The Entity Trust Score (ETS) is the framework CiteWorks uses to assess a brand's citation eligibility across generative engines. Where traditional SEO focuses on link equity, ETS focuses on verifiability and consistency, the signals AI retrievers weigh before quoting a source.

AI retrievers (the systems inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini that search the web) are programmed to avoid hallucination by preferring sources that exhibit high trust signals across five specific dimensions.

The 5 Dimensions of Entity Trust

1. Citation Quality (D1)

The density of verifiable facts on a page versus vague marketing claims. AI retrievers quote passages that contain concrete identifiers (CAS numbers, founding years, specific certifications) rather than vague marketing adjectives.

2. Authority Footprint (D2)

The presence of the entity across high-authority third-party nodes. This includes earned media (Reddit, Wikipedia, trade press) and industry-specific directories. A brand that exists only on its own domain has a low D2 score.

3. Entity Consistency (D3)

The alignment of core facts (NAP: Name, Address, Phone, plus registry identifiers like CIN/GSTIN) across the web. Conflicts in founding dates or locations between your website and your LinkedIn profile trigger "entity disambiguation" errors, lowering trust.

4. Retrievability & Freshness (D4)

The technical path for AI crawlers. This includes the absence of 403/WAF blocks for bots like GPTBot and ClaudeBot, and the regular update frequency of core pages. Stale pages (>90 days) are penalized by engines like Perplexity.

5. Disambiguation Anchors (D5)

The use of unique registry identifiers (DUNS, LEI, VAT) and Schema.org JSON-LD to explicitly link your website to the global knowledge graph. This is the "wire" that tells the AI exactly which entity you are.

Why ETS Matters for GEO

Moving a weak dimension from a 2/10 to a 5/10 provides a significantly higher ROI in AI visibility than perfecting a dimension where you already score highly. Our audit identifies your weakest link and fixes it first.