How to Audit Your Brand's AI Visibility
The BAI Scoring Framework
The Brand Authority Index measures three weighted dimensions. Each tells you something different about how AI sees your brand.
Answer Presence
Does AI mention your brand when asked relevant category and intent queries? Not just "what is [brand]" but "what are the best tools for [your use case]?" The distinction matters — most brands pass the identity test but fail the category and intent tests.
7.5% of brands score 0-19 on this dimension (completely absent from AI responses).
Message Pull-Through
When AI does mention you, does it get the description right? We measure this against a brand's "ground truth" — the actual positioning, category, products, and differentiators as defined by the brand itself. The gap between ground truth and AI output is the Message Pull-Through score.
60% of brands have at least one significant misrepresentation — wrong category being the most common (59.8% of errors).
Owned Citations
Does AI reference your authoritative sources? When Claude answers a question about your brand, does it cite your website, your documentation, your case studies — or a third-party article from 2022? Owned citations create a positive feedback loop for future accuracy.
Brands with high owned citation rates have 3x more stable BAI scores week-over-week.
BAI distribution across 5,829 brands:
What separates a 40 from an 80: it's usually the difference between showing up in identity queries only vs. showing up in buyer intent queries.
The Audit Process Step by Step
Define your ground truth
What should AI say about you? Category, products, differentiators, competitive positioning, key messages. If you can't define this clearly, no audit framework will help.
Design your query set
The 5 categories: identity, category, buyer intent, sentiment, competitor displacement. Each probes a different dimension of AI's understanding.
Run queries across models
Minimum 3 models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini), ideally 5+ (add Perplexity, Copilot). Each model has different training data.
Score each response
Against your ground truth. Is the brand mentioned? Is the description accurate? Are your sources cited?
Calculate your BAI
Combine the three dimension scores into an overall Brand Authority Index.
Diagnose your archetype
Incumbent, Challenger, Phantom, or Misread. Each has a distinct remediation path.
Build a remediation plan
Specific fixes based on where you scored lowest. See our fix guide for the detailed playbook.
Benchmarks — Where You Stand
Category-level data from the directory:
SaaS / Cloud Software
(429 brands)Largest category. Wide BAI distribution — well-known players score 90+, niche tools often fall below 40.
Fintech / Financial Services
(89 brands)Generally strong presence due to regulatory content and press coverage. Most common archetype: Incumbent.
Retail / E-commerce
(63 brands)High variance. DTC brands often score lower because AI models prioritize aggregator sites over brand sites.
Healthcare / Life Sciences
(32 brands)Highest Misread rate. AI often confuses medical device companies with pharma, health tech with telehealth.
If you're a SaaS company scoring below 60, you're underperforming your category. If you're a healthcare brand scoring above 70, you're ahead of most of your peers.
What to Do Next
The audit tells you where you stand. The fix guide tells you how to move.