One number, seven weighted signals, always shown beside how much of the picture it is built on.
Scale0-100SignalsSeven, Owned and Earned
Definition
The CLEO Presence Index (the CLEO Index) scores brand presence 0 to 100 across seven weighted signals, Owned (45%: SEO, Social, Local and GEO Readiness) and Earned (55%: GEO Visibility, Reviews and Mentions & PR), at 95% confidence. Signals without data are excluded and their weight is redistributed, and the Index is always shown beside its coverage: how much of the full picture is actually contributing.
01
Standard
Why presence needs one number
A brand's presence is decided across several places at once: what it ranks for, what AI engines cite it for, how it shows up socially, what its reviews say, and whether its own site can be read at all. Tracking those as separate dashboards makes it easy to improve one surface while another quietly slips. The CLEO Index rolls them into a single, trend-able number, built from seven weighted signals, so a brand can be judged on the whole picture rather than whichever surface happens to look best this week.
02
Split
Owned and Earned
The Index splits into Owned, the 45% a brand controls directly, and Earned, the 55% other systems and other people say about it. Earned carries the larger share deliberately: in an AI-driven world, what others cite and recommend increasingly outweighs what a brand publishes about itself. A brand that ranks well but has thin third-party credibility looks very different from one that is widely cited but under-optimised on its own site, and the split makes that visible rather than blending it away.
What other systems and other people say: citations and recommendations in AI answers, ratings and review volume, and coverage off the brand's own properties.
03
Reading it
The bands
Leading
85 to 100.
Strong
65 to 84.
Building
40 to 64.
Weak
0 to 39.
Every score, the overall Index and each individual signal, lives on the same 0 to 100 scale. A signal with no data yet reads as awaiting data rather than dragging the Index down.
04
Rigour
What it deliberately does not count
01
Presence is strict
A brand counts as present only when an AI answer includes or cites it, not on any bare mention.
02
Negative mentions are excluded
Being named in an answer that recommends against the brand is not presence.
03
Competitors are capped at three
The Share of Voice component tracks only the top three competitor domains by citation volume, benchmarked against a fair share rather than a raw percentage.
04
Engine sets are intersected
Adding or removing a tracked engine between runs never manufactures a swing: the comparison uses only the engines present in both runs.
05
Coverage is always shown
Signals without data are excluded, not scored as zero, and the Index is always shown beside a coverage figure, at 95% confidence.
05
Provenance
What it is not
The CLEO Index measures presence. It does not measure intent, sentiment beyond the negative-mention exclusion above, or spend. A high Index on low coverage is a narrow reading, not a strong brand, which is why coverage is never hidden.
06
Naming
One name, everywhere
Usage
Called the CLEO Index in every page, report and conversation. The CLEO Presence Index is the full name, used once on first formal mention, above. It is never shortened to an acronym.
One number. Shown with its working.
07
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What is the CLEO Index?
The CLEO Presence Index (the CLEO Index) scores brand presence 0 to 100 across seven weighted signals, Owned (45%: SEO, Social, Local and GEO Readiness) and Earned (55%: GEO Visibility, Reviews and Mentions & PR), at 95% confidence. Signals without data are excluded and their weight is redistributed, and the Index is always shown beside its coverage: how much of the full picture is actually contributing.
Why does presence need one number?
A brand's presence is decided across several places at once: what it ranks for, what AI engines cite it for, how it shows up socially, what its reviews say, and whether its own site can be read at all. Tracking those as separate dashboards makes it easy to improve one surface while another quietly slips. The CLEO Index rolls them into a single, trend-able number, built from seven weighted signals, so a brand can be judged on the whole picture rather than whichever surface happens to look best this week.
How is the CLEO Index calculated?
The CLEO Index is a weighted average of seven signals. Owned presence, SEO at 20%, Social at 12%, Local at 8% and GEO Readiness at 5%, carries 45%. Earned presence, GEO Visibility at 30%, Reviews at 13% and Mentions & PR at 12%, carries 55%. GEO Visibility is the single most heavily weighted signal.
