How Discoverable measures client capture, and what the score does not claim

A 0–100 measure of how well a firm is positioned to be found, trusted and contacted when a potential client is choosing a lawyer. It is built from five outcome components, each weighted by how much it decides who gets the call.

Missing data never lowers the score — it lowers confidence. A component we could not measure is excluded from the score and reflected in a confidence grade (A–D) by how much of the 100-point weight we actually measured. "Not connected" is a coverage fact, never a poor result. As more of your market is connected, confidence rises toward A.

One readiness input to Authority & corroboration — not the headline. Every located directory profile is scored against these ten weighted checks (summing to 100); a check we cannot evaluate is excluded, never counted as a failure, and below 40% evaluable we publish no completeness number. Complete profiles help the web substantiate a firm, but they are an input to visibility, not visibility itself.

How much each directory contributes to AI answers is genuinely contested. Two published studies sampled different engines and disagree by up to fourfold, and on Lawyers.com, completely. We show the full range and rank fixes on the lower bound, so we never send a firm to spend time on a directory the evidence argues about.

When a page will not load, a directory blocks automated checks, or a profile is truncated, we report unknown, "could not check", with the reason. We never render that as "not listed." A directory we could not evaluate is excluded from your score and never appears in your fixes: our failure is not your chore.

The AI score is measured against the questions a potential client actually asks, organised by intent — immediate hiring, comparison & trust, problem & eligibility, cost & process — and weighted by how close the asker is to hiring and the case economics of the practice area. We test the highest-weighted questions for each firm and market. We never invent search volume: the honest claim is "we track the high-value questions clients ask when choosing a firm," never "N searches per month," which no one can measure at that precision.

Not by which gap is biggest — by which move is worth your time. Each candidate is weighed by the value of the client intent behind it, the size of the visibility gap, the competitive disadvantage (how many rivals win instead), the strength of the evidence for the cause, and how much you can actually control it — divided by cost and effort. We never punish a firm for what it cannot change, like distance. The result is one ordered list, the highest-value move first, with directory fixes as one kind of action among search, AI, authority, trust and conversion. That ranking is the product.

A baseline is preserved, the change and its completion date recorded, and after the next re-check the affected questions are re-tested against the ones the change should not have touched, with competitors re-measured alongside. Each result is labelled by confidence — verified improvement, likely influence, correlated improvement, no measurable effect yet, or insufficient evidence. "Verified" is only ever set by a real re-test, never asserted by whoever did the work.