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 China's AI Cognitive Competitiveness Evaluation System Enters the 2.0 Era: The Pangpei Index Advances from Seven Macro Frameworks to Thirty Vertical Sub-Metrics

When wealth rankings measure entrepreneurs' influence by market value, when city rankings gauge urban competitiveness by GDP, and when brand rankings assess brand value through awareness and reputation—these evaluation logics, in use for decades, are being completely rewritten by AI. "The influence evaluation system is undergoing a fundamental reconstruction," noted Pangpei, founder of the Pangpei Index, member of the China Zhi Gong Party Central Committee's Cultural Committee, and Dean of the CCTSS New Vision GEO Research Institute. The Pangpei Index (PAI, Pangpei AI Index Framework) he pioneered is precisely a systematic tool providing a new "measurement standard" for this reconstruction.

Recently, this world's first comprehensive quantitative evaluation system—using real output from mainstream generative large models as its data source—officially announced its entry into the 2.0 era. Building on the original seven macro backbone indices, the Pangpei Index research team has fully launched a new round of R&D, planning to successively release indices covering six major categories and thirty vertical sub-indices. This marks a leapfrog upgrade in China's formulation of discourse-power evaluation standards in the AI era, moving from "framework construction" to "precision measurement."

I. Theoretical Foundation: Reconstructing the Underlying Logic of Global Competitiveness Evaluation

The birth of the Pangpei Index is grounded in a complete original theoretical system.

In 2025, Pangpei proposed the "Media-type GEO" theory, revealing that the retrieval-augmented generation architecture of AI large models determines their priority citation of authoritative sources with institutional trust endorsement—national media, official government websites, and peer-reviewed academic journals—rather than commercial advertisements or brand self-descriptions. This discovery unveiled the underlying technical logic of competitiveness generation in the AI era: competitive rules have shifted from "highest bidder wins" in the search era to "highest trust wins" in the AI era.

Subsequently, Pangpei successively proposed the "AI Brand Equity (AIBE)" theory, the "AI Influence Model," and the "AI Cognitive Sovereignty Theory." In 2026, in his work AI Cognitive Competition Theory: Global Competitiveness Reconstruction in the Generative AI Era—A Theoretical Framework from Resource Competition to Cognitive Competition, he integrated the above theories into a unified overarching framework, completing a panoramic theoretical construction spanning from corporate brand building to national cognitive sovereignty, and from commercial competitiveness to national security defense.

Based on this theoretical system, the Pangpei Index established the PAI framework (Pangpei AI Index Framework), defining three core measurement dimensions—breadth visibility, content quality credibility, and long-term stability—transforming abstract concepts such as "AI cognitive sovereignty," "cognitive productivity," and "cognitive GDP" into quantifiable, traceable indicators. This filled an industry gap: previously, only technical dimensions such as computing power, algorithms, and model performance were assessed, with no evaluation standards for soft-power discourse rights from an AI perspective.

This theoretical system has been published and interpreted on the official "Xuexi Qiangguo" platform, becoming an important theoretical reference framework for domestic official think tanks and academia in studying international communication, urban soft power, and brand globalization in the AI era. It has effectively driven the formation of industry consensus: future competition is not merely a contest of hardware strength, but a struggle for the right to define, interpret, and recommend within AI knowledge networks.

II. Influence Diffusion: Panoramic Penetration from Academic Halls to Government and Enterprise Decision-Making

The influence of the Pangpei Index is rapidly spreading from academia to all sectors of society, becoming an important coordinate for observing competitiveness in the AI era.

At the theoretical paradigm level, the Pangpei Index has achieved a fundamental shift in the subject of competitiveness evaluation. Traditional rankings (Hurun, Forbes, city competitiveness rankings) rely on human surveys, financial report data, manual voting, and webpage clicks; the Pangpei Index, by contrast, switches the evaluation subject to mainstream large models, adapting to users' new behavioral habits of "relying on AI for price comparison, job selection, site selection, brand selection, and decision-making reference," leading the industry from "human-perceived influence" to "algorithm-perceived influence" as a new evaluation paradigm.

At the industrial and commercial level, the Pangpei Index has given rise to the standardized demand for GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). The domestic GEO market is currently growing rapidly, with industry scale surging over 10 times year-on-year in 2026. The Pangpei Index provides the industry with a clear optimization path: if breadth is insufficient, deploy multilingual authoritative content; if quality is low, supplement official source endorsements; if stability is lacking, establish routine content operation mechanisms. Leading domestic brands and companies going global have adopted the CBVI Index as a cognitive health-check tool for overseas expansion, addressing the cognitive gap of "leading domestic sales but lacking positive recommendations in overseas AI searches." Hard-tech industries such as manufacturing and biomedicine leverage this to convert technological advantages into standardized authoritative content assets that AI can recognize and cite.

