Digital Authority Management
Managing the authority signals scattered across the web so that search and AI systems understand, trust and prefer a brand. Coined by Olaf Kopp in 2022.
What it actually means
Authority is not a number a site holds. It is an aggregate a machine computes from evidence distributed across many sources, most of them not yours, and much of it about people rather than domains.
Managing it means treating that distribution as the object: which sources carry your facts, whether they agree, whether the named humans behind the brand are themselves resolvable and credible.
Why the 2022 date matters
Kopp named this before the generative wave, and the framing has aged unusually well. Everything the current vocabulary says about corroboration and entity confidence is a restatement of the argument he was making about authority signals.
It is a useful corrective to the assumption that AI search invented the problem. What changed was the cost of getting it wrong, not the nature of it.