The SiteNexis Intelligence Index: One Number for Machine Trust Readiness
The SII answers one question: how deeply does the AI ecosystem trust, retrieve, and recommend this domain? It is computed from five Layer 4 scores, each addressing a distinct dimension of machine trust. Unlike the AI Visibility Score, it cannot be gamed by technical SEO alone.
The AI Visibility Score measures how well AI systems can find and extract your content. The SiteNexis Intelligence Index measures something different: how deeply the AI ecosystem trusts, retrieves, and recommends your domain as an authoritative source. It is the Layer 4 composite. A domain can score 85 on AI Visibility and 42 on the SII — it is easy to find but not trusted as a citation source. A domain that scores 70 on AI Visibility and 78 on the SII is a highly trusted, citation-ready source for the topics it covers.
The Five SII Components
- Retrieval Quality Score × 20% — how reliably content survives the six-stage AI retrieval pipeline
- Machine Trust Score × 25% — entity credibility, schema alignment, external validation, contradiction absence, decay resistance
- Authority Velocity Score × 15% — whether trust signals are growing, stable, or declining across audits
- Recommendation Surface Score × 20% — coverage across AI Overviews, chat, voice, and agent discovery surfaces
- Entity Authenticity Confidence × 20% — absence of synthetic entity patterns that degrade trust model confidence
Why Machine Trust Weights Highest
Machine Trust carries the highest weight (25%) because it is the most foundational. Retrieval quality, recommendation surface coverage, and entity authenticity are all downstream of trust. A domain with a Machine Trust Score below 40 will struggle to maintain high scores on the other four dimensions regardless of how much content or technical optimization is applied. Trust is the substrate. Everything else builds on it.
●The SII requires at least one complete audit including Layer 4 analysis. It is available on Pro and Agency plans. Free and Starter plans receive the AI Visibility Score but not the SII. The SII requires all five Layer 4 components to have non-null scores — partial audits produce a partial SII with the components available.
SII vs. AI Visibility Score: When to Use Which
Use the AI Visibility Score to diagnose technical extraction and entity problems — the kind of issues that can be fixed in a single sprint with schema changes, content restructuring, and entity consistency work. Use the SII to track strategic trust health over time — it requires multiple audits to show meaningful velocity, and improvements come from sustained content quality, external validation growth, and contradiction resolution rather than one-time technical fixes.
What a High SII Looks Like
Domains with SII above 75 typically share four characteristics: entity data is consistent and externally validated across at least three independent sources, content is organized into coherent topical clusters with no major semantic drift, schema markup accurately describes page content without over-claiming, and the domain has been audited at least twice with positive velocity on Entity Confidence and Citation Probability. The SII is earned over time — it is not something that can be optimized in one sprint.
See your domain's SII alongside all twelve intelligence scores.
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