Paid plans, Starter and above
Founder and authority signals
Buyers and models both look for humans behind the brand. This category measures how visible and credible those humans are.
What we check
- Whether named people appear on the site with roles and credentials
- Founder or executive presence on relevant public platforms
- Thought-leadership footprint: articles, talks, mentions
- Consistency between personal and company positioning
- Third-party corroboration of stated expertise
Why it matters commercially
Anonymous brands are discounted by buyers and under-cited by AI systems, which favour content with identifiable, corroborated authorship.
Example findings
- No named person appears anywhere on the site, including the about page.
- Founder profile describes a different specialism than the company website.
The checklist we run
6 fixed checks. Each one is graded pass, needs attention, failed or not applicable, with the fact we observed printed beside the verdict. The category score is the weighted pass rate of these checks — nothing is invented.
Real people are named
Leadership is named on the site, not anonymous.
high impact · low effort
Bios establish credibility
Bios state relevant experience, not just job titles.
medium impact · low effort
Photos of the team are published
Real photography, not stock or avatars.
low impact · low effort
Leadership profiles are active
Public professional profiles exist and are current.
medium impact · medium effort
Published points of view
Articles, talks or interviews carry the leader's thinking.
medium impact · high effort
Independent mentions exist
Press, podcasts or citations reference the leadership.
medium impact · high effort
Where the evidence comes from
- This category is judged from the pages and public profiles we retrieve for your brand, read directly rather than through a third-party data provider.
If a source is unreachable we mark it unavailable and exclude it. A blocked source lowers data coverage, never your score.
What the deep dive adds
On any paid plan you can run this category on its own. The deep dive re-reads the pages we retrieved with only these 6 checks in front of it, returns a verdict page by page, prints the measured data behind each finding, and orders the fixes by impact and effort. It uses one audit from your monthly allowance.
What you need to provide
founder or leadership profiles Without it this category is marked Not assessed and excluded from your score rather than guessed at.
Industry brand audits
See how this section is scored for your sector: accounting & bookkeeping firms brand audit, architecture & design studios brand audit, automotive brand audit, biotech & life sciences brand audit. Browse all industries.
Read more on this
Founder Profile vs Company Page: Aligning B2B Brand Voice
Align founder personal branding and B2B company channels. Learn how to establish narrative swimlanes that reinforce corporate authority without diluting positioning.
LinkedIn Content Strategy for B2B Brand Authority
Learn how a structured LinkedIn B2B strategy turns executive profiles and company pages into a verifiable authority engine that buyers and AI discovery platforms trust.
The other scored categories
Brand foundation
Reputation & social
Website experience
Paid media
Local presence
Editorial policy
Questions
Founder & authority: common questions
Why audit the founder at all?
For many businesses the founder is the most searched and most quoted part of the brand. This category checks whether a named person is publicly attached to the business and whether their public profile agrees with the brand's positioning.
What do you need from us?
Founder or leadership names and public profile links at intake. Without them the category is not assessed and excluded from the score — it is never inferred.
Do you use private or personal information?
No. Only the public professional information you point us at.
Which plan includes this category?
It is scored on paid plans from Starter upward. On the free scan it is shown locked, with the number of checks behind it, rather than partially guessed at.
What does the deep dive add over the overview report?
The overview scores this category in one pass over your site. The deep dive re-reads the same pages against all 6 checks on their own, returns a page-by-page verdict, prints the measured data behind each finding, and orders the fixes by impact and effort. It uses one audit from your monthly allowance.
Want it done for you?
The audit tells you what to fix. If you'd rather not do the fixing, The Branded Agency can take it from here.
Audit-holder rate
Copywriting rewrite
We take the findings from your audit and rewrite the messaging across your site: one clear promise, consistent supporting messages, and copy that search and answer systems can quote correctly.
Start the rewrite
Work with us directly
Strategic brand engagement
A strategist-led engagement that fixes the brand underneath the copy: positioning, story, personality and the message architecture every channel runs on.
Book your strategy call
The report identifies the signals. We find the causes.
Diagnosis is free. Fixing the cause is what our brand strategy and marketing services are for — see the results across our client work.