Neural Cluster Influence (NCI)
Whaily’s proprietary 1-100 score for how much a source shapes AI answers in your category.
Neural Cluster Influence, or NCI, is a Whaily score from 1 to 100 that estimates how much a given source shapes the AI answers in your category. A source with a high NCI is one the models lean on repeatedly across the prompts you track, so earning presence there tends to move more answers than a source the models rarely cite.
NCI exists because not all citations are equal. A page cited once by one model on one prompt matters far less than a page cited by several models across many of your prompts. NCI weights sources by how often and how broadly they influence the answers that matter to you.
The score is relative to your tracked keywords, so it is not comparable across organisations or across algorithm versions. Whaily stores the algorithm version with every score so historical values are never silently recomputed under new logic. Use NCI as a ranking signal for where to invest, not as an absolute measure of a site’s quality.
Frequently asked questions
- What does a high NCI score mean?
- A high NCI means the source frequently and broadly shapes the AI answers in your category. Earning a mention or citation there is likely to influence more of your tracked answers than a low-NCI source.
- Are NCI scores comparable between companies?
- No. NCI is relative to each organisation’s tracked keywords, so scores are only meaningful within one workspace. Scores across algorithm versions are also not comparable without an explicit backfill.
Related terms
Whaily turns this from theory into measurement: which brands AI names in your category, and which sources shape those answers, tracked across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.