How to Tell If Your Content Is Building Authority Using AI
The 4-criterion test that shows which of your posts are actually doing authority work
There’s a difference between publishing consistently and building authority. Most people are doing the first one while trying to do the second. The calendar gets filled. The ideas are decent. The writing is fine. And six months in, nothing has compounded. No one thinks of you as the person for anything in particular.
That’s not a consistency problem. It’s a signal problem. Authority content does something specific: it gives readers a reason to remember who said it. Calendar-filling content is correct and forgettable in equal measure.
These 7 prompts audit your existing content and tell you which side of that line you’re on.
Step 1: Work out what you’re actually saying across all your content
Prompt 1: Content position extractor
What it does: Reads a batch of your recent posts and identifies the underlying positions you’re taking, separate from the topics you’re covering.
When to use it: First. Before any other audit step. Topics and positions are different things, and most people conflate them. Writing about productivity is a topic. “Most productivity advice optimises for output when the real problem is decision load” is a position.
The prompt:
I’m going to paste several pieces of my recent content below. For each piece, identify: the topic (one phrase), the position (the specific claim or argument being made, in one sentence), and whether the position is something a reasonable person in this space could disagree with. If a piece doesn’t have a clear position, say so explicitly. Here are the pieces: [PASTE 5-10 RECENT POSTS OR ARTICLES]
How to use it:
Pull your last 5-10 published pieces. Substack posts, LinkedIn updates, threads, whatever you publish most regularly
Paste them together in place of [PASTE 5-10 RECENT POSTS OR ARTICLES]
Save the output. The “no clear position” flags are your first data point
Example input: Eight recent Substack posts across a range of topics the writer covers regularly.
What you’ll get: A table of topics vs. positions. Some pieces will have clear, arguable positions. Others will come back as “this piece describes X but doesn’t take a position on it.” That ratio tells you more about your content than any engagement metric.
Advanced note: The “could a reasonable person disagree” test matters. If the answer is no for most of your content, you’re not building authority, you’re confirming things people already believe. Authority comes from being right about something others haven’t said yet, or said clearly enough.
That prompt does something most content audits skip entirely: it separates topic from position, which is where the real diagnosis starts.
The next six prompts complete the audit and tell you what to do with what you find.
Prompt 2 — Theme concentration checker: Takes your position list and tells you whether your content is building toward a coherent point of view or spreading across unrelated claims that don’t add up to anything.
Prompt 3 — Authority signal detector: Scores each piece on four criteria that separate authority-building content from calendar filler, with specific evidence from the text for each score.
Prompt 4 — High-signal piece analyser: Takes your highest-scoring pieces and extracts the specific decisions that made them score higher, so you can repeat those decisions deliberately.
Prompt 5 — Buried claim excavator: Scans your archive for positions that were stated but not developed, where the seed of a strong authority claim got one sentence when it needed a full piece.
Prompt 6 — Pre-publication authority brief: Forces you to define your original claim, your evidence, and your memorable framing before you start drafting, so you’re not hoping a position emerges during writing.
Prompt 7 — Position stress tester: Takes the central claim of a piece you’re about to publish and tries to defeat it, so you know which counterarguments to address and which reveal a genuine limitation in the claim.
Plus: the content authority scorecard to track every piece going forward.