The Brand Authority Index™
When an investor or buyer asks a generative AI engine who the leaders are in your space, the answer depends on seven measurable signals weighed simultaneously. A brand with strong media coverage but inconsistent entity data confuses the AI. Perfect technical readiness but no third-party reviews gives it nothing to recommend. These factors compound.
Red Fan’s Brand Authority Index™ scores all seven because that's how AI actually evaluates your brand. It’s not about where you rank, but how you’re recommended.
The Brand Authority Index™
The Red Fan Brand Authority Index™ scores your brand across the seven factors AI engines weigh, benchmarks you against your top competitors and maps every gap to a specific action. Your AI visibility score, your competitive gap and the 90-day plan to close it.
Earned Media & Market Presence
Evaluates the volume, quality, and recency of earned media coverage. This is the single strongest signal AI engines use when deciding which brands to recommend.
Recognition & Industry Visibility
Measures whether your leadership team has a visible, quotable presence. This determines whether your CEO shows up as an influential category voice—or doesn't show up at all.
Review Platform Health
Assesses the depth and recency of third-party reviews across platforms. AI treats third-party reviews as proof, not opinion.
Entity Coherence
Scores how consistently your brand is named, described, and categorized across the web. When AI can't figure out what your company does, it recommends your competitor instead.
Content Authority
Evaluates proprietary research, thought leadership and content freshness. AI determines whether your brand is actively producing category expertise or coasting on past presence.
Social & Community Authority
Quantifies your presence on the platforms with the greatest correlation to AI visibility. AI doesn't just take your word for it. It looks for evidence that others already have.
Technical Readiness
Determines whether your website is structurally accessible to AI crawlers. Why it matters: If AI can't crawl you, you don't exist. This is the table stakes the other six factors build on.
"Health care requires authentic trust-building unlike any other industry. Red Fan's crisis communications and media training helped us deliver a heartfelt message that resonated with our target communities. They secured the right media opportunities and prepared me thoroughly for every interview."
Trusted by
Approach
Authority that compounds. So when the moment comes, you've already won.
Embed
Get under the tent. We immerse in your business before anyone else knows a moment is coming. Proximity is why clients pull us in first.
Diagnose
Find the truth. The Brand Authority Index™ and Brand Positioning & Narrative Lab benchmark your authority and build your unique positioning on data — not a kickoff meeting.
Roadmap
Build the blueprint only you can claim. A strategic framework proprietary to your company. The narrative architecture and authority position that makes you impossible to confuse with competitors.
Execute
No handoff. No B-team. Ever. This is how authority compounds and category ownership is won. The same senior team that embedded and diagnosed builds your roadmap and runs it. This is why our clients stay for years, not quarters.
A monitoring tool tells you where you stand; it can’t tell you why, and it can’t build the program that moves the number. We hear the same sentence from marketing leaders already paying for these tools—“it only gives me a slice”—because a point-in-time ranking is a photograph of a wave, and you need to understand the currents underneath it before you can change where it lands.
Most teams end up wanting both, and that’s reasonable, because monitoring provides the ongoing pulse while diagnosis and strategy produce the change. The order matters more than the choice. Start with the diagnosis—until you know which signals are weak and why, the dashboard is reporting a score you can’t act on.
Most of what drives an AI recommendation happens away from your own website. Our synthesis of the major empirical studies—Ahrefs’ 75,000-brand analysis and First Page Sage’s 11,128-query study chief among them—puts more than 80% of AI brand mentions originating in earned media: press coverage, lists, rankings and third-party validation.
You’re reading your dashboard correctly, and the dashboard is telling the truth as far as it can see. Cloudflare Radar’s May 2026 data has all four AI engines combined sending a fraction of 1% of search referrals, against nearly 88% for Google. If clicks were the unit of measure, none of this would be worth your attention. The unit of measure changed when half of B2B software buyers started their research inside an AI chat, where the engine’s answer shapes the shortlist before any click happens.
That’s an important question to answer when evaluating your generative search optimization strategy. However, it only scratches the surface of how AI engines are evaluating and recommending your brand to your target customers. The marketing leaders pulling ahead in AI search stopped asking whether they show up. They started asking how AI describes them, and why it recommends a competitor instead.
It depends on the strength of each of your signals, and we’d rather set that expectation honestly than promise a date. Ensuring your brand is described consistently across a few critical websites can be corrected in days. Technical readiness is a dev sprint. Review platform health moves in weeks to months once a program starts. Earned media, executive visibility and content authority compound over months—and those are the signals that carry the most weight, which is why the brands that started a year ago are hard, but not impossible, to catch. The engines reward accumulated third-party evidence, which takes time to accumulate. We sequence the work by time to impact.