Methodology and limitations
How a Growth Gazette ranking is produced, what it measures, and what it does not.
What is measured
Each cycle puts a fixed set of buying questions to several AI assistants and records which companies are named in the answers, in what position, and by how many of the assistants. A company that is never named does not appear.
This measures visibility in AI-generated answers. It is not a measure of quality, size, revenue or customer satisfaction, and it should not be read as one.
Verification
Language models routinely produce company names that do not exist. Every name returned by the measurement is checked against a live website that mentions the company before it can enter an index. Names that fail are held for human review rather than published or silently discarded.
In one measured run, 11 named companies could be confirmed and 516 could not. Verification is not a formality.
How the score is computed
A company's score is a weighted composite of five components, each scaled to 0 to 100. Four come from the measurement of AI answers. The fifth, site readiness, is an audit of the company's own website and is measurable for every company whether or not any assistant has named it. That is deliberate: visibility in AI answers is sparse, and without a component every firm can score on, an index would be a handful of names above a cliff of zeros.
| Component | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Appearance rate | 30% | The share of the category prompts in which the company was named at all. |
| Average position | 15% | Where the company landed in the list when it was named, 1 to 10, scaled so that first place scores 100 and a company never named scores 0. |
| Assistant breadth | 15% | How many of the assistants queried named the company, as a share of the assistant set. |
| Sentiment | 10% | How favourably the mentions were framed, from -1 to 1, scaled to 0 to 100. A company never named scores 0. |
| Site readiness | 30% | A crawlability and structure audit of the company's own website, 0 to 100. Measurable for every company whether or not any assistant has named it. |
The instrument, per cycle
Scores move when companies change, and also when the instrument changes. Recording the instrument is what makes the difference visible, so every published cycle carries its full provenance.
| Cycle | Index | Assistants | Mode | Prompt set | Weights | Prompts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Managed IT Services | anthropic, gemini, openai | grounded | demo-ps-1 | demo-w-1 | 25 |
Interviews do not affect rank
The Gazette interviews companies it covers. Nothing said in an interview changes a company's position, and declining an interview carries no penalty of any kind. Interview data and ranking data are held separately and are never combined.
No suppression
The Gazette does not hold the ability to hide a score it has computed. There is no mechanism to remove a company from a published index on request, from the company or from anyone else. Errors of fact are handled through corrections.
Limitations
- Assistants are sampled, not surveyed. A fixed set of models is queried. Other assistants, and other versions of the same assistants, may answer differently.
- Model versions shift underneath the measurement. Providers update models without notice. Where a version changed between cycles, the comparison is marked rather than smoothed over.
- Absence is not evidence of absence. A company not named may simply not be described in terms the questions reach.
- Prompt wording changes results. This is why the prompt set version is published for every cycle.
Not yet settled
These are open and are published here rather than omitted.
- Whether the assistants queried should be the frontier models a buyer actually reaches, or the smaller models currently used.