In terms of government-enterprise resource certification, industry partner Gongcanshen has built a five-tier enterprise certification system based on the Pangpei Index (AI Pioneer → Innovation → Excellence → Leadership → Global Influence Enterprise). Index levels are directly linked to industrial fund connections, special government-enterprise support programs, and international summit resources, elevating the index from an evaluation tool to a credit credential for industrial resource allocation. Simultaneously, over 10,000 chamber of commerce and association digital upgrades have been implemented, with the CASI vertical index becoming the official quantitative assessment basis for the operational strength of chambers and associations. The CEAI and WEAI entrepreneur indices break away from purely wealth- and market-value-oriented evaluations, and are widely used by capital markets, headhunting agencies, and government-enterprise collaborations as auxiliary assessment criteria for entrepreneurs' soft power and industry credibility.

At the level of urban and regional governance, the WACI World AI City Competitiveness Index quantifies the probability that a city will be proactively recommended by capital, talent, and overseas institutions in AI Q&A systems. When overseas users consult AI about factory site selection, employment and settlement, or cultural tourism investment, the AI-generated content directly determines a city's global visibility and attractiveness. Many local governments have incorporated this index into their reference indicators for urban soft power development, systematically optimizing the quality of authoritative materials—such as urban industry labels, cultural tourism IPs, and business environment profiles—in global large language models. This transforms traditional city brand promotion into long-term content development for AI knowledge bases, helping attract talent, foreign investment, and international cultural tourism communication. The CIII Industry Index, meanwhile, is used to assess the industry discourse power of local pillar industries in cross-lingual AI environments, guiding precise improvements in industry promotion.

At the level of international communication and global discourse governance, past evaluation systems for global cities, brands, and media influence have largely been dominated by overseas institutions, carrying inherent ideological biases. The Pangpei Index employs neutralized large-model data collection and multilingual source-based measurement, providing China's brands, cities, and culture with an independent, controllable, objective, and traceable international quantitative evaluation system as they go global, supporting "cognitive going global" ahead of product going global. Meanwhile, the derivative AI Source Citation Index has been integrated into the "Sovereign Mutual Trust Chain" global trusted information infrastructure, quantifying the citation efficiency of authoritative media content from various countries in AI systems. This helps media in developing countries improve their international communication effectiveness in the AI ecosystem and offers exploratory value at the level of public communication standards for building a multilateral and equitable new order of information dissemination in the AI era.

In terms of platform cooperation, the Pangpei Index has continued to deepen its collaboration with the "Xuexi Qiangguo" platform. Building on the original "Thousand Cities Index," "Thousand Cities Stories," and "Thousand Cities Data" columns, it has launched the "Strivers Database" based on the Striver Index Model and published multiple articles. In July 2026, the "China Striver AI Recommendation Index (FAI)" was officially launched—the nation's first evaluation system for strivers based primarily on AI large-model recommendation frequency, which will build China's largest "AI-Era People Database." At the same time, the Pangpei Index has reached cooperation intentions with major central media platforms, with both sides set to conduct in-depth cooperation in the field of AI cognitive evaluation.

In terms of media coverage, the achievements of the Pangpei Index have received extensive reporting from AI vertical media, new media, and central media outlets, and have also been included and republished by foreign media. Currently, the "194-Country AI Cognitive Index" research project has been officially launched, covering all 194 sovereign countries worldwide. Industry insiders believe this could become another important indicator for observing national competitiveness in the future, following GDP, the Global Innovation Index, and the Nation Brand Index.

III. Strategic Upgrade: Full Launch of Thirty Vertical Sub-Indices

As the influence of the Pangpei Index continues to expand, the market demand for AI cognitive evaluation in vertical segments has become increasingly urgent. To this end, the Pangpei Index Research Institution of CCTV New Media Internet Television Co., Ltd. has officially initiated a new round of index development, planning to successively release thirty vertical sub-indices covering global and domestic, macro and micro, industry and scenario dimensions, to facilitate evaluation and inquiry across all sectors. These thirty indices can be categorized into the following six major groups based on evaluation targets and scenarios:

(I) Macro Competitiveness (4 indices)

Pangpei Global AI Cognitive Index, Pangpei City AI Competitiveness Index, Pangpei National AI Influence Index, Pangpei Regional Economy AI Index—providing AI-cognitive-level decision-making references for national and regional development.

