How an Affirmation Search Is Measured

A fixed set of questions per company

Power100 tracks a fixed set of Affirmation Search questions for every company it works with. For a company that serves consumers, the set is the eleven questions on this site, verbatim, with the company's name in each. For a company whose buyers are other businesses, the set comes from its own bank of questions, built around what its buyers and partners actually ask.

The set does not change from month to month. The book the measurement comes from puts the reason in one line.

Change the question and you have changed the experiment.

Reputation Intelligence, chapter 11

Run monthly, across the platforms people use

The questions are run every month across the AI platforms people actually use to ask about a company. Monthly, because a company's record changes, the platforms change, and a single reading cannot tell a company which way it is moving.

The sources behind each answer

An answer is only half of the reading. The other half is where it came from. Every answer is recorded alongside the sources it was built from, so the company can see who is currently speaking for it: its own pages, a review platform, a directory, a forum thread, a competitor sitting beside the result.

That record is what makes the reading useful. It shows which answers rest on the company's own evidence and which rest on somebody else's, which is what Affirmation Ownership measures.

Movement, not a snapshot

A score is a photograph. A trend is a direction, and only one of those is useful on a Monday.

Reputation Intelligence, chapter 11

Progress is the same questions, asked again next month, coming back with a clearer answer, a more current source, or a narrower gap between what the evidence shows and what is true. A question that returned hesitant language in one month can return a confident answer a few months later, not because anyone rewrote it, but because the company behind it became easier to verify.

Two readings stay separate and never get blended into one. Presence asks whether the platforms can find the company at all. Confidence asks what they say when they do.

What a single reading cannot tell you

Platforms disagree with each other. Information changes. Personalization shapes what one person sees. So one answer on one night is not a verdict, and a month should never be built around a single screenshot. The pattern across questions, platforms and months is the reading. That is why the method is monthly and the wording is frozen.

The method, step by step

1. Fix the questions. Set the company's question set once. For a consumer-facing company it is the eleven on this site, with the company's name in each. For a company that sells to other businesses it is drawn from its own bank of the questions its buyers ask.
2. Ask them where people ask. Run every question across the AI platforms people actually use to ask about a company, word for word.
3. Record the answer and its sources. Keep the answer and, alongside it, the sources it was built from: which pages, which platforms, whose words.
4. Read what shapes each answer. For each question, note whether the evidence behind the answer is strong, thin, missing or out of date, and whether the answer stays about the company or drifts toward alternatives.
5. Ask again next month. Run the same questions again, word for word, and record what moved: the answer, the sources, the gap.

Run one yourself

Anyone can run an Affirmation Search on their own company tonight. Forget that you own it. Imagine you are a homeowner who just received a large proposal. Search the company name, then ask the eleven questions. Ask about complaints, employees, the warranty and the community. Then ask the one nobody wants to type: why somebody should not choose it.

Do not argue with the answers. Study them. What is accurate, what is wrong, what is missing, and which sources the answer leans on.

Who runs it every month

The method on this page comes from Reputation Intelligence, the discipline Greg Cummings defines in his book and describes at reputationintelligence.io. Power100 runs it monthly for the companies it works with, and only for companies that have first qualified in its independent ranking.