What is AI Authority Score?
AI Authority Score is Pi’s benchmark for measuring how visible and influential a brand is across AI conversations.
It brings performance across connected questions and conversations into one competitive view, helping you understand where your brand leads, where competitors have an advantage, and what is shaping the difference.
AI authority goes beyond measuring only your site's AI presence and provides a broader view of your brand's performance across doorways (links to your site), mentions and brand influence.
The four metrics behind the score
The Authority Score is made up of four component metrics:
Doorways
How often AI responses provide a path to your brand’s wider digital ecosystem.
Sentiment
How positively or negatively your brand is represented in AI-generated responses.
Owned Mentions
Brand mentions originating from your own content.
Earned Mentions
Brand mentions from sources beyond your owned content.
Together, these signals provide the context behind the headline Authority Score.
Benchmark your brand against competitors
Use Authority Score to compare your brand with competitors appearing across the same conversations.
You can:
Compare Authority Scores across selected brands.
Benchmark against the market leader or an individual competitor.
See where your brand leads and where it falls behind.
Compare the four component metrics.
Track week-over-week, month-over-month and year-over-year movement.
Identify emerging competitors and sustained changes in authority.
This provides a consistent competitive view of AI performance.
Understand what is behind your score
Brand Analysis helps explain what is influencing your Authority Score.
You can focus on a brand or individual conversation to explore:
The four component metrics over time.
Citation Doorways.
Candidate Content.
Digital assets earning citations.
Queries and brand mentions supported by each citation.
Content gaining or losing influence.
Candidate Content identifies digital assets that are already earning citations and could become stronger candidates for AI-generated answers.
Measure performance across conversations or topics
Pi supports two approaches to AI Authority measurement.
Conversational measurement
Conversation-led datasets measure how a brand appears across connected, multi-turn journeys.
This helps show whether a brand remains visible and influential as users move through discovery, comparison and recommendation.
Topic-level measurement
Topic-led datasets measure performance across selected topics, topic groups and prompts.
This provides a focused benchmark for defined areas of strategic importance.
Both approaches use the same four component signals, with each selected workspace producing its own AI Authority Index for the brands, market, answer engine and groups included.
How is the Authority Score calculated?
The Authority Score combines:
Doorways
Sentiment
Owned Mentions
Earned Mentions
The score is specific to the selected workspace, market, answer engine, groups and reporting period.
It is therefore most useful as a competitive benchmark and a way to monitor movement over time, rather than as a universal score for a brand.
What is a good AI Authority Score?
There is no universal score that represents good performance for every brand, market or answer engine.
The most useful benchmarks are:
Your position relative to relevant competitors.
Your movement over time.
The performance of the four component metrics.
A strong result should reflect consistent Asset Presence, a healthy balance of Owned and Earned Mentions, positive brand representation and citation Doorways into your digital ecosystem.
Why measure AI authority across conversations?
AI search journeys can develop from an initial question into follow-up questions, comparisons, evaluations and recommendations.
A brand that appears in the opening response may disappear later, while another brand may enter as the conversation progresses.
Measuring isolated prompts therefore provides only snapshots of the journey. Pi's conversation-first approach measures performance across connected, multi-turn journeys to provide a broader benchmark of conversational AI performance.
How can you improve AI Authority?
Start by identifying which component signals are limiting performance.
Identify where your brand is absent
Explore relevant conversations or topics where competitors are present, but your brand is missing.
Strengthen Asset Presence
Understand whether your brand and wider digital assets are appearing consistently across AI-generated responses.
Improve owned content
Create or improve content that answers the questions developing throughout a conversation, rather than focusing only on the opening prompt.
Build earned authority
Identify publishers, review sites, communities and other third-party sources influencing AI-generated responses in your market.
Create more citation Doorways
Develop useful and distinctive digital assets that AI platforms can cite and that provide a route into your wider brand ecosystem.
Monitor brand Sentiment
Investigate where your brand is represented negatively or inaccurately and identify the sources influencing that perception.
Measure improvement over time
Track your AI Authority Index and its four component signals to understand whether your activity is creating more consistent visibility and influence.
Related Pi tools
For deeper investigation, Pi's AI Search Visibility Tool provides the mentions, citations, sources and sentiment behind AI-generated answers and conversational search performance. AI Prompt Explorer can also be used to investigate the supporting questions and responses behind the analysis.