Definition

Identity-free collection

Identity-free collection means gathering AI answers without an authenticated session, so the response reflects the engine's default behaviour rather than a specific user's history, memory and personalisation.

It is a methodological requirement rather than a limitation: a number measured through somebody's personalised account is a number nobody else can reproduce.

Some engines — the Gemini app, DeepSeek, Qwen, Doubao, Kimi — require an account. Numbers from those engines should be treated as directionally useful rather than identity-free.

Nostimates measures identity-free collection 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 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