When you're choosing where to place a press release, a thought-leadership article, or a product announcement, you want to know more than just "does this site get traffic?" You want to know whether readers will actually pay attention—whether your story will leave a mark or scroll past them in seconds.
The Medialister Attention Index—or MAI—is our answer to that question. It's a proprietary, article-level quality metric that estimates how long a typical article on a publisher's website stays in a reader's memory, expressed in days.
Think of MAI as a memory score. A publisher with an MAI of 75 means that, on average, an article on that site is estimated to stay in a reader's memory for about 75 days. A publisher with an MAI of 10 will likely be forgotten within a week and a half.
The higher the number, the more attention each article commands—and the longer it lingers.
Ahrefs Domain Rating, Semrush Authority Score, and Monthly Visits all describe something about the publisher's domain as a whole. They tell you how well the site ranks, how strong its backlink profile is, or how many visitors it gets per month.
None of those metrics tell you what happens once a reader actually lands on an article. A site can have millions of monthly visitors who skim the homepage for 8 seconds and leave. Another site might have a fraction of that traffic but hold readers for minutes on every story.
For certain goals, the second publisher is worth more than the first. MAI is built to surface that difference.
MAI is especially useful for three types of campaigns:
For brand awareness campaigns, you're paying to be remembered. An article that's read attentively and stays with the reader is worth more than one that flashes by on a high-traffic homepage. Sort your marketplace search by MAI descending and you'll see which publishers actually leave a mark.
For AI visibility and GEO campaigns (getting your brand cited in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini), attention is a strong proxy for citation value. LLMs tend to surface content that real humans engage with—pages that readers spend time on, not pages they bounce off. A higher MAI signals exactly that kind of content environment.
For comparing two similar offers, MAI gives you a quality tiebreaker. When two publishers have similar price, similar Ahrefs DR, and similar traffic, the one with the higher MAI is the one where readers are genuinely paying attention.
In the marketplace table. MAI is available as a toggleable column. Open the "Columns" menu above the table and turn it on to see MAI next to every offer. It's hidden by default to keep the table clean—enable it when you need it.
As a filter. You'll find MAI in the filters panel under the Medialister metrics group, alongside our other proprietary signals. Use the range slider to set a minimum Attention Index for your search—for example, "only show me publishers with MAI ≥ 30" when you're building a brand-awareness shortlist.
As a sort option. Click the column header to sort the marketplace ascending or descending by MAI, same as any other quantitative metric.
On the offer page. Every offer page displays MAI alongside the other quality metrics (Ahrefs DR, Semrush AS, Organic Traffic, etc.) with a colored scale so you can see at a glance whether the value is strong, average, or weak. Hover the info icon for a plain-language tooltip explaining what the number represents.
MAI depends on third-party engagement data. For some publishers—usually smaller sites or very new domains—that data isn't available or is too noisy to be reliable. In those cases you'll see the standard empty state on the offer page and an empty cell in the marketplace column, the same way we handle missing Ahrefs or Semrush data.
A missing MAI doesn't mean the publisher is bad. It just means we don't have enough signal to score them confidently, and we'd rather show nothing than show you a number we don't trust.
A few practical patterns to get you started.
Building an AI-visibility shortlist. Set your campaign goal to "To increase visibility in AI tools," then add an MAI minimum filter (try 20 as a starting point) on top of the goal's essential filters. You'll get publishers that are LLM-friendly and whose articles hold reader attention.
Comparing two final candidates. When you've narrowed your shortlist to two or three offers at a similar price, enable the MAI column and let it break the tie. Higher MAI = stronger signal that your placement will land.
Sanity-checking high-traffic sites. Some very large sites score surprisingly low on MAI because readers skim homepages and bounce. If you see a site with 10M monthly visits and an MAI of 5, that's telling you something important about the reader experience there—factor it into your decision.
MAI is a proprietary Medialister metric. The underlying formula and the constants we use to calibrate it are part of what makes the index uniquely ours, so we don't publish them. What we do commit to is this: the metric is calculated consistently across every publisher in the marketplace, recalculated regularly as fresh engagement data arrives, and tuned over time against real-world outcomes like AI citation rates and brand recall.
If you want to go deeper on the thinking behind the metric, our blog post Attention Is a Critical Component of Advertising for Long-Term Impact explains why we believe attention—not just reach—is the right way to evaluate media quality.
