A fictional business. The figures are a modelled scenario, not a client result.
Prairie Static Radio · Listener-funded public radio · Minneapolis
Headline signal
+2,800
organic member sign-ups over 14 months
Plan: Content Engine · Content & AI search
91.1 FMThe challenge
Decades of local journalism sat in an unindexed audio archive, and national outlets were the cited sources even for Minnesota stories.
The station had covered Minneapolis since the mid-nineties: council fights, neighbourhood rebuilds, the jazz clubs, the winters. That reporting sat in an audio archive no search engine could read. When people searched for Minnesota history, they found national rewrites of stories Prairie Static had broken, and the AI answers above them credited those rewrites.
Membership, which pays for everything, depended on on-air pledge drives. Search brought almost no one to the donor page. The brief: make the archive findable, make the station the cited source, and give every archive reader a reason to join.
94.3 FMDiagnosis
Thirty years of segments lived as MP3 files behind a search form. No URLs per story, no transcripts, nothing a crawler could follow.
Daily news posts shipped without datePublished, author or location, so Google could not tell a 1998 council report from a press release.
On 61 of 80 sampled local queries, AI Overviews cited national outlets that had rewritten the station's own reporting.
Neighbourhood, music and civic coverage was scattered across tag pages with 40-character descriptions and no internal links.
Organic visitors landed deep in story pages and never saw a membership ask; 0.2% of organic sessions reached the pledge form.
Three embedded players per page and an uncompressed station logo pushed story pages past every Core Web Vitals threshold.
97.9 FMStrategy
Built on our Content Engine plan (content & ai search): turn the archive into structured, citable journalism, organise it around the beats the station owns, and put a membership ask where organic readers actually land.
Every story, new and archived, became a NewsArticle with a real dateline, reporter, location and an AudioObject for the original broadcast.
Twenty-two hubs for the beats the station has covered longer than anyone: neighbourhoods, the Twin Cities music scene, civic life, weather history.
Answer-first summaries, clear sourcing and first-hand audio made the station the citable original rather than the story national outlets paraphrased.
Machine transcripts, edited by volunteers, turned decades of tape into readable pages, each ending with a membership ask tied to the story.
Before · month 0
AI Overview · sources
After · month 14
AI Overview · sources
101.3 FMTimeline
Archive audit: 31,000 hours catalogued, 9,600 segments shortlisted for transcription.
180 indexed · 0 citations · +20 members
Story URL scheme agreed; NewsArticle template built; first 240 segments transcribed.
420 indexed · 0 citations · +45 members
Volunteer transcript-editing desk launched; 400 pages a month leave the queue.
820 indexed · 1 citations · +70 members
First six topic hubs live: Lake Street, North Minneapolis, Twin Cities jazz.
1,300 indexed · 2 citations · +110 members
Audio players consolidated; mobile LCP down from 6.4 s to 2.1 s.
1,800 indexed · 4 citations · +150 members
Pledge module added to every archive story; membership attribution set up.
2,300 indexed · 7 citations · +190 members
Hubs reach 14; weather-history hub picks up the first winter-storm searches.
2,750 indexed · 10 citations · +230 members
Answer-first summaries rolled across the 500 most-searched stories.
3,100 indexed · 14 citations · +250 members
First AI Overview citations on blizzard and election-night queries.
3,400 indexed · 18 citations · +260 members
Author and beat pages published for 38 current and former reporters.
3,650 indexed · 22 citations · +270 members
Anniversary calendar resurfaces 120 stories; peak month for new members.
3,820 indexed · 26 citations · +280 members
All 22 hubs live; internal links audited across the full archive.
3,950 indexed · 30 citations · +300 members
Archive search rebuilt on indexed story pages, retiring the old form.
4,040 indexed · 33 citations · +310 members
Wrap-up: 4,100 indexed pages, 36 AI answer citations, handover to the newsroom.
4,100 indexed · 36 citations · +315 members
104.7 FMResults
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
Archive & membership queries
| Query | Position | Cited source |
|---|---|---|
| 1991 halloween blizzard radio coverage | #1 | Prairie Static archive |
| minneapolis community radio archive | #1 | Prairie Static archive |
| minnesota election night 1998 coverage | #1 | Prairie Static archive |
| north minneapolis oral history | #2 | Prairie Static archive |
| twin cities jazz history | #3 | Prairie Static archive |
| lake street rebuild reporting | #4 | Prairie Static archive |
| donate to local radio minneapolis | #3 | Prairie Static archive |
| minneapolis city council history | #2 | Prairie Static archive |
107.1 FM · Sign-off
Archives, newsrooms and member-funded organisations: we will audit what you already own and tune it for search and AI answers.