What Is the Authority Index?
Most LinkedIn tools tell you what to write. The Authority Index tells you what actually works, and it can prove it, because it is a database, not a set of opinions.
The one-sentence version
The Authority Index is a structured database of 29,599 LinkedIn posts from 53 of the highest-performing B2B creators on the platform, with every post classified across 100+ fields. It is the evidence base every Authority Lab analysis runs on.
When we say "images beat text by 2.5x," that is not a hunch. It is 13,598 image posts measured against 14,789 text posts. When we say the median engagement rate is 0.91%, that is the actual middle of the distribution, not a number copied from another blog.
What "classified" means
A raw post is just text and a like count. The value is in the structure. For every post we record what it is trying to do (its intent: Teach, Inspire, Provoke, Sell, Connect, Entertain), what form it takes (text, image, carousel), how it opens (hook type), how it ends (CTA type), how dense it is (a cognitive load score), its length, and how it performed relative to that creator's own baseline.
Why "relative to the creator" is the whole game
The most important design decision in the Index is that we never judge a post by its raw numbers alone. Comparing a small account and a large one on absolute engagement just tells you who has the bigger audience, which you already knew. So every post is scored against the creator who published it. "Exceptional" means top-of-range for them. This is what lets a 5,000-follower specialist and a 500,000-follower thought leader sit in the same dataset and actually be comparable.
Deterministic first, AI second
Most "AI content tools" throw your post at a language model and ask what it thinks. You get confident, fluent, unfalsifiable feedback: the model's vibe dressed up as analysis. We do it the other way around. The metrics come first, all computed and checkable. Only then, on top of that hard foundation, do we use AI to help interpret and phrase guidance. The AI never invents the facts. It explains them. That is why we call it a thinking tool, not an auto-writer.
See where you stand. The 2-minute Authority Diagnostic benchmarks your content against all 29,599 posts in the Index and tells you which gap is costing you most.
Want it pulled apart with you? Book a 30-minute Authority Consult and we'll run your profile against the data, live.
Every figure here is one cut from the Authority Index: 29,599 classified LinkedIn posts from 53 creators.