> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.surfais.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# The AIS Score
> The single 0-100 number that answers 'how visible is my brand in AI answers, right now?'
Every brand in Surfais has one headline number: the **AIS Score**. It's a 0-100 measure of how visible your brand is in the answers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews give to the questions your customers are already asking.
## Overview
The AIS Score blends four signals into one composite: how often you're mentioned, where you rank when you are, how positively you're framed, and what share of the conversation you own against everyone else being named. It's computed fresh from your live scan data — the actual answers the five platforms gave to your tracked prompts — designed to answer the question you actually have in mind when you look at it: "how visible am I?"
This is a different question from "how well-set-up am I to become visible?" — that's your [Readiness Score](/metrics/ais-vs-readiness), a separate number from your audit. The two are never merged.
## The four signals and their weights
```
AIS = 0.60 × Visibility + 0.15 × Position + 0.10 × Sentiment + 0.15 × Share of Voice
```
| Signal | Weight | Question it answers |
| ----------------------------------------- | ------ | ------------------------------------------------------------ |
| [Visibility](/metrics/visibility) | 60% | Are you mentioned at all, and consistently across platforms? |
| [Position](/metrics/position) | 15% | When you're mentioned, how prominently? |
| [Sentiment](/metrics/sentiment) | 10% | When you're mentioned, how positively? |
| [Share of Voice](/metrics/share-of-voice) | 15% | What fraction of the whole conversation is you? |
The weighting is deliberate and asymmetric. **Visibility carries 60% of the score because being mentioned at all is most of the battle.** A brand that's never named can't be well-positioned, can't be praised, and can't hold a share of a conversation it isn't part of — Position, Sentiment, and Share of Voice are all *conditional* on presence. Surfais calls this a presence-led model: the score rewards showing up first, and only then rewards showing up well.
Position and Sentiment can only be measured on the runs where your brand actually appears. To stop a handful of lucky mentions from banking a high score, both are **credibility-shrunk** toward a neutral midpoint until enough evidence has accumulated — see [Why scores move](/metrics/why-scores-move) for how this plays out for a brand that's just getting started.
## A worked example
Say your brand ran 20 scans this period and was mentioned in 10 of them — 50% presence — with a platform consistency of 40% (your mention rate averaged across all five platforms individually). When you *are* mentioned, your average rank among every brand named in the answer is 2nd, and the tone is generally positive (a raw sentiment average of 70). Across those same runs, competitors and other brands the AIs named collectively picked up 30 mentions to your 10.
| Signal | Calculation | Result |
| -------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------ | -------- |
| Visibility | (50 × 45 + 40 × 15) / 60 | **47.5** |
| Position | rank 2 → decay score 85, credibility-credited at 10 mentions | **69.4** |
| Sentiment | raw 70, credibility-credited at 10 mentions | **61.1** |
| Share of Voice | 10 / (10 + 30) × 100 | **25.0** |
```
AIS = 0.60 × 47.5 + 0.15 × 69.4 + 0.10 × 61.1 + 0.15 × 25.0
= 28.5 + 10.4 + 6.1 + 3.8
= 48.8 → Fair
```
Notice that Position and Sentiment don't simply plug in their raw values (85 and 70). Both pass through the credibility shrink first — at 10 mentions they're pulled some way toward the neutral midpoint of 50, which is why 85 becomes a credited 69.4. The breakdown drawer always shows you both numbers side by side.
## What the AIS Score does not measure
The AIS Score tells you what AI platforms are saying about your brand *today*. It does not tell you *why*, and it does not tell you what to fix — that's the job of the separate [Readiness Score](/metrics/ais-vs-readiness) from your audit's six-category assessment. A brand can have a strong AIS Score built on fragile foundations, or a weak AIS Score despite having done everything right structurally — the two are designed to diverge and mean different things when they do.
Nor is the AIS Score a ranking against a fixed leaderboard — it's your own brand's measured visibility. Use [Competitor Share of Voice](/analysis/competitor-share-of-voice) to see how you stack up against specific competitors.
## Score bands
Consistently surfaced across AI answers. You're the default recommendation for the questions you track.
Frequently mentioned across AI platforms. Solid ground, with headroom on consistency or position.
Visible for some prompts, with clear room to grow. Typically a presence problem more than a quality one.
Largely invisible — most prompts don't surface you yet. Start with [Visibility](/metrics/visibility).
Below 20 is **Critical**: effectively absent from AI answers. If you see **"Awaiting first scan"** instead of a number, that's a different state entirely — [no scan has run yet](/metrics/why-scores-move#awaiting-data-vs-a-real-zero), so there's nothing to score. A true 0 only appears after a scan finds no mentions anywhere.
## Related metrics
The 60%-weighted core signal: mention rate and platform consistency.
Bands, the credibility ramp for new brands, and common causes of movement.
Two different questions, two different numbers — never merged into one.
Where the underlying data for every signal comes from.