When we started measuring AI search visibility across UK galleries earlier this year, we had a problem: there was no language for what we were seeing.
The gap wasn’t between galleries with good websites and galleries with bad ones. It wasn’t between galleries with big marketing budgets and galleries with small ones. It was between galleries that AI systems understood — as distinct, authoritative sources on specific artists — and galleries that AI systems didn’t.
“SEO” didn’t capture it. “AI visibility” was too broad. “Entity optimisation” was accurate but meaningless to a gallery owner who thinks in terms of artists, provenance and market position rather than search architecture.
So we named it.
Artist Authority: the degree to which AI search systems recognise a gallery as the authoritative source on the artists it represents.
The term matters because the concept matters. AI search doesn’t return a list of websites — it makes a recommendation. And recommendations are based on what AI understands about who a gallery is and which artists it holds with genuine authority. Galleries that AI understands well appear in the answers collectors see. Galleries it understands poorly don’t appear at all.
We’ve measured this across leading UK galleries. The results are striking. Galleries with decades of expertise, museum-quality stock and impeccable provenance records — invisible. Not ranked low. Not occasionally present. Invisible.
Artist Authority is the framework for understanding why, and for fixing it.
We coined the term in May 2026. At the time, it returned no results in Google. It still doesn’t — except one.
Ours.