Digital Index
How the index is calculated
Observable signals, compared within a group of similar companies, aggregated into a single score. No opinion, and no data quietly imputed.
Three steps. One index.
The whole calculation fits in these three steps. The rest of this page is each one of them, to the end.
Observe → Compare → Aggregate
Observation
Every metric is collected from the public world and stored with a status: measured, not applicable, not measured, or error. The difference between the last two is the engine’s most consequential decision, and it determines whether an absence is penalised or merely lowers confidence.
Comparison
No value is read in absolute terms. Each metric becomes the percentile it occupies within the entity’s comparison group: its sector, nationwide.
Aggregation
Percentiles become pillar scores through a weighted mean, and the six pillars combine through a geometric mean. It is the geometry that stops a strong pillar from covering a weak one.
Methodology
The six pillars
These are the same six that appear on every record in the index and in the ranking. Each measures a distinct dimension of digital presence, and none compensates for the absence of another.
Foundation
Speed, security, mobile and accessibility.
Field-measured load times, security headers and TLS, small-screen behaviour, and accessibility conformance. An entity with no website is not left unscored here: it lands at the bottom of the comparison group’s distribution, because having no site is a real absence, not a measurement that failed.
Machine Readability
Structured data and access for AI crawlers.
Presence and validity of structured data, consistency between what a page shows and what it declares, and whether language-model crawlers are allowed to read the site at all. This is the pillar that decides whether an automated system can cite the company correctly.
Discovery
Search, presence in sector queries and local pack.
Whether the entity shows up in the searches its sector actually generates, and where — local pack included. It is measured against sector queries, not the company’s own name: ranking first for people who already know the name is not discovery.
Reputation
Review volume, recency, average and response.
How many public reviews exist, how long ago the last one landed, the average, and how often the company replies. Volume and recency count separately: 400 reviews frozen three years ago say something different from 60 in the last quarter.
External Authority
Press, mentions and directory presence.
References to the entity on sites it does not control — press, sector associations, directories with an entry bar. It is the one pillar a company cannot move from its own website, and therefore the hardest to stage.
Activity
Cadence and consistency of content and social.
Publishing rhythm across owned and social channels, measured as regularity rather than volume. Steady cadence scores above bursts followed by silence, because it is regularity that signals a live operation.
Weights and versions
The weight of each pillar and each metric lives in the published methodology version, not in this page’s code. Changing weights means publishing a new version rather than quietly editing the page, and every score records the version it was computed with.
Collection
What is observed
Collection combines direct probes of the website with external public sources. No metric depends on a single origin.
Direct probes of the website and its public files
Search engines, local results included
Generative engines and language-model crawlers
Public review platforms
Press, directories and third-party mentions
“Not measured” vs “not applicable”
When a probe fails, the metric is marked “not measured”: it drops out of the calculation, is not penalised and is not invented. It only lowers published confidence. That differs from “not applicable”, which is a real absence. Having no website is not missing data, it is a weakness, and the entity lands at the bottom of that metric’s distribution. Conflating the two would mean imputing data in silence.
Each metric’s status: measured, not measured, not applicable
Comparison group
Who the entity is compared against
The comparison group is the sector, nationwide. A value only means something inside it: 214 reviews is neither good nor bad until you know how many the other companies in the same sector have. The municipality does not narrow the group: the comparison is national, and it is the same one for every company in the sector.
Mean rank, never min-max
Position uses the mean-rank definition, with ties sharing a percentile. Never min-max: with min-max a single extreme case would compress the entire scale, and an entity’s score would change simply because another one entered or left the extreme, with nothing having changed about it.
Comparing against competitors
How the distance between two companies is broken down
The score difference between two companies is not broken down by subtracting pillar by pillar. Because the six pillars combine through a geometric mean, raw differences do not add up to the final gap: ten points on a weak pillar are worth more than ten points on a strong one, and subtraction returns the same number in both cases.
Marginal contribution and rounding
Each pillar's share is its marginal contribution: how much a company's score would change if it had that one pillar from the other company and kept its own five. The six contributions are then scaled proportionally so they add up exactly to the gap shown, and rounded to integers by the largest-remainder rule, and the adjustment goes to the contributions with the largest fractional part. A pillar without a measurement on both sides receives no contribution: with only one value there is no substitution to make, and assigning it distance would mean inventing a measurement.
Minimum sample
No distribution, median or percentile of a group is shown when that group holds fewer entities than the minimum published in this methodology version, the same minimum that decides whether a position is publishable. There is one threshold, identical across the platform: two would mean a sample credible enough to plot but not to score, or the other way round.
Updating
The index is not a photograph
Every company’s position is monitored continuously. Each new pass observes again, compares again and aggregates again, and the result may not be the one from last time.
A position can change without the company having changed anything. It is enough that the other companies in the same comparison group improved, that companies joined or left that group, or that one of them had its sector corrected to a more accurate one. That is what being a relative measure means: what is measured is the place within the market, and the market moves too.
On the other side, what is observable also changes over time: a site that goes down, an address that gets corrected, reviews that appear. That is why the data is revisited over time and every pillar shows the date it was measured: today’s reading is a picture of what was observable today, not a final verdict.
What you find out
What a record tells you.
Which sector queries your company never appears in, not once.
Not an average position on a generic term: the specific queries where the company is absent, and what stands there instead.
Whether the AI engines that now recommend businesses can read and cite your site.
A site can be flawless for the people who visit it and illegible to the system answering on its behalf. Those are two different things, measured separately.
How it stands against companies of the same sector and size.
An absolute number says nothing on its own. The same value can be the 81st percentile in one comparison group and the 30th in the next.
Getting into the index
Company not listed?
The index is built from public sources, and not every company is discovered at the same time. If you looked and could not find it, you can ask for it to be indexed, and it is free and requires no account.
Request indexingRequesting indexing neither guarantees nor influences any score. The request follows the normal process: identifier validation, measurement against the same criteria, and entry in the next edition. A company indexed on request is treated exactly like any other.
The company is already in the index
See the record and what produced it
Search the index for a company to see its results and where it stands against the market. If you are responsible for it, you can claim it.
Search the index