What is the TOP Score?

The TOP Score is a 0 to 100 measure of how often AI assistants name a business when someone asks for a recommendation in its category. It is the share of recommendation-style prompt responses that mention the business, measured across a fixed set of AI engines and a fixed prompt set.

How often is the TOP Score refreshed?

Client programs are measured monthly. The public TOP 100 is refreshed quarterly, with the measurement date published alongside every figure.

What does the TOP Score not measure?

It does not measure traffic, leads, revenue or the quality of a business. It measures how often AI assistants named the business in response to a fixed set of recommendation prompts on a given date, and nothing more.

The standard · Version 1.0

The TOP Score

Q: How is the TOP Score calculated?

Responses that name the business are divided by the total number of recommendation-style responses collected, then multiplied by 100. Only recommendation prompts count, the prompt set and engine set are held fixed between measurements, and the score is reported alongside the number of prompts and responses behind it.

A 0 to 100 measure of how often AI assistants name a business when someone asks for a recommendation in its category. This page is the whole method, including what it can't tell you.

The TOP Score is the share of recommendation-style AI responses that name a given business, expressed out of 100 and measured across a fixed set of AI engines and a fixed set of prompts. A score of 12 means the business was named in roughly 12% of the answers a buyer might get when asking AI for a recommendation in that category.

How is the TOP Score calculated?

TOP Score = ( responses naming the business ÷ total recommendation responses ) × 100

Three rules keep that number honest, and they matter more than the formula itself.

1Only recommendation prompts count. A question like "who should I use for X in Sydney" counts. A question that names the business already, or asks for a definition, does not, because those inflate the number without telling you anything.
2The prompt set and engine set are held fixed between measurements. If either changes, the score is republished as a new baseline rather than compared to the old one, and we say so on the page.
3Every score is published with its working. The number of prompts, the number of responses collected, the engines queried and the date, so anyone can see how thin or how solid the sample is.

Which AI engines are queried?

The current engine set is the assistants Australian buyers actually use to ask for recommendations: ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI answers. Each engine is scored separately as well as pooled, because they disagree with each other more than most people expect, and an average can hide a total absence on the one your buyers happen to use.

Engine coverage changes as the market does. When an engine is added or removed the version number on this page changes and the affected scores are rebaselined rather than quietly restated.

What are the three sub-scores?

The TOP Score tells you where you stand. The sub-scores tell you why, and they map to the three things an AI draws on when it assembles an answer about your category.

Sub-score	What it measures
Readable	Whether AI crawlers can actually parse your site: structure, schema markup, rendering, and anything hidden behind scripts they won't run.
Answerable	Whether your content directly resolves the questions buyers ask, in the form an assistant can lift an answer from.
Trusted	Whether the third-party sources AI leans on in your category, the review sites, directories and industry media, actually mention you.

How often is it refreshed?

Businesses on an SDM program are measured monthly, because that's the cadence at which work can be reviewed and adjusted. The public TOP 100 is refreshed quarterly, and every published figure carries the date it was measured, so a number you read here is always attributable to a point in time rather than floating free.

What the TOP Score does not measure

This is the part most vendors leave out, so here it is plainly. The TOP Score is a visibility measurement, not a verdict.

×It is not traffic, leads or revenue. Being named in an answer is the start of a buying process, not the end of one. We connect the score to enquiries separately, through the client's own CRM, and we don't pretend the score is the outcome.
×It is not a quality ranking. A business can be excellent and invisible to AI, and a business can be mediocre and highly visible. The score measures what the machines say, not what the machines should say.
×It is not deterministic. Ask the same assistant the same question twice and you can get two different answers, which is why the score is built from many prompts rather than a single lookup.
×It is not what you personally see. Logged-in assistants personalise, so your own results will look better than a stranger's. Every measurement here is taken unauthenticated.

Why can a score move without anyone doing anything?

Because the thing being measured moves. Models get updated, retrieval behaviour changes, a competitor gets written about somewhere an assistant trusts, and any of that can shift a score without a single change to your website. That's a real limitation rather than a disclaimer, and it's why we report the trend over several quarters rather than making much of a single month.

Version and change history

Version	Date	Change
1.0	August 2026	First published method: formula, prompt eligibility rules, engine set, sub-scores, refresh cadence and stated limits.

Corrections and right of reply

If you think a score we've published about your business is wrong, tell us and we'll re-run it. If the re-run disagrees with what we published, we correct the page and note the correction rather than editing it silently. The full process is on the about page.

Want your own TOP Score?

A Namecheck gives you the score, the sub-scores and the actual answers we saw, at no cost. Request one here.