Methodology
The UK Fostering Visibility Index measures how findable a fostering service is across Google and AI assistants. This page explains what we measure today, what arrives at launch, and how we handle services we cannot fully measure.
Two numbers
The Index reports 2 measures. The Composite Findability Score is live now: a single score from 0 to 100 that combines the 4 measured dimensions below. It is the number you see across the pre-release pool today.
Share of Local Fostering Voice arrives at launch. It is the proportion of local fostering demand captured by the public ecosystem, the authority and its hub together, against private agencies. It is still being calibrated across the full pool, so no figure is shown in this pre-release.
The 4 measured dimensions
The Composite Findability Score combines 4 dimensions. Each carries a fixed weight, and the weights sum to 1.00.
| Dimension | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Citation | 0.30 | Whether AI assistants name the service when people ask how to foster in the area. |
| Local search | 0.30 | How visibly the service appears in local search results where prospective carers look. |
| Crawl | 0.20 | Whether the service’s site can be reached and read reliably. |
| Schema | 0.20 | Whether the site carries the structured data that helps search engines and AI assistants understand it. |
| Total | 1.00 |
Further dimensions are held back by design in this pre-release and join at the launch lock, when the weights are set for the launch methodology.
Honest data gaps
Some services cannot be fully measured. When a service’s organisation root cannot be reached, for example when a firewall blocks automated access, the schema dimension cannot be read. Rather than record a false zero, we suppress the schema score and the Composite Findability Score for that service, and we flag it as an honest data gap. The dimensions we could measure are still shown.
In the pre-release pool, 2 of the 40 services are held this way, 1 authority and 1 hub. A data gap is not the same as a service that is not yet in the pool. Many authorities and hubs are still being added and are simply not scored yet, so they carry no score and no gap flag until they enter a pool.
Our honest promise
Better findability lifts fostering enquiries and grows a public service’s Share of Local Fostering Voice against private agencies. We claim both directly. We do not claim to deliver approvals on our own. Turning enquiries into approved foster carers depends on a service’s own assessment and support, so we treat approvals as a shared outcome of a partnership, not a number the Index delivers by itself.
Versions
This is the pre-release methodology. Scores are only compared within the same methodology version. The launch methodology will be published in full when it is locked.