Definition

Confidence interval

A confidence interval expresses the uncertainty around an estimated rate. For AI answer tracking it is calculated on a proportion — typically a Wilson interval on citation share over n samples.

Intervals are what convert an AI visibility number from an anecdote into a measurement. A share of 34% ±17 points at n=25 supports a claim; a share of 34% with no interval does not.

The interval narrows with the square root of the sample size, so quadrupling samples halves the interval. That relationship is the entire cost model for accuracy in this category.

Nostimates measures confidence interval 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 Statistical significance Citation volatility Non-determinism Reproducibility Identity-free collection Personalisation Locale Residential proxy Bot detection Collection cost 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