Scoring Methodology

How Influencer Brand Safety Scoring Works

Every creator receives a brand safety score from 1 to 100, calculated by 7 independent AI scoring agents. CreatorScore provides a transparent, explainable influencer vetting methodology — so brands know exactly why a creator scored the way they did.

Score Ranges

Scores range from 1 (highest risk) to 100 (lowest risk). Higher is always better.

90–100
Exceptional

Top-tier creator. Consistently brand-safe, authentic audience, positive community. Ideal for premium brand partnerships.

80–89
Excellent

Very low risk. Strong performance across all agents. Suitable for most brand campaigns with confidence.

70–79
Good

Low risk overall. Minor areas for improvement but generally safe for brand partnerships.

60–69
Fair

Some caution needed. Review the score breakdown to understand specific concerns before partnering.

1–59
Poor

Significant concerns identified. High risk for brand reputation. Detailed review strongly advised before partnering.

7 Scoring Agents

Each creator is evaluated by 7 independent agents. Each scores 0–100 internally, then a weighted average produces the final 1–100 CreatorScore.

Content Risk

20%

Evaluates content for hate signals, deceptive/scam promotion, explicit material, misinformation, and profanity across nine weighted components: hate (18.4%), deceptive content (18.4%), NSFW (13.8%), flag severity (9.2%), web controversy (9.2%), visual analysis (9.2%), misinformation (9.2%), transcript controversy (8%), profanity (4.6%). Tied for the most heavily weighted agent, because a single brand safety incident can cause lasting reputational damage.

What We Analyze

  • Every post caption and video transcript through AI-powered hate speech detection
  • Thumbnails and video frames through computer vision for NSFW, violence, substance, and weapon detection
  • Text-on-screen extraction to catch hidden messages that differ from spoken audio
  • Scam, MLM, and get-rich-quick promotion patterns — one of the two heaviest components
  • Profanity frequency with niche-aware tolerance (comedy creators aren't penalized the same as family creators)
  • When a signal doesn't apply — no video to transcribe, no web coverage — its weight is redistributed across what we did measure, never defaulted

Why It Matters

A single offensive post can go viral and damage both the creator's and brand's reputation overnight.

Authenticity

20%

Detects fake followers, bot commenters, spam engagement, engagement pods, and artificially inflated metrics. Comment-level bot analysis carries 80% of the agent, blended with follower authenticity at 20% once there is enough follower history to judge. Ensures the audience is real people, not purchased bots.

What We Analyze

  • Commenter profiles for bot indicators (suspicious usernames, empty profiles, extreme following ratios)
  • Duplicate and spam comments via content fingerprinting
  • Low-effort comment ratios (emoji-only, single-word responses)
  • Engagement pod detection (coordinated groups artificially boosting numbers)
  • Comment timing patterns for naturalness vs. suspicious bursts
  • Engagement-to-follower ratio anomalies

Why It Matters

Fake engagement means your ad spend reaches bots, not real customers. Authenticity directly impacts ROI.

Brand Safety

15%

Assesses brand-association risk across seven components: FTC disclosure compliance (26%), brand-partnership patterns (23%), controversy breadth (15%), corroborated web reputation (11%), active X feuds (10%), video-transcript statements (10%), and following-graph risk (5%).

What We Analyze

  • FTC ad disclosure compliance — are sponsored posts properly labeled with #ad, #sponsored, or paid partnership tags?
  • Controversy in the creator's own content, plus web reputation corroborated across independent sources — a single unverified thread is not evidence
  • Historical brand partnership track record and controversy associations
  • Live feuds and arguments on X, and statements made in video transcripts that never appear in a caption
  • Following-graph risk — whether the creator follows a cluster of flagged hate or extremism accounts
  • Components that don't apply (no X account, no transcripts, no following-graph data) are dropped and the remaining weights renormalize

Why It Matters

Brands need partners who protect the relationship. Missing FTC disclosures expose brands to legal liability, and past controversies signal future risk.

Audience Quality

15%

Measures the quality and reach of a creator's audience across eight components: engagement rate (30%), community health (20%), engagement depth (15%), velocity (10%), niche fit (10%), and audience demographics, loyalty, and live performance (5% each) — all normalized by tier and platform.

What We Analyze

  • Engagement rate relative to audience size and platform benchmarks
  • Engagement depth — comment substance and conversation quality, not just volume
  • Audience demographics and buying power, and audience loyalty over time
  • Platform-specific normalization (TikTok vs. Instagram vs. YouTube have very different benchmarks)
  • Tier-specific normalization across 6 tiers: nano, micro, mid, macro, mega, celebrity

Why It Matters

High-quality audiences mean real reach and genuine influence. Poor audience quality means wasted ad spend.

Sentiment & Voice

10%

Measures whether a creator's voice is coherent enough for brands to predict what they'll say next, and how their audience receives it. Rewards creators with a clear voice (even one that ranges across topics) and flags genuine drift. Surfaced as “Voice Stability” in the dashboard.

