The words Throughline uses, and what each one means.
- Campaign
- A time-boxed piece of proactive PR work, measured against its key messages.
- Tracker
- An always-on view of how one organisation is portrayed in online coverage and by AI assistants, with no start or end date.
- Story
- An announcement from the organisation's own news page that a tracker follows, together with the coverage and AI answers found for it.
- Key message
- A statement from a messaging document that a campaign is trying to land in coverage.
- Online coverage
- Written articles published online: news sites, broadcasters' websites, blogs and newsletters. TV, radio, podcasts, YouTube and social media are not scored. Throughline scores an article only after it has been read in full.
- Fidelity
- How closely online coverage carries the wording of the campaign's messaging document. It measures wording overlap, not factual accuracy.
- AI Visibility
- What AI assistants say when asked natural questions about the organisation's key topics.
- Media & AI Reputation Score
- A 0–100 measure, where 50 is neutral, of how favourably online coverage and AI assistants portray an organisation in a calendar month. It is built only from online coverage and AI answers, never from social media or polling.
- Baseline
- The first Media & AI Reputation Score recorded for an organisation. Every later score is compared against it.
- Indicative
- The label shown on a month's score when it rests on fewer than 15 scored articles or fewer than 5 outlets. Treat an indicative score as a direction, not a result.
- Monitor
- The step that looks for coverage of a story, reads and scores what it finds, and asks AI assistants about it.
- Followed journalist
- A person or independent outlet on a tracker's Journalists list. Their written feeds are read before the wider web is searched.
- Report
- The short monthly summary of a tracker, shared as a link or PDF and sized for a five-minute board presentation.