Brand Query Volume
Searches for the property or organization by name, and the trend over time.
Measured. Expected to be zero on this property for a long time.
Authority
Does anything treat this property as a source? Brand demand, direct return, earned references, and repeat machine retrieval.
Authority signals are the slowest to move and the hardest to fake, which is the same sentence twice. Everything here is either an outcome somebody else produced (a brand search, a link nobody asked for, a crawler choosing to come back) or a structural declaration that makes those outcomes possible.
Deliberately excluded: any third-party composite authority score. Those are link-graph estimates, useful for a quick look at an unknown domain, and including one as an input here would mean importing assumptions that cannot be inspected.
Signals (5)
Direct Traffic Share
The proportion of sessions arriving without a referring source, as a proxy for deliberate return.
Measured with caveats. Treat the trend as the signal and the absolute number as an estimate.
Earned Referring Domains
Distinct domains linking to the property that were not bought, exchanged, or self-placed.
Partially measured. Earned versus placed requires judgement, and any third-party link index has its own coverage limits.
Repeat Retrieval Rate
How often crawlers with retrieval purposes return to the same sections of the property.
Measured, with the caveat above stated every time it is used.
Entity Declaration Completeness
Whether the property declares what it is, what it covers, and how its pieces relate, in machine-readable form.
Measured directly. It is the one authority-adjacent signal fully inside the owner's control.