What We Analyze

  • Voice consistency (30%) — scored against a niche benchmark, so multi-topic creators like reviewers aren't penalized for legitimate range
  • Audience sentiment (25%) — how the community actually responds in the comments
  • Tone safety (20%) — respectfulness, with niche-adjusted profanity tolerance
  • Engagement style (15%) — question frequency, language matching, and whether CTAs are appropriate rather than pushy
  • Content adaptability (10%) — topic variety, where diversity is rewarded, not punished

Why It Matters

Brands need predictable partners — but predictable doesn't mean monotone. This agent distinguishes a creator whose tone wanders by topic (fine) from one whose voice is genuinely drifting toward conflict (real risk). The earlier variance-only sentiment scoring unfairly penalized the former.

Community Trust

10%

Evaluates whether a creator's recommendations hold up: do they disclose their partnerships, do the brands they promote fit the audience they've built, and how do they conduct themselves toward their own community?

What We Analyze

  • FTC disclosure compliance (45%) — measured against verified brand partnerships, never caption guesses
  • Brand alignment (30%) — do the products they promote actually fit their niche and audience?
  • Creator conduct (25%) — how they treat their community and the people they talk about
  • Reply quality and responsiveness, tier-normalized so mega-creators aren't penalized for not answering millions of comments

Why It Matters

A creator who promotes anything for a cheque, or hides the fact they were paid, burns their audience's trust — and the next brand inherits a sceptical room. Disclosure is also a legal exposure a brand shares.

ROI Prediction

10%

Projects likely campaign return by combining engagement performance, growth trajectory, and how often content is shared or saved. Helps brands estimate the value of a partnership before committing budget.

What We Analyze

  • Engagement performance (40%) relative to tier and platform benchmarks
  • Growth trajectory (25%) — momentum and follower retention, where retention data is available
  • Shares and saves (20%) — the strongest intent signals a platform exposes
  • Community health (15%) — whether the audience is an actual community or a passive feed

Why It Matters

High engagement and consistent growth mean the audience actively cares about the content. Declining engagement signals a creator whose influence — and your campaign ROI — is fading.

Weight Allocation

Content Risk
20%
Authenticity
20%
Brand Safety
15%
Audience Quality
15%
Sentiment & Voice
10%
Community Trust
10%
ROI Prediction
10%
Total
100%

Multi-Layered Analysis

CreatorScore combines multiple layers of AI analysis, each specialized for a different type of content and risk detection.

Natural Language Processing

Advanced AI language models analyze every caption, comment, and transcript for hate speech, sentiment, toxicity, and spam.

Computer Vision

Purpose-built vision models scan thumbnails and video frames for explicit, violent, or inappropriate visual content.

Text-on-Screen Detection

Optical character recognition reads text overlaid on images and videos to catch hidden messages not in the caption or audio.

Speech-to-Text

Audio transcription analyzes what creators actually say in videos, not just what they write in captions.

Contextual AI Review

A large language model reviews all findings in context — understanding niche, tone, and intent to minimize false positives.

Explainable Scoring

Every score comes with a transparent breakdown so brands and legal teams can see exactly which factors raised or lowered it.

When We Won't Score — And Why

A score is only as good as the data behind it. When a creator's profile is too new, too quiet, or too private to evaluate fairly, we say so out loud — instead of fabricating a number that would mislead brands or unfairly penalize creators.

Minimum Data Requirement

We require at least 5 public posts per platform within our content window to produce a per-platform score. Below that threshold, we run a brand-safety risk scan on whatever content exists — so brands still get risk visibility — but we don't publish a FICO-style score for the platform, because the data isn't sufficient to be fair to either side.

Five is the floor where engagement, sentiment, and content-risk signals stabilize enough to produce a number that's defensible.

Adaptive Content Window

Our default scoring window looks back 180 days. For creators who post less frequently, we automatically widen the window to 720 days (two years) on the first attempt before concluding there isn't enough content to evaluate.

Dormant creators with older-but-real content still get scored. The window only widens once per scoring pass — we don't retry indefinitely or burn API tokens on creators we've already determined are inactive.

“Not Enough Data” State

If every platform on a creator's profile is below the minimum after widening the window, their public profile shows a clear “Not Enough Data” banner — with platform-specific reasons (“Only 4 posts available on LinkedIn,” “No posts available on Facebook”) — instead of a misleading score.

Brands see honest “we don't know yet” instead of a low number that looks like a verdict. Creators see exactly what they need to do to become scoreable. We re-check every 24 hours and rescore automatically on the next post.

Brand-Safety Scanning Continues

Even when we can't publish a score, we still scan every piece of available content for hate speech, NSFW material, violence, and other brand-safety risks. A creator with a single inflammatory post is still flagged for it — risk visibility doesn't depend on having enough data for a number.

Brand safety is a watchdog, not just a score input. Insufficient data for ranking is not insufficient data for screening.

Fair Scoring Across All Creator Sizes

A nano-influencer with 5,000 followers and a celebrity with 10 million followers operate in completely different realities. CreatorScore uses tier-based normalization so every creator is scored against benchmarks appropriate for their size and platform.

Engagement Rate

A 2% rate is excellent for a mega-influencer but below average for a nano-creator. Both are scored fairly.

Reply Rate

Mega-influencers can't reply to millions of comments. We weight reply quality over quantity at scale.

Niche Context

Comedy creators aren't penalized for casual language the same way family creators would be.

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