Definition

Statistical significance

In AI visibility, a change in citation share is significant when the intervals around the before and after measurements do not overlap, given the sample sizes used.

Most month-on-month movements reported in AI visibility dashboards would not survive this test at the sample sizes those tools use.

The practical rule: decide what change size matters to the client, then choose the sample size that can resolve it, rather than sampling cheaply and interpreting whatever comes back.

Nostimates measures statistical significance 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 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