Every AI visibility company hands you a number. Almost none of them will let you show it to anyone else. The score lives in a dashboard only the vendor controls — they can change it, it flatters you by design, and it vanishes the day you stop paying. That's not a record. It's a rental.
A registry is the opposite of a dashboard. It's the public, permanent side of the ledger: a credential you can point a customer, an investor, or another AI at — and they can check it without taking anyone's word for it. In a category this young, where "scores" are handed out like candy, the registry is the thing that turns a claim into a fact.
A dashboard asks you to trust the vendor. A registry lets you verify without them. That single difference is the whole game.
What a real registry has to have.
Not every "public results page" is a registry. A real one clears four bars — and most vendor dashboards fail the first.
- Public. The credential is posted where anyone can find and read it — not locked behind a login the vendor switches off when you leave.
- Dated. Every entry is time-stamped, so a result can be re-checked against the day it was measured. AI answers change; a registry entry says exactly when this one was true.
- Method-linked. Each entry links to the disclosed test behind it — the engines queried and the buyer questions asked — so the number is reproducible, not asserted.
- Honest about losses. It shows the engines that don't name you yet, not just the wins. A results page that only shows wins is an advertisement with a certificate border.
Why the registry, not the dashboard, is the trustworthy part.
The trust problem in this category is structural: the company that issues your score is usually the same company you'd pay to raise it. It grades its own homework, and the number always goes up. A private dashboard makes that impossible to audit — you can only see what the vendor chooses to show you.
A registry removes the issuer from the equation. Because the entry is public, dated, and linked to a disclosed method, an outside party — a competitor, a journalist, or another AI agent consulting the record — can reproduce the check and confirm it. The credential stands on verification, not reputation. That's why PRAGMA publishes every score, high or low, to the public registry rather than a dashboard we control.
Each credential records whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews name the business when buyers ask who's best in its category and market — the exact questions disclosed in the published method.
The score separates the pillars — answer-engine visibility, parametric (model-memory) visibility, and local presence — so a single blended grade can't hide which one is failing.
We freeze a baseline before any work, date every entry, and publish the losses beside the wins. And we never claim a registered score predicts revenue — we report what the engines actually say. That's the difference between a registry and a leaderboard.
A registry entry isn't a promise. It's a receipt.
Anyone can say their credential is honest. A registry means you don't have to believe them — you can open the entry and read it yourself.
Look at a real one: Brand 9 Signs — AAIR™ 48/100, Commercial Signage, Jacksonville. It's our own founder's 40-year signage company, which is exactly why we could open every number. The entry is dated, links to the method, and shows that Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews name the business in its market — while honestly flagging the engines that don't yet. Same test anyone could re-run. That's what a credential looks like when it's on the record instead of in a dashboard.
If a provider can only show you a number inside a login — one you can't reproduce, can't date, and can't point anyone else at — you're looking at a dashboard, not a registry. And a score no one else can verify was never really yours to begin with.
Are you the answer?
Run the disclosed check on your own business and earn a credential you can actually show — public, dated, and verifiable, not a number locked in someone's dashboard.
Are you the answer? Find out