The Authority Engine.
Getting named by AI is not a button you press. It is ongoing, engineered work that builds and compounds your authority across eight areas until the engines treat your business as a source worth recommending. This is how the Engine works.
Authority is the only kind of marketing that grows in value.
People used to Google you.
Now they ask AI.
Your customers stopped scrolling ten blue links. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google's AI, and it hands back one or two names. If yours isn't one of them, you never even got to compete. This is the new front door, and most of your competitors don't know it exists yet.
The same question, with and without an engineered foundation.
The behind the scenes work that makes AI trust you.
There's no button for this. Getting named by AI takes real engineering under the hood. The invisible groundwork that convinces an engine your business is the one worth recommending. Here's what we build.
Every month it works, it gets stronger.
This is the part ads can never do. It builds on itself. Each month of work earns more AI mentions, those mentions bring more customers, and more customers make the next month easier and cheaper. It compounds, like interest.
How the Authority Index is actually measured.
A score you can't inspect is marketing. This one is a measurement. Here is exactly how a citation is counted, how the 0 to 100 score is built, and how movement is credited to the work, published so the number means something to a prospect, a skeptic, and the models themselves.
How a citation is counted
A citation is recorded when, in response to a real buyer question, an AI engine either names the business in its answer or links it as a source. The two are tracked separately, never merged, because a named mention and a cited source are different signals.
Every question is measured across six engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and Claude.
AI answers vary by session, location, and time, so a single check is never treated as a result. Each question is run many times from a controlled location on recorded dates, and what gets reported is citation frequency, the share of runs in which the business appears, not a single lucky hit. The question set is fixed per vertical and written the way customers actually ask, so the measurement can be reproduced.
How the 0 to 100 score is built
The Authority Index is a composite of independently observable inputs, each mapping to the eight pillars:
- Entity resolution: is the business a distinct, disambiguated entity engines recognize?
- Structured data coverage: schema completeness and validity across services.
- Citation frequency: the measurement above, across all six engines.
- Topical authority: depth and extractability of coverage for real buyer questions.
- Corroboration: external sources that confirm the entity, not self claims.
- Technical health: crawlability, Core Web Vitals, indexation.
The score is normalized against the businesses currently winning the same market, not a theoretical ideal. 100 is not perfection. It is the ceiling set by the strongest competitor in your vertical and metro, which is why the Index is comparative: it measures you against exactly who you are losing to.
How movement is credited to the work
This is where most authority scores quietly cheat. The standard here is stated openly.
A baseline is measured before any work begins, then remeasured on a fixed cadence using the identical question set, engines, and location every time. The same ruler, every time.
Movement is tied to specific work shipped, with dates. A change in citation frequency is attributed to the intervention that preceded it, never claimed in the abstract.
The honest claim is documented correlation on a controlled measure, not proof of sole causation. By holding the questions, engines, and location constant, the variable that changed is the work. Shifts across the whole market are not claimed as ours, and we say so.
The Authority Index is produced by the Authority Audit, where it is measured directly against your market. The number on this page is an example, not a claim about any specific business.