Introducing aura+: A new lens for visibility, authority, and trust in the age of AI discovery
Over the last 12–18 months, AI has quietly become one of the most influential channels shaping how buyers research companies, products, and services. More and more discovery is happening inside platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity before someone ever visits a brand’s website.
Instead of browsing pages or clicking through search results, buyers are asking questions like:
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- “What companies are leaders in [category]?”
- “What solutions should I evaluate for [problem]?”
- “Which providers are trusted for [need]?”
AI systems analyze thousands of sources across the web and generate a single synthesized answer.
Those answers increasingly determine:
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- Which brands are recommended
- Which companies are cited
- Which competitors appear more frequently
- and ultimately, which organizations buyers trust
In other words: AI is quickly becoming the new gatekeeper of brand authority.
The Shift in Signals: AI Authority
For decades, search strategy focused on optimizing pages and rankings. But AI-driven discovery introduces a different dynamic.
Instead of just ranking pages, AI systems evaluate credibility, authority signals, and narrative consistency across the web to determine which brands deserve to be recommended.
The signals shaping visibility now include:
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- Third-party credibility and citations
- Brand authority across trusted sources
- Consistent narrative signals across the web
- Structured content and knowledge signals
- Expert recognition and industry presence
When these signals are strong, AI systems tend to surface and recommend the brand. When they are weak or fragmented, competitors often appear instead. Yet most organizations today have very little visibility into how AI platforms actually represent their brand.
And that lack of insight creates both risk and opportunity.
Introducing aura+ 
At Chartis, SEO has long been a core part of how we help organizations build digital visibility and authority.
As AI-driven discovery reshapes how buyers research and evaluate solutions, expanding into AI authority and trust optimization became a natural evolution.
To support this shift, we developed aura+.
aura+ analyzes how leading AI platforms discover, interpret, and position a brand inside the answers customers increasingly rely on.
It helps reveal critical questions such as:
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- How AI platforms position your brand relative to competitors
- Whether external trust signals reinforce or contradict your narrative
- Where authority signals are strong (or underdeveloped)
- Which prompts and buying questions shape visibility in your category
- What signals influence recommendation likelihood
In short: aura+ turns AI discovery from a black box into something measurable and understandable.
A Strategic Intelligence Layer, Not Another Tool
It’s important to us to clarify what aura+ is and what it isn’t.
aura+ is not a SaaS product. It is a strategic intelligence layer we use within Chartis to help organizations understand how AI platforms evaluate trust, authority, and credibility in their category.
The goal is not to simply generate a score or report.
The goal is to open strategic conversations with leadership teams about a new dimension of visibility that many organizations haven’t yet measured.
Once those insights are understood, we activate the ecosystem of best-in-class platforms and partners that help execute improvement.
This includes platforms such as:
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- SEMrush for SEO and AI optimization capabilities
- Profound for deeper AI visibility monitoring and intelligence
- and others
Together, these technologies help operationalize the insights aura+ uncovers.
In that sense, aura+ serves as the strategic layer that connects AI authority insights to execution.
Why This Matters Now
Many brands today still appear strong on paper.
1. They rank well in traditional search.
2. They have well-designed websites.
3. They invest heavily in content.
Yet when we analyze how AI platforms actually describe them, the results are often surprising.
We frequently see:
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- Competitors cited more often
- Outdated or incomplete narratives repeated
- Authority signals coming from unexpected sources
- Strong brands underrepresented in AI-generated answers
At the same time, the companies addressing these gaps early are gaining a meaningful advantage.
They are strengthening the signals that AI systems rely on to determine which brands deserve to be trusted and recommended. And that advantage compounds quickly as AI becomes more embedded in buyer research behavior.
The Opportunity Ahead
AI discovery is still evolving. But one thing is becoming clear:
Trust signals will determine visibility.
Organizations that understand how AI platforms interpret credibility and authority will be far better positioned to shape their narrative. Those that ignore this shift risk losing control of how their brand is represented during one of the most important moments in the buyer journey: early research and evaluation.
Our goal with aura+ is simple: To help organizations see how AI sees them and to strengthen the signals that build authority, credibility, and trust.
See How AI Sees Your Brand
If AI is increasingly shaping how buyers discover and evaluate companies, an important question emerges:
Does AI trust your brand?
Run a quick aura+ audit to explore:
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- Which prompts your brand appears in
- How competitors compare
- Where authority signals are strongest or weakest
- Where narrative gaps exist
Explore your brand’s AI authority:
