Domain Authority

Domain Authority is dead. Not because Moz said so, but because the metric was built for a world where humans clicked through ten blue links. That world is gone. In its place, a new measurement has emerged: Share of Model, the probability that an AI recommends your brand when a user asks a relevant question. What Is Share of Model? Share of Model (SoM) is the percentage of times your brand appears in AI-generated responses across a set of representative queries for your category. Unlike Domain Authority, which estimates your likelihood of ranking on Google, Share of Model directly measures whether AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude mention you when potential customers ask questions you should be answering. ...

Domain Authority, the Moz metric that dominated SEO strategy for 18 years, is now measuring the wrong thing. In May 2026, Smart Money Media launched the first AI Authority Score, a tool that measures whether a brand is recognized, trusted, and surfaced by AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. The timing is not coincidental. A landmark Rand Fishkin study published in March 2026 analyzed the top 5,000 websites and found that brand entity strength now outperforms topical depth in determining which sources AI engines cite. The metric that defined search visibility for two decades is being replaced by one that measures something fundamentally different: whether AI recommends you. ...