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What is the BrandIndex API?

What is an API?​

An API (Application Programming Interface) is a way for one program to use another program's data and behaviour. Unlike a user interface, it is not made for people to click through directly — it is a software layer that another application (the API client) connects to. The BrandIndex API is delivered as a web service: the data lives on a server, and your client program (running elsewhere) connects over HTTP to retrieve it, then displays or processes it however you need.

What is the BrandIndex API?​

The BrandIndex API gives you programmatic access to YouGov BrandIndex — daily brand-perception tracking across many markets, categories and metrics. Where the BrandIndex web application lets you build charts and tables by hand, the API lets you request the same underlying data directly, so you can build your own dashboards, reports or integrations.

Processed data, not raw responses. The API returns the same already-aggregated figures that power the BrandIndex UI charts — scores, volumes and their components — not respondent-level raw data. The numbers you get back match what the UI displays.

What you can do​

  • Run analyses — time series of brand scores for one or more brands, metrics and audiences.
  • Run rankings — league tables of brands within a category.
  • Explore the taxonomy — discover the regions, sectors and brands you can measure.
  • Apply audience filters — narrow results to demographic or behavioural segments.
  • Test significance — check whether a change between two points is meaningful.
  • Export — pull results as JSON or CSV, or download Excel/CSV files.

What a result looks like​

You describe what to measure — a brand, a metric, a date range, an audience — and the API returns the calculated scores over time, together with the base sizes and component figures behind each number.

Prerequisites​

  • A licensed BrandIndex account with API access.
  • Credentials to authenticate with (see Authentication).
  • Data access is limited to your account's entitlements.

Base URL and versioning​

Everything lives under:

https://api.brandindex.com/v1

The /v1 prefix is the API version; it is also echoed in the meta.version field of request bodies and successful JSON responses (error responses and CSV/file downloads carry no envelope).

Asking rather than building​

If you want to explore the data by asking questions rather than by writing code, the BrandIndex MCP exposes BrandIndex to an LLM client as a set of tools. It calls this same API underneath, so the figures match — it just takes a sentence instead of an analysis definition.

Where to go next​

  1. Authentication — log in.
  2. Your first request — run a simple analysis.
  3. Concepts — understand the building blocks.