Authority Signal
Also known as: Trust signal
An observable indicator that something treats a property as a source, as opposed to an estimated authority score.
Authority signals used here are ones that can be observed directly: brand query volume and trend, direct traffic share, repeat retrieval of the same sections by crawlers with retrieval purposes, referring domains earned rather than bought, and the completeness of the property's entity declarations.
Third-party composite authority scores are deliberately excluded from the inventory. Including another vendor's model as an input means inheriting assumptions that cannot be inspected, which defeats the reason for keeping signals separate in the first place.