You Are Bein Lied to

By LeeroyDotUK

Why The Number Your Agency Brags About Means Nothing To AI

I was on a discovery call last week with a SaaS platform founder. He was explaining that he was getting frustrated due to traffic coming through, but nothing was really converting. On the call, he was showing me a report from his current AI SEO supplier. One thing he was focusing on was that his domain authority was 68.

He said it the way people say their golf handicap. A little pause before the number, a little lift in the voice, waiting for me to be impressed. Sixty eight. And to be fair, ten years ago I would have been. Sixty eight is a strong score. It means his backlink profile is healthy, his site has been around a while, and a lot of other websites point at his.

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So I asked him a simple question. “When did you last get recommended by ChatGPT?”

Silence. Then, “I don’t think I have been.”

And there it is. The number he was proud of, the one his agency puts at the top of every monthly report, the one the whole industry has chased for over a decade, is telling him almost nothing about whether AI will ever put him in front of a buyer. In fact, and this is the part that makes people choke (given the money they pay for it), it might be pointing the wrong way entirely.

Let me explain, because this one pi$$es a lot of people off… and it should.

What domain authority actually is

Domain authority, or domain rating, or whatever your tool of choice calls it, is a score out of 100 that estimates how likely a website is to rank on Google. It was never an official Google metric. It is a third party invention, built mostly on one thing: backlinks. How many other sites link to you, and how strong those sites are.

For twenty years that was a decent enough proxy. Google leaned heavily on backlinks, so a metric built on backlinks roughly tracked your chances of ranking. The whole SEO industry organised itself around pushing that number up. Buy the links, earn the links, beg for the links, watch the score climb, put it in the report.

Here is the problem. Domain authority was built to predict one specific thing: Google rankings. AI citation is not Google rankings. It is a completely different mechanism, and it does not care about the thing your DA score is made of.

NOTE: I am not saying DA is not important… it is. But the same as if with your car, you only focused on the gearbox when the engine was made of cheese (random analogy, but you get the point).

The number that should make you spit your tea at your colleague

We noticed early on that DA is not the defining factor when it comes to whether or not AI searches list you. And we aren’t alone on this. Researchers actually measured what predicts whether an AI assistant cites and recommends a brand, domain authority did not come out weak. It came out negative.

The correlation between domain authority and AI citation sits somewhere between minus 0.08 and minus 0.21. Negative. That means, very loosely, that across the sample the higher your DA, the slightly less likely AI was to cite you, not more.

Read that again. The single metric the SEO world has obsessed over for a decade is, at best, irrelevant to your AI visibility and, at worst, mildly working against it.

Meanwhile, the things that actually predict AI citation are not on most agency reports at all.

Signal Correlation with AI citation On your agency’s report? Branded web mentions 0.664 Almost never Brand search volume 0.334 (strongest single predictor) No Backlinks 0.218 Yes, endlessly Domain authority Negative (around -0.08 to -0.21) Top of page one

Look at what is happening in that table. The two strongest predictors are barely tracked by anyone. Backlinks, the weak one, get all the attention. And domain authority, which is built almost entirely out of backlinks, gets pride of place despite pointing the wrong way.

And a bad backlink strategy (ie spammy links) does a lot worse to your traffic, but I’ll cover that in a different issue).

The industry has been polishing the one number that matters least and ignoring the two that matter most.

Why it is negative, not just useless

“Useless” I could live with. “Negative” needs explaining, because it sounds like a typo.

The most likely reason is this. The sites that score highest on domain authority tend to be the ones that have spent years engineering their backlink profile. Big, link heavy, SEO optimised domains. And AI models, it turns out, are not impressed by the same things Google’s old algorithm was. They lean towards sources with genuine brand demand and real third party discussion. Reddit threads. YouTube. Review platforms. Wikipedia. Independent mentions from people who were not paid or asked.

A high DA score is a signal that you are good at the old game. It is not a signal that real humans are talking about you, searching for you by name, or vouching for you in the wild. And those human signals are exactly what the machine is reading.

So you can have a magnificent DA and a brand that, as far as the wider web is concerned, barely exists outside its own website. The score says “authority.” The reality says “nobody is talking about you.” AI reads the reality, not the score.

What actually moves the needle

If domain authority is out, what is in. Two things, mainly.

The first is brand search volume. How often people type your name into a search engine. Not “best CRM software.” Your actual brand name. This is the single strongest predictor of AI citation in the whole field, and it makes intuitive sense the moment you stop and think about it. If thousands of people are searching for you by name, you are clearly a real, known, demanded entity. AI picks up on that demand and treats you as a brand worth mentioning. If nobody searches your name, you look like a string of text that happens to have a website.

The second is branded mentions across the wider web. Not links. Mentions. Your name appearing in conversations, articles, reviews, threads and videos that you do not own and did not control. That correlates with AI visibility at 0.664, which is three times stronger than backlinks. And it leads to the most important single fact in this whole field, which I will give a full edition of its own shortly: roughly 85 percent of the brand mentions AI pulls into its answers come from third party sources, not from your own site.

In other words, the game has moved off your website and onto the rest of the internet, and your domain authority score cannot see any of it.

So what do you do instead?

You stop reporting on the vanity number and start reporting on the ones that predict the outcome.

Track your branded search demand. Track how many independent places on the web mention your brand, and whether that number is going up. Track whether you are being cited and recommended by the AI platforms at all. None of these are harder to measure than the DA score you have been quoting. They are just less flattering at the start, which is exactly why most people avoid them.

This is the thinking baked into the way we score brands at MarGen. In the Synaptic Authority Engine, the source trust angle is weighted on what the evidence actually proves, which is why brand demand and third party trust carry real weight, and domain authority is deliberately set aside despite how loudly the rest of the industry still shouts about it. We weight what predicts AI visibility, not what tradition assumes.

The full breakdown of every angle and weight is in the field guide at **margen.net/services**.

But first, the usual. One thing this week.

Do one thing this week

Open Google. Type in your brand name. Just the name, nothing else.

Now look at what comes back, and ignore your own website and your own social profiles. Strip those out in your head. What is left? Is there anything? Independent articles, reviews, directory listings, forum threads, videos, mentions from people who are not you?

If the entire first page is your own owned properties and nothing else, you have just seen what AI sees. A brand that exists only on its own say so, with no outside world backing it up. That is a brand the machine has very little reason to trust, no matter how high the DA score climbs.

Then go to Google Trends and type the same brand name in. If the line is flat on the floor, you have no brand search demand, which means you are missing the strongest single predictor of AI citation there is.

Neither of those checks costs a penny. Both tell you more about your AI future than a DA score ever will.

The point of all this is not that SEO is dead or that the old metrics were always rubbish. They work, for the game they were built for. The point is that a new game is being played in a place those metrics cannot see, and clinging to a number because it used to mean something is how good businesses end up invisible.

A domain authority of sixty eight is a lovely number. It just is not the one that gets you recommended.

If AI is not recommending you, it is recommending someone else.

Leeroy

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