What's the difference between AI Visibility Score, Authority Score, and the others?

You'll run into a few different scores and counts as you use RunOctopus, and it's a completely fair question to ask why there isn't one. Each one measures a genuinely different thing, and once you know which is which, they tell you more together than any single number could on its own.

AI Visibility Score

Where you'll see it: your main dashboard.

What it measures: how often AI search, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, is recommending your store right now. Think of it like a credit score for AI visibility, the higher it climbs, the more often AI is mentioning you when someone asks for a recommendation in your space.

Authority Score (also shown as "The Score")

Where you'll see it: Ollie's Operations Room, and as "The Score" on your content dashboard and on billing.

What it measures: how much authority your content itself has built up, how well it's positioned in search, how strong it looks, how well past moves have paid off, and more. It's the health check for your content specifically, separate from how visible your store is across AI search overall.

Worth knowing, honestly: I calculate this a couple of different ways depending where you're looking, since Operations Room takes a broader read of your whole strategy while the number on your content dashboard and billing page weighs a narrower set of content signals. That means the two numbers can genuinely differ, sometimes by a fair bit, and that's not a bug, they're each telling you something real, only not identical. If you're brand new and don't have much history yet, you may see a stage name instead of a number at all, something like "Emerging" or "Compounding" rather than a 0-to-100 figure, that's expected too, and it fills in as I learn more about your store.

AI-Readiness Score

Where you'll see it: Schema Audit.

What it measures: something more technical and specific than the other two, how legible your site's code is to AI search right now. It's high when your pages carry complete, correct schema markup (the hidden labels that tell AI exactly what a page is), and low when they don't. Think of it as "can AI even read my pages properly," separate from "is AI recommending me." If it's low, that's not something you need to fix yourself, Schema Audit shows you exactly where the gaps are and I fill them.

Signal Strength

Where you'll see it: Diagnostics.

What it measures: something simpler than the three scores above, a running, all-time count of how many times AI search has cited your store. It's not a score with a ceiling at all, only a number that goes up, and every tick is a real moment your store got mentioned.

If a score looks low

None of these numbers are meant to be perfect on day one, and a low reading almost never means something's broken. Content authority builds as I run more cycles and learn more about your store, and schema gaps get fixed automatically once Schema Audit finds them. If a number ever looks stuck rather than slowly moving, that's worth a look in Diagnostics, but low and early are two very different things, don't read one as the other.

The short version

• AI Visibility Score — how visible are you across AI search, overall, right now.
• Authority Score / The Score — how much authority has your content itself built up. Shown a couple of different ways in a couple of different places, so don't expect the numbers to always match exactly.
• AI-Readiness Score — can AI technically read your pages correctly.
• Signal Strength — a running tally of real AI citations, all-time.

They're not competing with each other, they're four different angles on the same goal: your store really getting found and recommended by AI search.