The Batwise Framework

Authority measures the degree to which AI models treat your brand as a trusted, credible source of information. It reflects how well-established your brand is across the web — from the quality of your backlink profile and domain authority to expert endorsements, media coverage, and the trustworthiness of the sources that reference you.

AI models don't just count links — they evaluate the quality of the ecosystem that surrounds your brand. A single mention in a high-authority publication can outweigh hundreds of low-quality backlinks. The Authority pillar captures this nuance by analyzing your brand's reputation signal across the entire web.

Citations measure how frequently AI models reference your brand when answering queries relevant to your market. This pillar distinguishes between inline citations (direct links that drive traffic) and content sources (materials the AI consulted but didn't explicitly link to).

A critical concept within this pillar is the source gap — domains and publications that cite your competitors but not you. Identifying and closing source gaps is one of the highest-leverage activities for improving AI visibility, because it directly targets the information ecosystem that AI models draw from.

Content Readiness evaluates whether your website's content is structured in a way that AI models can easily parse, understand, and extract answers from. Even brands with strong authority and citations can underperform in AI search if their content isn't formatted for machine consumption.

This pillar goes beyond traditional SEO content optimization. It measures schema coverage (how much of your content uses structured data), answer density (how directly your content answers common questions), and FAQ coverage (whether you address the queries your audience is asking AI platforms).

Technical Health assesses the infrastructure-level factors that determine whether AI models and their crawlers can access, index, and process your content. If your site is slow, blocks crawlers, or has broken structured data, even the best content won't reach AI models.

This pillar covers crawlability (can AI bots reach your pages), page speed (do pages load fast enough for efficient crawling), sitemap health (is your content properly mapped), and structured data validity (does your markup parse without errors).

Competitive Position measures your brand's standing relative to competitors across AI search platforms. It's not enough to improve in isolation — you need to understand where competitors beat you, on which models, and for which queries.

This pillar tracks your share of voice (what percentage of relevant AI answers mention your brand vs. competitors), head-to-head comparisons (when users ask AI to compare brands, who wins), recommendation frequency (how often AI explicitly recommends each brand), and growth rate (who is gaining or losing visibility over time).