Publishers write the genre into the address. One operator reads it back.

A search that filters results by the genre marker a publisher wrote into the address of the page. Newsrooms and platforms organise their content into paths: a report sits under /article/ or /content/, a comment under /opinion/, a clip under /video/, a rating under /review/, a thread under /discussion/. The operator inurl: reads that marker.

Because everything else is either private or unreliable. The section label on the page is styled, not standardised. The structured data of an article names a type only sometimes. The address, however, is visible to everyone, stable for years, and searchable from outside without an account.

Take your brand name and add one marker at a time: opinion for comment, article or content for reportage, video for clips, review for ratings, discussion for threads. Six searches, one brand, and the shape of your coverage is visible.

With a block of exclusions. Platform pages crowd out editorial coverage in almost every brand search, and a short list of minus terms removes them for the whole query. It is worth saving once and reusing: the same block serves every brand, every market and every genre.

Six searches for your brand, six for the closest competitor, each with the exclusion block. Write down the number of results and the first three publishers per genre, with the date. The table that comes out of it answers three questions at once: where you are reported, where you are argued about, and who owns the genre you are missing from.

Search the publisher with site: and your brand name. If the article does not appear, look for it by its exact headline in quotation marks. A placement that neither search finds is either not indexed, behind a wall, or published under a different address than the one you were sent.

Four things, and they matter. Coverage behind a paywall is often invisible. Syndicated copies appear as separate results and inflate every count. Publishers with clean, descriptive addresses carry no genre marker at all. And print or broadcast coverage is not in the index in the first place.

Because the number above a result page is an estimate that changes between two identical searches. It is useful for comparing genres against each other on the same day, and useless as a figure in a report. Write down the date, the market and the query with every count, or leave the number out.

A small set: quotation marks for an exact phrase, site:, a minus sign for exclusion, before: and after: for dates, and filetype:. inurl: belongs to the widely used group that the help page does not list. It works, and it is an observation rather than a promise.

“Do not put spaces between the operator and your search term”

Reference: Google Search Help, Refine web searches. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433

Google retired the cached link in January 2024 and the operator followed in March 2024. Since September 2024 the About this page panel links to the Internet Archive instead. Anyone still teaching cache: as a way to check coverage is teaching a dead instrument.

Because a generated answer is built from passages, and a passage from an opinion piece carries a judgement while a passage from a report carries a fact. When the two are mixed, a judgement can end up in an answer that reads like a fact about your company. Knowing which genre dominates your coverage is therefore a risk question, not a vanity one.

Three things. Place where the genre is missing rather than where coverage is already dense. Correct where the wrong genre carries a claim, because an opinion piece with a false fact is the cheapest thing to have corrected. And keep the map with dates, so the next quarter has something to compare against.