The diagnostic
The Signal Gap.
Brand Integrity is what is true about you. Signal Strength is how much of that truth actually reaches search engines, AI systems and buyers. The distance between the two is the number nobody else produces.
Two organizations with the same Brand Integrity score can perform completely differently in market. The one with the smaller gap is the one whose truth survives the trip through retrieval — indexation, structured data, entity resolution, third-party corroboration.
A wide gap is not a branding problem and it is not a search problem. It is a translation problem, and it is the most common finding in every study published so far.
Scores shown are illustrative.
Brand Integrity
Signal Strength
Reading the gap
Four positions, four different pieces of work.
Similar Index results can describe very different organizations. The quadrant decides what to do next.
Present, but interchangeable
The infrastructure exists and machines can retrieve it. What they retrieve reads like a template: category language, no stated position, nothing a competitor could not also claim.
Diagnosis: Content and positioning gap.
Meaningful, but undetectable
The proposition is clear and the experience is credible to a person who arrives. Search engines, AI systems and citation networks cannot reliably reach, parse or attribute it.
Diagnosis: Findability and distribution gap.
Foundation problem
Neither side supports the other. Isolated fixes tend not to move the score, because the faults capping performance sit upstream of the work being done.
Diagnosis: Rebuild, sequenced by dependency.
Target state
Meaning and detectability are moving together, and the distance between the two sides is small enough that neither is holding the other back.
Diagnosis: Maintain through governance.
The two sides are read side by side and never blended into a single composite. The distance between them — the Signal Gap — is itself the finding.
How the gap is calculated
- Every organization is scored on all fifteen dimensions, on the same 1.0–10.0 scale, from publicly observable evidence.
- Brand Integrity Index is the average of the seven Brand Integrity Review dimensions; Signal Strength Index is the average of the eight Signal Architecture Review dimensions.
- The Signal Gap is Signal Strength minus Brand Integrity, so a negative number means truth is not reaching the market.
- A gap wider than two points is treated as a material finding and reported with its three largest contributing dimensions.