Search Visibility
20% of the IndexObserved presence across market, local and intent-driven searches. We are looking for repeated visibility, not a single lucky ranking.
Authority Index Methodology
A ranking is useless if the evidence cannot survive a second look.
The Authority Index is a market-relative comparison of observable digital presence. The methodology is published because the score should be inspectable, reproducible enough to challenge, and narrow enough that nobody mistakes it for a judgment about who is the better real estate professional.
The weighting.
One hundred points are distributed across seven signal families. The weight matters, but the evidence under the weight matters more.
Google Business Presence
15% of the IndexObservable local profile strength, review footprint, recency and other public evidence that the business is established in the market.
Local Content Authority
15% of the IndexDepth and usefulness of market, neighborhood, community and decision-support content tied to the geography being analyzed.
External Authority & Corroboration
15% of the IndexIndependent links, citations, media, partner references and other credible third-party evidence supporting the public entity.
Technical / Crawl Health
10% of the IndexIndexability, crawlability, rendering, site structure and the technical conditions that affect whether the public footprint can be discovered and understood.
Market Coverage
10% of the IndexHow completely the public site covers the places and search intents associated with the market being evaluated.
Brand & Entity Signals
15% of the IndexConsistency of the public brand, entity clarity, branded demand where observable, and corroborating citations across the web.
The score is not allowed to pretend we know more than we do.
Freshness is part of the evidence.
Every published market report should show when the market was analyzed. A stale scan should never be presented as a current leaderboard.
Missing evidence stays missing.
If a signal cannot be measured with reasonable confidence, the Index should disclose that limitation rather than silently converting the gap into certainty.
Market-relative means market-relative.
A result inside one Arizona market is a comparison inside that market. It is not automatically equivalent to the same numerical result in another Arizona market with a different competitive landscape.
The result should be explainable.
Readers should be able to understand which signal families helped or hurt a result and, where the underlying evidence can be shown responsibly, inspect why.
Publication rules matter as much as scoring.
Corrections are part of the system.
If a business believes materially incorrect public information affected a result, MetaKona should provide a documented correction path and re-review the affected evidence.
Clients do not buy a better rank.
Purchasing MetaKona services must never improve a public Authority Index result merely because the business is a client.
Professional quality is outside the model.
The Index does not measure transaction volume, negotiation ability, ethics, fiduciary quality, client service, licensing quality, experience, or whether a consumer should hire one agent over another.
Complete data does not publish itself.
A completed scan moves into review first. Publication requires a separate approval after the eligible cohort, evidence coverage, corrections and resulting rankings have been checked.
A published result is a dated observation.
Rankings should move when the observable market changes. That is a feature of the Index, not a flaw.