We touched on this briefly in the post comparing the AI Recommendation Score to Google reviews, but it's worth a full explanation on its own, because the weighting behind the score isn't arbitrary. It's built around one core idea: the outcome that actually matters is whether AI names your business today, and everything else in the score is a leading indicator of that outcome, weighted according to how strongly it tends to drive it.
The five categories
The score is built from five weighted categories, combining into a single 0 to 100 number and letter grade.
| Category | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| AI Recommendation Presence | 35% | Does AI actually name the business across real, customer style prompts, tested directly across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity |
| Website AI Readiness | 20% | Can AI parse what the business does, where it operates, and who it's for, from the site itself |
| Brand Authority | 20% | Reviews, press mentions, directory listings and citations AI treats as trust signals |
| Content Quality | 15% | Depth and specificity AI can cite as evidence of genuine expertise, not generic marketing copy |
| Technical Health | 10% | Baseline crawlability, page speed, and whether the site is properly indexed |
Why AI Recommendation Presence carries the most weight
At 35%, this is the largest single category, and deliberately so. It's the only category that measures the actual outcome rather than an input that tends to produce it: does ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity name your business by name when a real customer style question is asked, across a fixed panel of prompts covering your category and area. A business can score reasonably well across the other four categories and still underperform here, which is exactly the gap the score is designed to surface rather than average away.
Website AI Readiness and Content Quality: related but distinct
These two categories are often confused with each other. Website AI Readiness is structural: can a model actually parse the site at all, is content locked behind JavaScript rendering or booking widgets, is schema markup present and accurate, is core information like pricing and hours in readable text. Content Quality is about what's there once a model can read it: is it specific and factual, or generic and adjective heavy. A site can be technically readable and still score poorly on Content Quality if the copy itself doesn't give a model anything concrete to cite.
Brand Authority is broader than review ratings
Reviews sit inside this category, but they aren't the whole of it. Press coverage, accreditations, directory and citation consistency, and third party mentions all contribute. This is also the category most connected to the traditional SEO and reputation work most businesses already do, which is why a business investing seriously in reviews and PR often sees this category move first, even before any AI specific work begins.
Why Technical Health is weighted lowest, not ignored
At 10%, this is the smallest category, but it functions as a floor rather than a growth lever. Genuinely poor crawlability or a broken indexing setup can suppress every other category's potential, because a model that can't reliably access the site can't act on strong content or accurate schema either. Most businesses clear this bar without dedicated effort, which is why it carries less weight than the categories that differentiate a strong result from an average one, but it's still worth checking rather than assuming.
What this means for where you focus
The weighting is a guide to prioritisation, not a strict formula for effort. A business with a badly broken Website AI Readiness score should generally fix that before investing further in Content Quality, because the second category's improvements are wasted if a model can't parse the site to find them. A business already strong on the structural categories but flat on AI Recommendation Presence should look directly at what real customer prompts return today, because that's the category actually measuring the result that matters.