Corroboration: the block you cannot write yourself
The largest component of the score, the hardest to move, and the only one that cannot be manufactured on your own website.
What corroboration means
Whether anything the business does not control supports what the business says about itself. Independent coverage, third-party listings, professional bodies, reviews on platforms the business cannot edit, citations by people with no commercial relationship to it.
It carries the most weight in an AI visibility evaluation for a straightforward reason: it is the only signal that is expensive to fake. Anyone can write a claim. Getting someone else to repeat it costs something.
We grade our own domains 0.5 on this. Sixteen properties owned by the same company citing each other is navigation, not evidence, and scoring it as corroboration would corrupt every other number we publish. If the measurement cannot return a bad answer about us, it is worthless for anyone else.
What counts, roughly in order
Independent editorial coverage. Someone with no relationship to the business wrote about it. Rare, slow, and the strongest signal available.
Authoritative reference entries. Structured records in sources with editorial standards the business does not set. Difficult to obtain and durable once held.
Professional and regulatory listings. Membership, licensing and accreditation records. Strong because entry is gated by someone else.
Reviews on platforms the business cannot edit. Volume and recency both matter, and a long silence reads as a business that stopped.
Directory citations. The weakest tier and the easiest to obtain, which is exactly why it is weak. Consistency across them matters more than how many there are.
What does not count
Your own domains. Sites where placement was purchased without disclosure. Reciprocal arrangements. Testimonials on your own site, which are evidence of nothing except that you chose them. None of these are dishonest, and none of them is independent, which is the only property that matters here.
Why it is the hardest to move
Everything else on an evaluation can be improved by work the business controls. Corroboration requires other people to act, and they act because the business did something worth referring to. That makes it slow, unreliable in timing, and impossible to schedule, which is also why it is worth so much.
The honest implication
A business that wants to move this number quickly cannot. What it can do is become citable: publish something specific enough to be referenced, get listed where listing is gated by someone else, and give people who already vouch for it a public place to do so. That is a programme of work measured in quarters, and any offer to accelerate it should be read carefully.