Buyer Persuasion Score (BPS) is a metric that measures how persuasively AI platforms recommend or disuade potential customers from choosing your business when generating responses about a specific query and area. When you run a Local Falcon scan using one of the available AI data sources, your report will include a BPS alongside your other AI visibility metrics like Share of AI Voice (SAIV).
BPS goes beyond simply tracking whether your brand appears in AI-generated results. It analyzes the actual language AI platforms use when talking about your business (think phrases like "transparent pricing," "exceptional service," or "long wait times") and evaluates whether that language would persuade a potential customer toward or away from choosing you.
How BPS Is Calculated
BPS is scored on a scale from -10 to +10. A score of +10 means AI platforms are strongly recommending your business, while -10 means they are actively discouraging it. A score near 0 indicates neutral language — your business is mentioned, but without strong persuasion in either direction.
The score is derived by analyzing the full scope of AI-generated responses for your business across the scan grid. Each descriptive phrase AI uses to talk about your business is analyzed for positive, neutral, or negative sentiment. The overall BPS reflects the cumulative persuasive direction of all those phrases, along with a one-sentence rationale explaining why the score landed where it did.
Understanding Brand Phrases and Sentiment
Alongside BPS, your AI visibility report includes a breakdown of the specific phrases AI platforms are using to describe your business, or the "Brand Phrases." Each Brand Phrase is categorized as positive, neutral, or negative, and includes a count of how many times AI mentioned it across all the scanned grid points.
This gives you actionable insight into exactly what's driving your BPS. For example, if you see "long wait times" flagged as a negative phrase appearing across multiple grid points, that's a clear signal about what to address to improve your Buyer Persuasion Score. Conversely, phrases like "highly rated" or "family-owned" appearing as positives tell you what AI systems view as your strengths.
Tracking Brand Phrases and Sentiment Over Time
One of the most powerful aspects of sentiment analysis is trend tracking. Brand Phrases identified in previous scans for the same business and query are carried forward — even if they no longer appear in the latest scan, they'll show up with a count of 0. This lets you see whether improvements you've made (getting more positive reviews, responding to reviews, updating your business description, earning new citations) are actually changing how AI talks about your brand.
On Trend Reports and Campaign Reports, phrases are aggregated across all scans being analyzed, showing total counts and positive/neutral/negative breakdowns. BPS is averaged across the scans in the report, with a summarized rationale.
Using BPS to Identify Opportunities in AI Search
Unlike SAIV, which measures whether your brand is part of the AI conversation, BPS measures the quality of what's being said. You can have a high SAIV but a low BPS — meaning AI mentions you frequently but isn't actually recommending you. Together, these metrics give you a complete picture of your AI visibility and AI search performance.
You can use your BPS to:
- Identify what's working in your favor and what's hurting you
- Monitor whether operational improvements translate into better AI-generated language
- Compare how persuasively AI recommends you versus your competitors
- Understand which keywords and queries generate the most favorable AI responses for your business
Because AI summaries behave differently from map pack rankings, even small BPS differences between you and a competitor may indicate an easy path to improving visibility and conversions via AI-powered search experiences. It could just be a matter of reviewing the source information in the report and identifying a couple of places to strengthen your citations or reviews.
Tracking BPS Over Time
As with SoLV and SAIV, monitoring changes in BPS over time helps you understand how your optimizations impact AI visibility.
In addition to comparing individual AI visibility Scan Report results, you can also check your Trend Reports, which automatically aggregate data for the scans you've run with the same parameters. This lets you:
- See how your BPS moves over time
- Identify patterns in how AI platforms perceive your business
- Understand whether your SEO and content efforts are influencing how AI systems recommend your brand
- Spot shifts in competitor persuasion strength in AI-generated answers
Treat BPS as a directional indicator of how AI platforms perceive and present your business to potential customers — a signal that is becoming increasingly important as more consumers rely on AI-generated recommendations for local business discovery.
Categories:Map Scan ToolReporting
