CEI Methodology

Measure exactly what moves your products toward the recommendation.

The Commerce Eligibility Index (CEI) turns 16 signals across five pillars into a clear 0 to 100 view of your catalog's AI discoverability. See what is already creating an advantage, where the strongest growth opportunities sit, and which improvements can move more products onto the AI shortlist.

Five pillars

A shared language for stronger recommendations.

Five practical questions help product, ecommerce, merchandising, and technical teams see the same catalog clearly and work from one plan.

Foundation

Is the catalog data clean and complete enough for AI to read?

Differentiation

Can products be told apart, or do they collapse into generic clusters?

Retrieval

Can AI find the right products for a realistic shopping need and all of its constraints?

Integrity

Do generated claims reconcile with catalog evidence, and is supporting review evidence informative?

Authority

What do independent reviews, AI providers, and video sources say about your visibility and authority?

The 16 signals

16 signals that turn AI discoverability into action.

Foundation

Attribute completeness, terminology consistency, visual quality, and video discoverability.

Differentiation

Differentiation strength, tradeoff density, and cluster separability.

Retrieval

Retrieval quality and constraint satisfaction.

Integrity

Hallucination rate, evidence coverage, and owned-review sentiment.

Authority

Independent-review sentiment, brand-mention density, AI discoverability, and video authority.

How measurement works

Every score has receipts.

CatalogSignal combines web-crawl and product-feed evidence, authorized inputs, local retrieval tests, reviews, authority sources, video evidence, and AI-provider responses into one traceable measurement.

Provider evidence can include OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, and Perplexity. Every run preserves the provider, model, query set, product-level evidence, and failures behind the score, so teams can move from the number to the fix.

How the score works

A score your team can trust and act on.

Each measurable signal produces a value on a common scale. Measured signals roll up into pillars, and the available pillars combine into the 0 to 100 CEI. Geometric aggregation keeps a genuine weak area from being fully hidden by an unrelated strength.

Every result keeps observed performance separate from gaps in available evidence. Coverage, confidence, access mode, and methodology era travel with the score, giving teams a clear basis for action.

AI-Ready · 75 to 100

High readiness across the measured signal set.

Partially Ready · 55 to 74

Usable foundation with meaningful improvement opportunities.

At Risk · 40 to 54

Material gaps across the measured signal set.

Critical · 0 to 39

Serious measured gaps.

Crawl Only

Useful crawl diagnostics and a clear path toward full CEI scoring.

Unmeasurable

A clear evidence-needed state that tells the team what must be supplied next.

Rescoring over time

The same instrument, before and after.

Rescoring runs Diagnose again across the same pillars and the same signals, so improvement is measured by the instrument that set the baseline.

Each cycle adds to a longitudinal view of readiness: where the catalog started, what changed, and how far it moved. Because coverage, confidence, access mode, and methodology era travel with every score, the comparison stays honest as the catalog and the methodology evolve.

Comparable and Authorized CEI

See more of the catalog with authorized evidence.

Comparable CEI shows the public view of the catalog. Authorized CEI adds approved private inputs to give teams a richer, more complete picture and a sharper improvement plan.

The CEI Benchmark

See where your catalog can pull ahead.

The CEI Benchmark spans 100 brands across 10 retail verticals on a governed common basis, helping teams see category patterns and identify the improvements that can create separation.

Every benchmark release reports its measured set, query volume, providers, and methodology era alongside the results.

Is this SEO for AI?

Make SEO, AEO, GEO, PIM, and feed work stronger at the product-data layer.

SEO gets a page found. CEI shows whether AI can understand, compare, trust, and support recommendations from the products on that page, then gives teams the plan to improve them.

Turn insight into momentum

Turn measurement into recommendation advantage.

Use one evidence-backed view to choose the next best fixes, prove the change, and keep more products ready to be recommended.

Get a preliminary catalog check