NewsGrade evaluates news websites against journalism best practices to help them improve. If your site is being evaluated — or if you want to evaluate it yourself — here's how to get the most out of the tool.
News organizations that take security seriously — using Cloudflare, Akamai, PerimeterX, and similar protections — are exactly the ones most likely to block automated analysis. We don't penalize you for that. If we can't get past your bot protection, we'll tell you clearly that we couldn't evaluate the site rather than hand back a low score based on pages we couldn't read — and we'll show you exactly how to let us in. This is especially common with properties from Dotdash Meredith, Condé Nast, Hearst, Gannett, and other large media companies.
You have three options, from quickest to most permanent:
Paste HTML
Use the Paste HTML option on the homepage to send page source directly from your browser. One-time copy/paste, works on any site, captures fully rendered content.
Try Paste HTML →Verify your site
Verify site ownership with NewsGrade. This gives us a dedicated bot identity (NewsGrade/1.0) that your security team can specifically allow, plus a Publisher Dashboard to track your score over time.
Start verification →Allowlist our bot
After verifying, ask your web operations team to add our bot to their allowlist. We provide specific instructions for Cloudflare, Akamai, AWS WAF, Nginx, and Apache.
See allowlist instructions →Some news websites use security systems that block automated analysis — meaning your NewsGrade score may be based on limited data. Verifying your site tells your security system to let NewsGrade through, which means a more complete and more accurate evaluation.
Verification also gives you:
Ready to verify your site?
Verification takes about 5 minutes. You'll prove ownership with a meta tag, file upload, or DNS record — just like Google Search Console.
Already verified? View your dashboard →Verification proves you control the site. Choose one of three methods — each takes about 5 minutes:
Add a single line to your homepage's <head>. Your web developer can do this in under a minute.
Upload a small text file to your website. Similar to verifying with Google Search Console.
Add a TXT record to your domain settings. Best if you don't have quick access to your site's code.
No problem. You can still get a complete analysis using the Paste HTML option on the homepage — copy your page source from your browser and paste it directly into the tool. No verification or code changes needed.
This approach captures the page exactly as your browser sees it — including JavaScript-loaded content — which means it can produce highly accurate results even for sites with heavy security restrictions.
Press associations, journalism funders, and media companies can license a branded version of NewsGrade for evaluating member sites, grantee portfolios, or multi-property benchmarking.
White-label instances include your branding, an admin dashboard, and bulk evaluation tools.
Press Associations
Offer site audits as a member benefit at scale.
Journalism Funders
Evaluate grantee digital infrastructure across your entire portfolio.
Media Companies
Benchmark multiple properties and track improvement over time.