What is Authority?
Verified 5 August 2026
Cruder than host rank and useful for a different reason: for regulatory, medical or academic questions, restricting to governmental and educational sources removes an entire category of noise in one parameter.
It says nothing about quality within a class. A government page can be outdated and a commercial one authoritative; it is a filter on institutional type, not on correctness.
How unlob handles this: authority filter
Common questions
What is Authority?
Authority is a coarse classification of a domain’s institutional class — educational, governmental, organisational, commercial — derived from the domain itself.
How does Authority work in practice?
It says nothing about quality within a class. A government page can be outdated and a commercial one authoritative; it is a filter on institutional type, not on correctness.
See it working
The free tier is 10,000 requests a month with no card — enough to test any of this against your own queries.