What It Is

The Five Fundamentals are the pillars of topical authority as defined by Koray Tugberk Gubur. They describe what a complete, authoritative website looks like from a search engine's perspective. Rather than scoring individual pages in isolation, the Five Fundamentals evaluate your entire site as a cohesive entity — exactly how Google evaluates domain authority.

Why It Matters for Your SEO

Most SEO tools score pages individually. But Google doesn't rank pages in isolation — it considers the entire site's topical focus, content structure, and authority signals. A brilliant blog post on a weak domain performs worse than a good blog post on a strong domain. The Five Fundamentals help you build site-level authority, not just page-level quality.

How Korvex Measures It

Each fundamental is scored 0-100 at the client (site) level:

How to Improve Your Score

1. Central Entity: Ensure your brand name appears consistently with high salience (0.3+) across 80%+ of pages
2. Central Search Intent: Audit your content mix — SaaS sites need 50-70% commercial/transactional content
3. Source Context: Add trust infrastructure (about, contact, privacy, terms, team pages) and authority evidence (case studies, testimonials, awards)
4. Core Section: Invest in comprehensive product/service pages — target 20+ with average Koray scores above 60
5. Outer Section: Maintain 50+ informational pages (guides, blog posts) updated within 90 days

Fundamental 1: Central Entity

Formula: (consistency_score × 0.80) + (salience_score × 0.20)

• Consistency: what percentage of pages contain the entity (80%+ = score 100)
• Salience: min(avg_salience × 200, 100) — average entity salience across pages
• Filters: entity types ORGANIZATION, PRODUCT, PERSON; salience > 0.3; appears on 5+ pages
• Interpretation: score 80+ = "strong and clear"; 60-79 = "good with room to improve"; <40 = "no clear central entity"

Fundamental 2: Central Search Intent

Formula: (consistency_score × 0.60) + (alignment_score × 0.40)

• Optimal intent distribution: 50-70% dominant intent = score 100 (too uniform or scattered = lower)
• Alignment is business-type specific:
  • SaaS: commercial=100, transactional=100, informational=75
  • Ecommerce: transactional=100, commercial=100, informational=50
  • Local Service: commercial=100, transactional=90, informational=60
  • Content: informational=100, commercial=50, transactional=25

Fundamental 3: Source Context

Formula: (model_clarity × 0.40) + (trust_signals × 0.30) + (authority_signals × 0.30)

• Model clarity (max ~115): business type defined (+40), lead tracking (+20), transaction tracking (+20), pricing (+10), trial/signup (+10), product catalogue (+15)
• Trust signals: 5 items × 20 points (about, contact, privacy, terms, team)
• Authority signals: 5 items × 20 points (awards, case studies, testimonials, press, research)

Fundamental 4: Core Section

Formula: count_score + quality_score (each 0-50)

• Count score: 20+ core pages = 50 points
• Quality score: (avg_koray_score / 100) × 50
• Core URL patterns: /product, /service, /pricing, /plans, /demo, /trial, /signup, /features, /solution

Fundamental 5: Outer Section

Formula: (count_score × 0.60) + (freshness_score × 0.40)

• Count score: 100+ pages = 100 points
• Freshness: average page age ≤ 90 days = 100 points, declining as content ages
• Outer URL patterns: /blog/, /guide, /tutorial, /resources, /learn, /article

Data Sources

• Collection: calculates fundamentals after page scoring
• Tables: five_fundamental_scores (client-level), page_scores (page-level contributions)
• Business type: Set in client settings, determines intent alignment and Source Context evaluation

Related Concepts

• The Koray Score — the composite score derived from these fundamentals
• The Three Axes — Koray's complementary framework for topical authority measurement
• E-E-A-T — feeds into Source Context (Fundamental 3)