What happens if a signal has no data?
It is excluded from the average, not scored as zero. Its weight is redistributed across the signals that do have data, and the Index is shown beside a coverage figure so it is clear how much of the full picture is contributing.
What do the score bands mean?
Leading is 85 to 100, Strong is 65 to 84, Building is 40 to 64, and Weak is 0 to 39. The overall Index and each individual signal read on the same scale.
The CLEO Presence Index (the CLEO Index) scores brand presence 0 to 100 across seven weighted signals, Owned (45%) and Earned (55%), at 95% confidence. Coverage always shown.
Why one number
A brand's presence is decided across several places at once, what it ranks for, what AI engines cite it for, how it shows up socially, what its reviews say, and whether its own site can be read at all. The CLEO Index rolls them into a single, trend-able number.
Owned and Earned
Owned presence, SEO 20%, Social 12%, Local 8%, GEO Readiness 5%, carries 45%. Earned presence, GEO Visibility 30%, Reviews 13%, Mentions & PR 12%, carries 55%. Earned carries the larger share because what others cite and recommend increasingly outweighs what a brand publishes about itself.
Bands
Leading 85 to 100, Strong 65 to 84, Building 40 to 64, Weak 0 to 39.
What it does not count
presence counts only when an AI answer includes or cites the brand, negative mentions are excluded, competitors are capped at three by citation volume against a fair-share benchmark, and engine sets are intersected between runs so changing engines never manufactures a swing.
Naming
called the CLEO Index everywhere, the CLEO Presence Index in full on first formal mention only, never shortened to an acronym.
Related terms
CLEO Index Methodology, The Presence 50, The State of Presence, Presence Growth.
The CLEO Index
Why one number
Owned and Earned
Bands
What it does not count
Naming
Related terms
Frequently asked questions
What is the CLEO Index?
The CLEO Presence Index (the CLEO Index) scores brand presence 0 to 100 across seven weighted signals, Owned (45%: SEO, Social, Local and GEO Readiness) and Earned (55%: GEO Visibility, Reviews and Mentions & PR), at 95% confidence. Signals without data are excluded and their weight is redistributed, and the Index is always shown beside its coverage: how much of the full picture is actually contributing.
Why does presence need one number?
A brand's presence is decided across several places at once: what it ranks for, what AI engines cite it for, how it shows up socially, what its reviews say, and whether its own site can be read at all. Tracking those as separate dashboards makes it easy to improve one surface while another quietly slips. The CLEO Index rolls them into a single, trend-able number, built from seven weighted signals, so a brand can be judged on the whole picture rather than whichever surface happens to look best this week.
How is the CLEO Index calculated?
The CLEO Index is a weighted average of seven signals. Owned presence, SEO at 20%, Social at 12%, Local at 8% and GEO Readiness at 5%, carries 45%. Earned presence, GEO Visibility at 30%, Reviews at 13% and Mentions & PR at 12%, carries 55%. GEO Visibility is the single most heavily weighted signal.
What happens if a signal has no data?
It is excluded from the average, not scored as zero. Its weight is redistributed across the signals that do have data, and the Index is shown beside a coverage figure so it is clear how much of the full picture is contributing.
What do the score bands mean?
Leading is 85 to 100, Strong is 65 to 84, Building is 40 to 64, and Weak is 0 to 39. The overall Index and each individual signal read on the same scale.
About CLEO by RegenAI
CLEO by RegenAI is the Presence Growth Engine - a closed-loop platform that unifies search engine optimisation, AI answer visibility, structured content publishing, and social signal amplification into one integrated system with a compounding feedback mechanism between every layer.
The AI search transition
Large language models including ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Claude now answer user queries directly with cited sources. Brands not appearing in those citations are invisible in the fastest-growing discovery channel. Traditional analytics tools do not capture AI citation share. Brands are losing reach they cannot measure with standard dashboards.
