Methodology

The AI Authority Index (AAI)

AAI is a single 0–100 index score combining four weighted pillars measured from real AI answers.

• Discovery (30%) — How often AI systems surface your brand when buyers ask category and solution questions — before any brand name is mentioned.
• Recommendation (25%) — Being named is not being recommended. This measures how strongly AI puts your brand forward as an answer rather than listing it in passing.
• Coverage (25%) — Breadth across question types, buyer intents, models and markets. A brand that only appears for one narrow question is fragile.
• Positioning (20%) — How AI characterises your brand relative to competitors — including where its description of you is wrong or outdated.

Scoring bands

• Invisible (0–19) — AI systems rarely surface the brand — recommendation share is effectively absent.
• Emerging (20–49) — AI systems recognize the brand intermittently, but it is not yet a default recommendation.
• Established (50–69) — Recognized by AI systems and present in consideration sets, though not yet a leading recommendation.
• Strong (70–84) — Frequently recommended by AI systems across high-intent prompts; competitive but not dominant.
• Leading (85–100) — AI systems consistently treat the brand as a primary recommendation in its category.

Evidence-first measurement

• Prompts reflect real buyer research, not brand-name lookups
• Every score traces back to stored AI responses
• Retries are deduplicated so a single query counts once
• Brand-name variants are normalized to one identity
• Competitive shares are bounded and like-for-like

Freshness

Customer-facing analytics use a rolling 29-day window so scores reflect current AI behavior rather than historical noise.