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Impact Score is a 0–100 number Cited computes for each opportunity it finds on your brand — a content gap, a competitor shift, a technical fix, a narrative angle. Higher means higher priority for your brand, given your current data.
Where you see this. Impact Score is an input, not a tile. It is one of the signals Cited uses to decide which opportunities become Tasks each week and how they are ordered. On your dashboard, each task carries a priority — High, Medium or Low — rather than a raw score. This page explains the reasoning behind that ordering.

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Why scores exist

Each refresh cycle surfaces several opportunities. Without prioritization, it’s hard to tell whether one affects a single low-volume prompt or spans dozens of high-intent ones where competitors dominate. Impact Score answers which one should I work on first?

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What the score weighs

Impact Score blends four signals into a single priority number:
  • How much of your prompt library the gap touches. A gap that affects 30 prompts is more urgent than one that affects 3.
  • How big the competitive gap is. The score treats offensive gaps (you trail a competitor) and defensive gaps (you lead, but a competitor is closing in) differently — both can be urgent, for different reasons.
  • How actionable the fix is. A technical fix you can deploy this week scores higher than a multi-quarter authority-building campaign.
  • How valuable the prompts are. Opportunities affecting commercial and transactional prompts score higher than purely informational ones.
The score is brand-relative: a 70 means “high priority on your brand’s scale”, not “high priority compared to every other Cited customer.” This matters because a brand with little dashboard history would otherwise see everything clustered at the bottom of a universal scale, even when the opportunity is genuinely the most important thing to do.

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Strategic alignment

If an opportunity’s topic matches the positioning you’ve declared in Settings → Brand Intent (the target attributes you want your brand to be known for), Impact Score lifts its priority — so the gaps that matter most to your strategic direction surface first. See Configure positioning for how to set this up. A small safeguard: if an opportunity is supported by only a handful of prompts, the strategic lift is capped — so a niche topic doesn’t reach top priority on thin evidence alone.

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The three bands

These bands are what surface as the priority label on each task.

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How Impact Score relates to estimated lift

Some opportunities also carry an estimated lift — a directional projection of how many percentage points of mention rate (or related visibility metric) you could expect to recover if the fix lands. The two numbers do different jobs:
  • Impact Score ranks opportunities against each other on your brand. It’s a priority tool.
  • Estimated lift projects the size of the prize. It’s a sizing tool.
A high-priority task with a modest estimated lift is still worth doing — it means the action is the most urgent on your brand even if the absolute lift is moderate.

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What Impact Score does NOT do

  • It does not predict the exact lift. That’s what the estimated-lift field is for, and even that is directional.
  • It does not account for your team’s capacity. A task can be high-priority on the data and still not the right thing to do this sprint based on bandwidth or roadmap context. The score is a starting point, not a project plan.
  • It is not comparable across brands. Brand A’s 60 is not the same as Brand B’s 60 — each is relative to that brand’s own ceiling.

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When the score changes

Impact Scores are recomputed on your weekly refresh cycle, alongside the Tasks they feed. Scores shift when the underlying inputs shift — new pipeline data changes how many prompts the gap covers, competitor visibility moves, or you add prompts to the library that change the supporting evidence. A swing of 5–10 points between cycles is normal.

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Frequently asked questions

The scores behind it recompute on each refresh cycle. They move when underlying inputs move — new pipeline data, competitor shifts, or prompt-library updates that change which prompts support the gap. A 5–10 point swing is normal between cycles, and that is enough to move an item across a band boundary.
Two common causes. First: your brand may be dominant in the category, with comfortable margins over competitors — the score correctly reflects low competitive urgency, which is not a bug. Second: very few pipeline runs so far. A new brand sees more items cluster at medium and low until enough data accumulates. If neither applies, contact support for a diagnostic review.
The computed score is applied uniformly and cannot be edited. You can add your own tasks and manage the queue directly, so use the ordering as a starting point and apply your own business context — it doesn’t know your team’s sprint capacity or strategic timing.
Impact Score ranks opportunities on priority (which to do first). Estimated lift sizes the potential return (how much mention rate could improve). One is sequencing, the other is sizing. They’re complementary, not the same.