What WVGI actually measures
WVGI is not one measurement pretending to be simple. It's eight dimensions, weighted and blended into a single number with a confidence band — because a business's visibility genuinely has eight different failure modes, and collapsing them into one score without saying which ones are strong or weak would hide exactly the information that makes the score useful.
The eight dimensions, and their weight
Search discoverability (18%) — can search engines find and index the site at all. Answer & AI authority (14%) — does the business show up when an AI assistant is asked. Local reach (14%) — map-pack visibility and listing completeness. Entity trust (14%) — whether the business's identity is stated in a form machines can verify. Content usefulness (13%) — does the site actually answer what someone searched for. Technical accessibility (10%) — crawlability, speed, mobile setup. Authority network (9%) — the strength of sites linking back. Conversion readiness (8%) — whether a visitor who arrives can actually reach the business.
Where each dimension's data actually comes from
None of the eight are self-reported. Search discoverability and Technical accessibility come from a real crawl plus Search Console. Local reach and part of Entity trust come from the connected Business Profile. Answer & AI authority comes from cold probes and live-search probes run against the actual model providers. Authority network comes from Bing Webmaster's real backlink data, with DataForSEO as the paid step up. Content usefulness and Conversion readiness are read from the site itself and, once connected, from the privacy-respecting WUWI tag. Every dimension traces back to a source that can be checked, not a proprietary black box.
A worked example
Take a fictional business — Brightline Electric, Portland, OR. A first crawl plus free Search Console and Business Profile connections might land Search discoverability at 81% covered, Local reach and Entity trust both around 73%, and Answer & AI authority at 44% (cold-probe only, no live-search probes run yet). Authority network sits at 0% until Bing Webmaster is connected. Blended and weighted, that's a WVGI in the low 60s with a wide confidence band — accurate to what's actually been measured, not padded to look more finished than it is.
Why the confidence band matters more than the number
A WVGI of 61 with a likely range of 54–68 and one connected only to a crawl is a different claim than the same 61 with five sources feeding it. The band narrows as more of the eight dimensions get real data instead of an estimate — which is also why connecting Search Console and Business Profile (both free) is the single highest-leverage thing an account can do before touching anything else.
The weights themselves are launch hypotheses, not fixed forever — they get recalibrated by business type and by watching what actually correlates with outcomes over time.