Domain Authority Auditor

Domain Authority Auditor

Audit one domain's citation-trust signals relative to a declared peer cohort. Produce a complete CITE score only when all applicable evidence and comparison context are present. CITE is advisory; it does not predict whether an answer engine will cite the domain.

When This Must Trigger

• The user asks whether a domain is trustworthy, authoritative, or citation-ready.
• A campaign needs a peer-relative CITE baseline or rerun.
• Link, entity, penalty, or citation evidence may materially change a domain gate.

Quick Start

Audit example.com against these five same-stage U.S. SaaS peers.
Run the CITE content-publisher profile; mark every private-data gap Unknown.

Skill Contract

Use offsite-signal-analyzer for link diagnosis without a gate, content-quality-auditor for one page, and entity-registry for canonical entity repair. Compare multiple domains as separate same-profile runs; never score them as one pooled target.

Reads: one domain, one locked cohort, and dated citation/identity/trust/eminence evidence. Writes: only a permissioned v3 artifact. Done when: context is complete, all 40 states are explicit, the scorer result is preserved, and any saved artifact validates.

Instructions

Runtime Reads

• ../../../references/auditor-runbook.md
• ../../../references/scoring-semantics.md
• ../../../references/cite-domain-rating.md
• ../../../references/framework-catalog.json
• ../../../references/runtime-invocation.md
• references/auditor-runtime.md

Runtime Contract

Read ../../../references/auditor-runbook.md, scoring-semantics.md, cite-domain-rating.md, and the CITE entry in framework-catalog.json. For standalone installs, use bundled immutable references/auditor-runtime.md; never fetch mutable main or guess missing policy. Before deterministic calls, follow runtime-invocation.md, resolve AARON_SKILLS_ROOT="${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT:-$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel 2>/dev/null || true)}", and require the scorer, validator, and typed catalogs. If unavailable, return score_state: NOT_SCORED / score_confidence: not_scored with no gate verdict or persistent artifact.

Required Setup

Declare:

• one canonical domain and observation date;
• market and entity stage;
• domain type/profile: default, content-publisher, product-service, ecommerce, community-ugc, tool-utility, or authority-institutional;
• a locked peer cohort with inclusion rules and evidence window.

Without peer cohort, market, stage, or domain type, return NEEDS_INPUT/UNDECIDED; the inherited numeric anchors are diagnostic priors, not universal thresholds.

Data Sources

Evidence Procedure

1. Normalize the domain and verify scope (host/subdomain/protocol treatment).
2. Freeze backlink, entity, security, search visibility, citation-panel, and reputation evidence with sources/dates.
3. Evaluate all 40 IDs against the declared cohort. Tool estimates remain estimated or proxy; user exports remain user-provided unless independently verified.
4. Use Unknown for absent backlink indexes, private console data, or comparison universes. Do not mark link-dependent items N/A simply because data is unavailable.
5. Apply catalog-authorized N/A only with a reason, for example an AI-citation item when no locked panel is in scope.
6. Verify vetoes positively:
   • CITE-T03: material link/traffic incoherence plus corroborating manipulation evidence relative to the cohort.
   • CITE-T05: verified manipulation network after common-source/ecosystem adjustment.
   • CITE-T09: verified active manual action or material unresolved deindexing.

Domain youth, privacy-protected WHOIS, low absolute volume, or missing private-console access cannot by themselves fail a veto.

Create a typed audit-run.schema.json input and execute python3 "$AARON_SKILLS_ROOT/scripts/rubric-score.py" score <run.json> when the verified runtime is available. Never renormalize weights around Unknown items.

Report

Begin with the auditor-runbook's exact typed conversation header. Never replace status, verdict, or score_state with prose; list each explicitly missing qualified item as ``ID: `unknown``` before findings.

Lead with verdict, profile/cohort/target/date, score or NOT_SCORED coverage/interval, and confidence. Then provide:

• C/I/T/E score and coverage table;
• peer-relative evidence and cohort definition;
• verified risks versus unresolved Unknowns;
• top fixes with owner, evidence needed, and rerun condition;
• provenance appendix, including qualified IDs when detailed traceability is requested.

Use SHIP/FIX/BLOCK/UNDECIDED as the canonical artifact verdict. User-facing prose may say trusted/cautious only as a descriptive translation, never as a separate decision system.