Method

How Book Score works

Everything in a report comes from real answers and real pages, checked the same way for every book. Here is how, and where the limits are.

Asking the assistants

We write questions the way a reader asks for a book like yours, without naming it, plus one that asks about your book by name. ChatGPT and Claude answer with live web search on. Gemini answers from what it already knows: Google's terms don't let tools like ours analyse its web-search answers. The free check asks a few questions once. The full report asks 12 questions twice of each assistant: 72 reader answers.

Answers change from one asking to the next, so we never give a single number as fact. We show how often AI named your book and the range the true figure probably sits in (a 90% range). A change between two checks only counts as real when it is bigger than that range.

Counting books

A helper reads which books each answer recommends. One book is counted once however it is written: with or without its subtitle, "The" or no "The", authors in either order. A book or author named in the question itself is not counted as a recommendation in that answer.

Places to get onto

Every website an answer cited, plus the sites AI cites most for your genre. "Write to these" lists only sites where we found a way in for books on the site's own pages: a submissions page, an email, a form, with any fee copied exactly as the site states it. A full report checks the strongest unchecked sites while it runs. Shops, big publishers and the health and research sites AI reads for facts are not places to pitch. A site gets a thank-you note instead of a pitch only when we open its page and find your book and your name on it.

Your Amazon page

We read your listing the way a shopper does and check it against Amazon's own rules from KDP's help pages: the description, title words, categories, A+ panels, ratings, what reviews say, the cover at thumbnail size, formats and price. Rules we quote are checked on Amazon's pages, with the date.

The score

Book Score out of 100 adds up the parts we can check: AI (40: up to 30 for how often it recommends the book, full marks from 4 answers in 10, and 10 for describing the book correctly when asked about it by name), the Amazon page (about 30: a few checks only apply to some formats), the web around the book (20) and formats (10). Parts we couldn't check are left out rather than counted against you. The report leads with how often AI recommends the book, because that is the part that sells books through AI.

The AI Shelf

Every week we ask the same 12 reader questions per genre, twice each, of all three assistants, and chart the books they name. A list is published only when every assistant answered. See the AI Shelf.

What we never do

We never invent praise, awards or numbers in the fixes we write, never log in to your Amazon or KDP account, and never present a simulated assistant as a real one. A score is a diagnosis, not a promise of sales.