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Overview

Position measures how prominently your brand appears within AI answers that mention it — first, second, third, or further down the list. Being mentioned at all (see Visibility) gets you into the conversation; Position measures whether you’re the headline recommendation or an afterthought at the bottom.

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How it’s calculated

Position is worth 15 of the AIS Score’s 100 points. For every run where your brand is mentioned, Surfais records your rank by order of first appearance among every brand the answer names — not just the competitors you chose to track, but every brand the AI mentioned. That raw rank is converted to a 0-100 score using a decay curve with linear interpolation between anchors: A fractional average rank lands between two anchors — for example, an average rank of 1.15 scores 97.75, and an average of 2.4 scores 79. This means Position captures marginal gains: moving from an average rank of 2.4 to 1.8 shows up in the score, not just a jump between whole-number tiers. Credibility shrinkage. A raw when-mentioned average can be misleading with very little evidence — a single mention at rank 1 says almost nothing about how you’ll rank on the next hundred runs. Before it enters the AIS composite, Position is pulled toward a neutral midpoint of 50 in proportion to how many mentions back it up, then ramped in over the first few mentions:
With zero mentions, Position is 0. With one mention at rank 1 (a decay score of 100), the credited value is roughly 18.5 — one lucky mention is treated as almost no evidence. The breakdown drawer always shows both numbers: the raw decay score for the mentions you have, and the credited value that actually feeds the composite.
This is the same shrink-and-ramp mechanism used for Sentiment. See Why scores move for what this means for a brand still building up its mention history.

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Why it matters

A strong Position score alongside weak Visibility means: when AI mentions you, it puts you near the top — the fix is getting mentioned more often, not changing how you’re described. Weak Position alongside strong Visibility means the opposite: you’re showing up reliably, but third or fourth rather than first. That usually points to a content or authority gap relative to whoever consistently ranks above you — worth checking against Competitor Share of Voice and your audit’s Authority & Brand category. Because Position only has data to work with on mentioned runs, a brand early in its tracking history will see this score move more than a mature one as each new mention updates a smaller sample. That’s the credibility ramp working as intended, not noise.

AIS Score

How Position combines with the other three signals into the headline number.

Sentiment

The other credibility-shrunk, when-mentioned signal.

Prompt detail

See your rank on a specific prompt, run by run.