Digital Craftsmanship Index · v1.0 · 2026
The benchmark
every brand
will be measured by.
CraftScore™ is the world’s first comprehensive digital health index. One number. Four dimensions. A standard built for the age of AI-driven discovery.
Why existing metrics fail
Domain Authority is not a health score.
Followers are not authority.
The old way
Single-metric thinking
DA, follower counts, and ad spend are isolated vanity metrics. They measure one channel, ignore everything else, and offer no actionable direction.
The blind spot
AI is changing discovery
ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews now answer questions before users click. Brands invisible to AI are losing demand they cannot measure.
The missing layer
No cross-channel benchmark
There is no industry standard that measures owned media health, earned authority, search visibility, and AI discoverability together in one comparable score.
What is CraftScore™
One number that tells you
the complete truth
about a brand’s digital health.
CraftScore™ is a weighted composite index built on four dimensions: Owned Media performance, Shared Media authority, Search and AI Visibility, and Brand Authority. Each dimension is scored from 0 to 100 from observable, external signals. They combine into a single benchmark number that is consistent, comparable, and actionable.
Unlike Domain Authority, which measures only backlinks, or social metrics, which measure only one channel, CraftScore™ measures the whole digital ecosystem. A brand can score high on one dimension and expose dangerous gaps in another — exactly what a health score should reveal.
“The goal is not a number. The goal is clarity about where your brand stands, why, and what to fix first.”
The Formula · Visible to Everyone
Open. Auditable.
Impossible to game.
The formula is published in full. Every input is observable. Every weight has a rationale. This is how a benchmark earns trust.
Core Equation · v1.0 · Frozen
Performance
Your digital real estate. Site, CRM, UX. The foundation you fully control. Highest weight because failures here cascade everywhere.
Authority
Social, PR, reviews, community. Channels you do not own but actively earn attention in.
Visibility
SEO rankings, AEO presence in AI-assisted search, GEO presence in standalone AI platforms. The complete discovery layer.
Authority
Backlinks, entity strength, sentiment, competitive position. A lagging indicator — it rises as a result of fixing O, S, and V.
Range: 0–100 · Integer display · Decimal retained internally · Version 1.0 · 2026
The Four Indexes
Every index is a
scorecard inside the scorecard.
Each index is calculated from weighted sub-components, all scored 0–100 from observable signals. Here is exactly how each one works.
Owned Media Performance
How well the brand controls and optimises its own digital real estate: website, app, CRM, UX, and content infrastructure.
+ 0.25(Content / AEO Foundation)
+ 0.20(UX)
+ 0.20(GEO Readiness)
+ 0.10(Email / CRM)
Shared Media Authority
How actively and effectively the brand earns attention in external channels it does not fully own: social, PR, reviews, and community.
+ 0.25(PR / Citations)
+ 0.25(Reviews)
+ 0.20(Community)
Search and AI Visibility
How discoverable the brand is across all search surfaces — including classic SEO, AEO (search-embedded AI), and GEO (standalone AI platforms).
+ 0.35(AEO Presence)
+ 0.30(GEO Presence)
Signal Definitions
AEO = Answer visibility in AI-assisted search surfaces (Google AI Overviews, Featured Snippets, People Also Ask, Bing Copilot)
GEO = Answer visibility in standalone generative AI platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, voice assistants)
Related Service
Search Everywhere Optimization is the dedicated service for improving your V-Index across all three channels.
Learn About the Service →Brand Authority
How much trust, credibility, and entity strength the brand carries across the web. A lagging indicator: it rises as O, S, and V improve.
+ 0.30(Brand Entity)
+ 0.25(Sentiment)
+ 0.15(Competitive Position)
Beyond the Core Score
Three layers make
CraftScore™ truly fair.
These companion scores never blend into CraftScore. They sit alongside it to add context, honesty, and commercial relevance.
Paid Amplification Score
Measures paid channel presence, landing page quality, and targeting sophistication. Displayed separately — paid budget should never inflate a brand’s core health score.
0–100 · Separate from CraftScoreConfidence Score
Measures data completeness and the observability of inputs. A high-confidence score is derived from Class A (directly observable) signals. Low confidence means the score is directional, not definitive.
0–100% · Displayed on every reportIndustry Percentile
Where a brand sits relative to audited peers in the same industry, stage, and region. The raw score is absolute. The percentile is contextual. Both are required for a complete benchmark.
Industry · Stage · RegionWhat a Report Looks Like
Every audit produces
the same canonical output.
The Five Tiers
Where does your brand
actually stand?
Once calculated, CraftScore maps into one of five tiers. Each tier signals a distinct health state with specific remediation priorities.
Why You Can Trust It
A benchmark without governance
is just a number someone invented.
CraftScore™ is governed by a published set of rules that define how evidence is classified, how missing data is handled, how the score expires, and how gaming is prevented. These rules are what make it a standard.
Evidence Classes
Class A (directly observable), Class B (platform-inferred), and Class C (self-reported). Each class carries a different trust weight. Class A inputs drive the most credible scores.
Score Validity Window
Every CraftScore expires after 90 days (governed by the shortest index window). An expired score must display “Score Expired” — no brand can use a stale result as a current health signal.
Gaming Tolerance
Artificially inflated signals are scored at zero and flagged. Buying followers, low-quality backlinks, and paid activity on a broken foundation cannot lift a CraftScore.
Structural Flag Types
“Structurally Compromised” when a top-level index falls below 15 and confidence is high. “Data Incomplete” when confidence is low. Both flags display alongside the score, never replace it.
Frozen Core Architecture
The four indexes and their weights are locked at v1.0. Sub-component signals update annually in January as a versioned Signal Pack. The benchmark logic never shifts without published rationale.
Calibration Milestone
Tier boundaries and industry percentile data will be empirically calibrated at the 500-brand audit milestone. Version 1.0 launches with Southeast Asia as the reference benchmark market.
The Foundation
CraftScore™ did not come from a lab.
It came from three volumes of practice.
Every index in CraftScore maps directly to a volume of the Digital Craftsmanship Series — the S.O.P. Operating System for building compounding digital authority. The score is not a theory. It is a practitioner’s framework made measurable.
Crafting Your Shared Media Authority Architecture
The complete playbook for social health, PR, reviews, and community. Every signal in the S-Index traces back to this volume.
Maps to → S-Index (25%)Engineering Your Owned Media Control Layer
Tech SEO, content architecture, GEO readiness, email and CRM design, and UX. The five pillars of the O-Index built in full.
Maps to → O-Index (35%)Designing Scalable Paid Media Growth Systems
Paid presence, landing page quality, and targeting sophistication. The complete framework behind the Paid Amplification Score.
Maps to → Paid Amplification ScoreGet Your CraftScore™
What does your brand
score right now?
Every brand has a CraftScore™. Most do not know theirs. Book a manual audit or read the white paper to understand the full methodology.