Sep |
|---|---|
| a1 colophon | — |
| a2 | — |
| a3 | — |
| a4 colophon | — |
| a5 colophon | — |
| a6 | — |
| a7 | — |
| a8 | — |
| Page | 28 Sep |
|---|---|
| a1 colophon | — |
| a2 | — |
| a3 | — |
| a4 colophon | — |
| a5 colophon | — |
| a6 | — |
| a7 | — |
| a8 | — |
| Page | 28 Sep |
|---|---|
| a1 colophon | — |
| a2 | — |
| a3 | — |
| a4 colophon | — |
| a5 colophon | — |
| a6 | — |
| a7 | — |
| a8 | — |
| Page | 28 Sep |
|---|---|
| a1 colophon | — |
| a2 | — |
| a3 | — |
| a4 colophon | — |
| a5 colophon | — |
| a6 | — |
| a7 | — |
| a8 | — |
First entry: week of 28 September 2026.
| Week | Articles | ChatGPT | Gemini | Copilot | DeepSeek |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 28 Sep | 168 outlets | — | — | — | — |
Outlets, fixed: The Guardian, Al Jazeera, DW English, The Conversation, Diken, Sözcü, BirGün, Medyascope. Each week's footnote carries outlet, date and link counts, and the number of attempts and replacements it took to fill the cells.
Interventions, dated. 24 Sep 2026: the record restarted.
The pilot's test pages were retired, eight new fixture pages with new
invented bylines went up under /f/, kept out of the sitemap,
unlinked, and closed to Googlebot by robots.txt; the front
page left the fixed arm; the fixture addresses were submitted to Bing.
What this measures, and what it does not. The question is whether a product names the journalist where it can read the article. Reachability is a precondition, not a finding: a page that does not open is tried again in a fresh session, up to five attempts. On the fixtures the fifth failure is written ✗ and stays, because reach on these pages is itself part of the record. On the grid the article is replaced by another from the same outlet, so no cell is left empty; every attempt is counted in the footnote. Which publishers are reachable by which company is a different study.
Why the fixtures are kept out of Google's index. Observed on 24 September 2026: a page that Google's index holds is answered from that index rather than fetched, and the answer is a refusal; a page it does not hold is fetched and read. The fixtures exist to be fetched, so Googlebot is asked not to crawl them, they are not in the sitemap, and they are not linked. Whether any index holds them regardless is read every week and written above. Every other crawler is welcome on them.
Nothing is corrected. A week's cells are written once. Failed attempts are counted in the footnotes, not deleted; a later week does not revise an earlier one. When the conditions change — a page submitted to an index, a product added, a page's text changed — the date goes in the record. A pilot ran in August and September 2026 on an earlier set of pages; it shaped this method and is not part of the record.
Sample and its limits. This reports what happened in a given week, on these pages and these articles, through the public interfaces as they were that week — not what any company says it will or won't do.