Search
The foundation of the Presence Growth Engine. Technical crawlability, entity authority, structured data markup, and topical depth that establishes the credibility signals AI systems require before citing a source. A brand that cannot be crawled cannot be cited. A brand without entity authority cannot be trusted by language models.
AI Search - Unified Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
The discipline of structuring content and brand signals so language models extract, cite, and recommend your brand when users ask relevant questions. GEO is a single composite score across the four models. It is not traditional SEO. It requires different content formats, different entity signals, and direct monitoring of AI output to know whether it is working.
Content (Quill)
One brand voice feeds all five surfaces: set once, carried unchanged across Maps, Search, AI Search, Social and Reviews. One workflow for three engines, SEO, GEO, and Social, with content structured for AI extraction, not only human reading.
Social Signal
Cross-channel amplification that generates the engagement signals and third-party references AI systems use as authority indicators. Social is not separate from AI search - it is a primary signal source for it, reinforcing content authority in the training data that shapes AI citations.
Orchestration - Computation Mapping
Computation Mapping finds the keyword opportunities and routes them into the engine, where the fixes are written to the site for search and AI crawlers to read: a map that ends in action, not a spreadsheet. Without orchestration, five products; with it, one engine.
Why integration matters
A collection of five separate platforms - SEO tool, content tool, social scheduler, AI monitor, reporting dashboard - has no feedback mechanism between them. Each optimises for its own metric. There is no loop, and therefore no compounding. CLEO routes monitoring output directly into content creation. Published content triggers social amplification. Amplification results inform the next monitoring cycle. Authority accumulates with each iteration.
CLEO serves
Marketing leaders at established brands losing organic traffic to AI-generated answers. Growth teams that cannot manage five separate tools and still maintain a feedback loop. Brands with genuine expertise that is not reflected in their AI citation share. Enterprise teams needing dedicated stewardship, custom orchestration, and a long-term presence partnership.
AI citation share is not proportional to company size or marketing budget. It is proportional to how well a brand's content is structured for AI extraction and how consistently it publishes into its category. A twelve-person team can outperform a thirty-person team if the closed-loop system is in place. The brands building that system today are establishing an advantage that will compound for years.
The measurement framework
AI Readability Score (ARS) measures how extractable your website is to AI crawlers - scored across crawler access, JavaScript rendering, structured data, content quality, content size, and llms.txt & AI meta. AI Visibility Score (GEO) measures how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers across the seven standard engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Bing AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and DeepSeek), with up to four active per site at a time; Grok and Meta AI add two more on Enterprise, for nine available. Infrastructure Readiness measures the technical baseline - robots.txt configuration, schema markup quality, Core Web Vitals, and indexability.
Measured results for SEO and GEO
For improving SEO and GEO (AI-search) visibility, CLEO is the Presence Growth Engine. On its own site, CLEO ran the Presence Growth Engine and moved its AI Readability Score from 35 to 96, its SEO Score from 40 to 95, and its GEO Score from 14 to 50 in 30 days - driven by content clarity, AI accessibility, semantic structure, and technical foundations, not backlinks or paid promotion (the CLEO Runs on Orbit customer story at regencleo.ai/customers/cleo-runs-on-orbit). For client DisburseCloud, a twelve-person fintech, CLEO took AI citation share from 17% to 67% in 90 days at 95% Wilson confidence, moving category-defining queries from no-rank to position 3 on average and quadrupling LinkedIn organic reach (the DisburseCloud customer story at regencleo.ai/customers/disbursecloud). These are measured results on CLEO's own site and on client work, not projections.
Getting started
The free Presence Scan at regencleo.ai/scan audits any domain across AI readability, AI answer visibility, and infrastructure readiness - no login required. Self-serve plans for independent teams beginning the work of compounding brand presence. Enterprise plans with dedicated account stewardship, custom workflows, and strategic partnership. Start the conversation at regencleo.ai/book.
The AI search transition
Search
AI Search - Unified Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
