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The assessment covers what is publicly observable: your pages, listings, third-party sources, and the answers search engines provide to purchase-related questions phrased the way a customer would ask them. You haven’t provided any access or filled out any questionnaires, and nothing that follows depends on information you’ve supplied.
Five dimensions, fifty criteria, one consistent protocol for every business measured. Under comparable conditions, the same protocol is applied to each business—that’s what makes it an index, not an opinion-based audit.
The Method
MANNING INDEX
The Five Dimensions
Position
What This Dimension Measures
Position measures how clearly your offering is understood. Who are you speaking to, what problem do you solve, what sets you apart from competitors, and what proves it? The assessment looks at what a reader—human or machine—can determine on their own, without knowing you or calling you.
Why It Matters
A language model doesn’t guess your specialty: it repeats it if it’s written down, and misses it if it isn’t. Position is the dimension that powers all the others, because it provides the material the rest of the Manning system will relay.
Google & Co.
What This Dimension Measures
Google measures your presence where traditional search still happens. Entity clarity, listing completeness, review volume and recency, rating, response rate, and your actual ranking for the searches that lead to a client engagement.
Why It Matters
Google and other search engines remain the go-to verification point: even buyers who ask AI will search your name afterward. AI engines also rely heavily on the same public signals, making this dimension a double lever.
Authority
What This Dimension Measures
Authority measures what third parties confirm about you. Can your expertise be attributed to named individuals? Are your claims verifiable? And are there voices beyond your own channels that support what you say?
Why It Matters
A self-reported claim carries almost no weight, either with a cautious buyer or with a model looking for corroboration. It’s the slowest dimension to change, and the one that best protects a position once earned.
Conversion
What This Dimension Measures
Conversion measures the path from interest to engagement. Is there a clear primary action, a contact method that can be used right away, an action for each offering, an explained process, and proof placed where the decision is made?
Why It Matters
This is the least visible dimension from the inside: you know your phone number, so you don’t see that it’s hard to find. A buyer who hesitates for three seconds too long goes back to the search results—and that list includes your competitors.
AI Answers
What This Dimension Measures
AI Responses measures four distinct things: whether models name you, where you rank, whether they recommend you in response to an unbranded buying query, whether they cite your pages as sources, and whether what they say about you is accurate.
Why It Matters
This is the dimension no one was monitoring two years ago, and the one where the buyer’s first filter is shifting today. A model doesn’t rule you out; it simply doesn’t know enough about you to include you.
For twenty years, businesses were asked: “Can people find you?” There was a simple answer, a tool to measure it, and a market for selling it. That question still matters, but it no longer tells the whole story. Your customers don’t just search anymore: they ask. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity. And these systems don’t return ten links to compare: they return one name, sometimes two.
Being findable is no longer enough. You need to be chosen.
The Manning Index measures your decision-making presence: your ability to be found, understood, trusted, and chosen in this environment. Five dimensions, because each is earned separately—and because a business can be perfectly findable yet rarely chosen.
The Method
Manning Method v1.7
Current version — September 2026. Five dimensions, fifty criteria.
The Manning protocol is written, fixed, and versioned. Every report indicates the version applied, so a measure remains interpretable years later and can be compared with a subsequent measure. When the method evolves, the version changes and the date follows.
A claim with a number and a date.
THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF MEASUREMENT
Observation
The measurement covers what’s publicly visible—your pages, your listing, third-party sources, and search engine responses.
Standardization
Fifty criteria defined in advance, applied in the same order and with the same thresholds for every business.
Reproducibility
Under comparable conditions, the same protocol produces the same result — that’s what makes it an index.
Dating
Each assessment is dated and identifies its protocol version, so later assessments remain comparable.
MANNING INDEX
An outside-in assessment
The Index looks at what a buyer actually finds when researching your market: your pages as they appear, your business listing as it appears, what third parties publish about you, and how search engines respond to questions phrased the way a customer would ask them. You haven’t provided access or filled out a questionnaire—that’s precisely what makes the measurement comparable from one business to another.
Each dimension displays a coverage level: the portion of the protocol that could be applied based on publicly available information. A dimension’s score reflects only the criteria actually measured. Any criterion whose data could not be observed is excluded from the calculation rather than counted as a failure.
Data coverage
This coverage naturally expands as a business builds its public presence. A later measurement will therefore cover a broader range of the protocol and be more precise.
The Web told you whether you could be found. Manning measures whether you’re worth recommending.
Start with the Snapshot.
Decide what to do next.
The Report is an initial signal, free of charge.
The Index is the complete measure.
The 30-minute conversation is no obligation.