A national brand built from real local guides

Most city information online comes from one of two places: a giant national directory that treats every town as a row in a database, or a thin content site assembled from whatever could be scraped. Both read the same everywhere, and neither knows which block of Main Street is worth walking.

We took the other approach. Every city in the network gets its own website on its own domain, written and maintained by people who live with the place — what opened, what closed, which park is good in July, which service businesses actually show up. Those guides are the product.

Above them sits a hub for each state, organizing city guides by region and county. Michigan City Guides is the first, covering 16 cities from Metro Detroit out to Ann Arbor and Lansing. Above the hubs sits CityGuide.us, which does three things: carries the national brand, sells advertising that runs across the whole network, and recruits the next round of cities, partners and businesses.

CityGuide.us is deliberately not a directory. You will not find business listings on this site — they belong on the city guide where someone is accountable for keeping them right. What you will find here is the map of the network and the fastest route into it.

Today the network runs 16 live city guides across 1 state hub, with 11 more states in progress. We add cities when we find the right local partner, which is slower than launching a template in every ZIP code — and the reason the guides are worth reading.