Definition

Collection cost

Collection cost is the fully loaded cost of a single successful sample: proxy egress, retries, browser compute, parser maintenance and, on gated engines, account health.

It varies by roughly an order of magnitude between the cheapest engine (a SERP request) and the most expensive (an account-gated Chinese chat app).

Any pricing model that charges the same for every engine is either subsidising the hard ones or overcharging for the easy ones.

Related terms

Bot detection Credit n-sampling

Nostimates measures collection cost across twelve AI answer surfaces. Request access →

All terms

AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)AI Overviews AI Mode Citation share n-sampling Query fan-out Grounding Share of voice (AI)Extraction success rate Surface Answer engine Citation Brand mention Mention rate Confidence interval Statistical significance Citation volatility Non-determinism Reproducibility Identity-free collection Personalisation Locale Residential proxy Bot detection Credit Evidence retention Audit trail Parser version Canary prompt Data freshness Cadence Prompt set Head term Long-tail query Competitive set llms.txt robots.txt AI crawler Training crawler Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)Hallucination Answer box Featured snippet Zero-click search Entity Entity salience Knowledge graph Structured data JSON-LD schema.org FAQ schema Answer-first content Chunk Embedding Semantic search Prompt injection Market coverage Sentiment analysis Position tracking White-label data