Affirmation Search and Reputation Intelligence

Two terms, one relationship

Reputation Intelligence is the credit report for your business: an honest diagnostic of what the outside world can actually find out about a company, where it is strong, where it is weak, what is visible and what is missing. The term and its full definition live at reputationintelligence.io, the reference for the discipline.

Every Affirmation Search reads that record. A credit report matters because someone pulls it before they lend. A company's record matters because someone who already knows its name asks about it before they hire, apply, partner, invest or lend. Every one of those searches is a test of the record that Reputation Intelligence describes.

How the discipline uses the term

Reputation Intelligence is practiced as a monthly loop: measure, diagnose, capture, publish, re-measure. The measuring is done with Affirmation Searches. The company's fixed set of questions, the eleven for a consumer-facing company, is run across the platforms people use, with the sources behind each answer recorded, and run again the following month. The rest of the loop is about what to do with what those searches returned. How it is measured describes the reading in full.

So the two terms stay distinct on purpose. Affirmation Search names a behavior anyone can observe: people search a name they already know. Reputation Intelligence names what a company does about it.

Where each term is kept

This site holds the definition of Affirmation Search. reputationintelligence.io holds the definition of Reputation Intelligence and the vocabulary around it, including its own entry for Affirmation Search. Both are maintained by Power100, and both come from the work of Greg Cummings, whose book on the discipline is described at reputationintelligence.io/book.

The shared vocabulary

Several terms belong to both sites. Each has a short entry in this site's glossary, worded exactly as it is on reputationintelligence.io, with a link to the fuller treatment there.