Introducing Caliber Authority Index: A New Way to Measure Marketing and Communications Impact.

The issue isn’t that communications teams lack data. It’s that the data often lives in different places, measures different things and doesn’t always add up to a clear view of how a brand is performing.

Media coverage, search visibility, website traffic, AI visibility and social performance can each tell part of the story. The challenge is understanding how those pieces work together: what’s driving performance, how a company’s visibility and authority are changing over time and where greater attention may be warranted.

That’s the problem we set out to address with Caliber Authority Index, or Caliber AI for short.

Caliber AI is our new proprietary measurement platform, built to bring together performance across earned media, digital PR and SEO, AI visibility and social media in one connected view.

How Caliber Authority Index works

Caliber AI measures performance across four areas:

• Earned Media
• Digital PR & SEO
• AI Visibility
• Social Media

Those scores draw on multiple underlying measures, including placement volume, sentiment, share of voice, backlinks, referral traffic, branded search, AI answer presence, click-through rates and website referrals.

All sub-metrics within each impact score, as well as the four impact scores themselves, can be custom-weighted based on a company’s business priorities and communications goals. The four scores then combine into a single 0–100 Authority Index Score.

That customization reflects an approach that has long shaped how we work at Caliber: there is no one-size-fits-all formula. Companies can weight the four impact scores around their priorities, but the customization goes deeper than that.

Within the Earned Media section of the dashboard, for example, we might give sentiment greater weight to a company working to shift how it is being perceived, while a company pursuing an acquisition may care more about share of voice and how prominently it is showing up relative to competitors. 

Other priorities might include web referrals from LinkedIn in Social Media, AI answer presence, position or owned-domain citations in AI Visibility, or referral traffic generated by digital PR and SEO efforts.

This allows the scoring model to reflect what matters most to each company at both the broader performance and individual metric level.

The dashboard then brings the overall Authority Index Score, the four impact scores and the factors influencing performance together in one view.

From more data to a more complete picture

Individual metrics still matter. The value of Caliber AI comes from seeing how they work together.

And those connections matter more than ever. 

Earned media, search, AI visibility, website performance and social media don’t operate in isolation. What happens in one area can contribute to performance in another.

The growing role of earned media in AI discovery is a great example. Muck Rack’s May 2026 analysis of more than 25 million links cited across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini found that 84% came from earned media — including news outlets, which alone made up 27% of all cited links.

That gives PR another role beyond the coverage itself: earned media can also influence the information people encounter when they turn to AI to research companies, products and markets. And it underscores why looking at earned media, digital PR and SEO, AI visibility and social media together can reveal more than evaluating each separately.

For our teams, that creates a more holistic view of performance so we can see what’s working, identify opportunities or gaps and make recommendations about where to focus.

For clients, it provides that same broader understanding of how their marketing and communications efforts are contributing to their visibility, authority and competitive standing — while also giving them a clear, easy-to-understand way to communicate that impact to senior leadership, boards and other stakeholders.

As Caliber CEO Grace Keith Rodriguez puts it:

“It’s not enough to hand clients an activity report of what happened. They need to understand at a glance what those results mean for the business and be able to communicate that story to the people making decisions. We built Caliber AI to give decision makers a clearer picture of where to focus, where to adjust their strategy and how marketing and communications can support their broader business goals.”

Over time, the Authority Index also gives companies a way to understand where they stand in their communications journey and how their performance is changing, with the four impact scores and underlying metrics helping show what is influencing that movement.

Caliber CEO Grace Keith Rodriguez dives deeper into the measurement challenge facing PR — and why more data hasn’t necessarily meant more clarity — in her new piece for O’Dwyer’s, PR Measurement Has a New Problem: Too Much Data, Too Little Clarity.

Building on our investment in PR measurement

Caliber Authority Index is the second part of a broader investment in modern PR measurement.

Earlier this year, we introduced our Digital Metrics Certification, an agency-wide training program focused on SEO, digital PR, analytics and AI-driven search.

We deliberately started with our people, investing in agency-wide training to expand our knowledge and skills in interpreting modern performance data and applying those insights to strategy and client recommendations.

Caliber AI builds on that foundation with the proprietary methodology and platform needed to bring those insights together in an integrated view for clients.

Built to evolve 

Launching Caliber AI is an important milestone, and one we’re incredibly proud of, but as they say: the work is never done.

Early testing and initial onboarding gave us the opportunity to put Caliber AI into use with clients before the public launch and continue refining the platform. Now that Caliber Authority Index is available to all Caliber clients, we’re continuing to learn from client feedback as we onboard in phases.

The platform itself will continue to evolve, too. We’ll add new data points and capabilities as we bring more sources into Caliber AI and develop new ways to capture and connect data. What we learn from clients will help guide that evolution and how the platform supports the way they evaluate and communicate performance.

Unclear on how your communications are helping you grow?

You should be able to see how your communications are contributing to visibility, authority and business goals — and have an agency partner that can help you act on that understanding.

If you don’t feel like your PR team is helping you reach your goals — or can’t clearly show you the impact of the work — let’s talk about how Caliber can help you grow and know what’s working.