Authority
In AI search, authority is whether the platforms see your brand as a credible name in your field, credible enough to name in their answers.
In AI search, authority is whether the AI platforms see your brand as a credible name in your field. A brand with authority gets named when someone asks about its subject. A brand without it doesn't come up, however good its product is.
For a marketer, it's the first problem to solve. Before you worry about where you're named or what's said about you, you need to be named at all.
Where authority comes from
The platforms learn who's credible from what they read. That means your own site, and much more than your site: review sites, directories, news articles, comparison posts, forum threads, and the training data the model learned from.
When many independent sources name you for the same thing, a platform has good reason to name you too. When only your own site says it, the platform has your word for it and little else.
For example, say Kestrel Roasters is mentioned in a national newspaper's guide to coffee subscriptions, sits on three "best of" lists and has a busy Trustpilot page. Fernhill Coffee has a better website but appears almost nowhere else. Ask a platform for the best coffee subscription, and Kestrel is far more likely to be in the answer.
Authority isn't the same as a domain score
SEO tools give websites authority scores, usually based on links. Those scores describe a website. Authority in AI search is about your brand, wherever it's mentioned, with or without a link. A brand can have a modest website and still be named often, because other people write about it.
How to build it
Get named where your customers already look: the review sites, directories and articles in your category. Give journalists and writers something worth citing, like your own data or a clear opinion. Keep your facts the same everywhere, so every source adds to the same picture of you.
In AnswerOrbit
The Gaps tab in Sources lists the pages that name your competitors and not you. Those are the places where your competitors have earned credibility you haven't yet. Your visibility shows whether the work is paying off.