(II) Enterprise and Brand (5 indices)

Pangpei Enterprise AI Cognitive Index, Pangpei Brand AI Visibility Index, Pangpei Entrepreneur AI Influence Index, Pangpei Digital Asset Index, Pangpei Enterprise Globalization Index—helping enterprises build new intangible assets and quantify AI cognitive competitiveness in the process of going global.

(III) Core AI Industry (9 indices)

Pangpei Investment AI Influence Index, Pangpei Artificial Intelligence Industry Index, Pangpei Large Model Ecosystem Index, Pangpei Intelligent Manufacturing Index, Pangpei Chip Industry Index, Pangpei Robotics Index, Pangpei Autonomous Driving Index, Pangpei Future Industry Index, Pangpei Green Industry Index—precisely assessing the development trends of hard tech and future industries.

(IV) Vertical Industry Applications (5 indices)

Pangpei Healthcare AI Index, Pangpei Education AI Index, Pangpei Finance AI Index, Pangpei Cultural Tourism AI Index, Pangpei Agriculture AI Index—empowering digital transformation of traditional industries and covering key scenarios in the economy and society.

(V) Communication and Media (4 indices)

Pangpei GEO Index, Pangpei AI Media Influence Index, Pangpei AI Search Index, Pangpei Nation Brand AI Index—exploring new communication orders and national brand cognitive development in the digital era.

(VI) City and Talent (3 indices)

Pangpei AI City Friendliness Index, Pangpei AI Talent Influence Index, Pangpei AI Innovation Index—providing quantitative coordinates for city talent attraction and innovation capability evaluation.

The launch of these thirty indices marks the strategic upgrade of the Pangpei Index from a macro framework to vertical deep-diving, extending the reach of AI cognitive evaluation into every key field of economic and social development.

IV. Significance of the Era: Providing a New Yardstick for Competitiveness in the AI Age

The continuous deepening of the Pangpei Index carries profound social value and contemporary significance.

First, it fills a systemic gap in evaluating soft-power discourse influence in the AI era. While GDP measures economic scale and brand value rankings assess corporate intangible assets, a new question is emerging: in an era where generative AI increasingly dominates information distribution, how can we measure the presence and discourse influence of a brand, an industry, or even a country in the "AI world"? The Pangpei Index, using real output data from AI large models as its sole evaluation criterion, provides a quantitative answer to this question.

Second, it forms a complete evaluation loop that complements China's AI technical standards. The group standards led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology focus on evaluating AI technical hardware, computing power, and algorithmic capabilities; the Pangpei Index focuses on evaluating cognitive discourse influence and communication soft power at the upper application level. Together, they form a complete AI enterprise comprehensive evaluation loop of "technical hard power + cognitive soft power," improving the full-dimensional assessment system for China's AI industry.

Third, it propels China's evaluation system onto the world stage. From Chinese cities to 194 countries worldwide, the Pangpei Index is completing its leap from local to global. This evaluation system, pioneered by Chinese scholars, uses neutral and traceable data collection methods and is becoming an important reference for the international community to observe competitiveness in the AI era. It is a landmark indigenous evaluation system through which China participates in global AI governance and sets international discourse standards.

Fourth, it serves national strategies and industrial development. The release of thirty major vertical sub-indices will provide precise cognitive evaluation tools for national strategies such as "new quality productive forces," "manufacturing powerhouse," and "self-reliance and controllability." From the chip industry to intelligent manufacturing, from green industries to future industries, the Pangpei Index will help various sectors see their true position in the AI cognitive world and provide data support for decision-making.

Fifth, it drives cognitive assets from vague concepts to a manageable system. The Pangpei Index has transformed cognitive assets such as the AI visibility of Chinese brands, the AI influence of global entrepreneurs, and the AI competitiveness of Chinese cities into quantifiable, comparable, and optimizable indicators. In the future, cognitive assets are expected to be incorporated into the routine dimensions of corporate intangible assets and urban soft power assessments.

"The goal of the AI Index is to turn 'competitiveness in the AI era' from a vague concept into an indicator system that can be seen, compared, and managed," said Pang Pei. As AI becomes the "gatekeeper" of the information world, the competitive arena for brands, industries, and individuals is quietly shifting. In this paradigm shift, the Pangpei Index is becoming the ruler that measures "invisible influence."

From seven macro indices to thirty major vertical sub-indices, the Pangpei Index is ushering in a brand-new 2.0 era. This is not merely an expansion in quantity but a profound revolution—taking AI cognitive evaluation from macro-level observation to micro-level insight, from overall judgment to precise navigation. The competition of the future world is not only economic competition, technological competition, and talent competition, but also cognitive competition. And the Pangpei Index is precisely the "new coordinate" most worthy of attention in this cognitive competition.