Source Diversity
The range of independent sources feeding a system's understanding.
Industry Term
Full explanation
Source diversity is the range of independent sources contributing to an AI system's understanding of a brand or topic. A claim on only one site is evidence. The same claim confirmed across several independent sources is corroboration.
Diversity is judged by independence, not volume. Ten mentions across ten unrelated, independently operated sites carry more weight than a hundred pages on the brand's own domain, because a system treats sources that share ownership, authorship, or incentive as a single point of view rather than separate confirmation.
This is why Digital PR and Third-Party Evidence sit at the center of most Authority Method work: they are the direct route to increasing source diversity, in a way that owned content on a brand's own site structurally cannot.
Why this matters
It explains why publishing more on your own site has diminishing returns. Ten pages on one domain is still one source.
Example
A brand claim, "the fastest-growing provider in its category", appears on the brand's homepage, its own blog, and its own LinkedIn page. That is one source repeated three times. A single independent trade publication confirming the same claim adds more diversity than all three combined.
Where this sits
Source Diversity belongs to Retrieval, Evidence & Consensus, one of the seven layers of the Aingworth Glossary. Information exists, then it is retrieved, then sources are selected, then they corroborate one another, then consensus emerges. This is where Aingworth's Consensus Over Rankings thesis lives.
Related terms
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