Answer variance is how far the citation and mention results move when the same query is run again under the same conditions.
This is the sense CiteAngle uses when it measures. The word travels with other meanings in this market, so we pin ours before it turns up in a report.
Where this lands in the measurement
It is the ruler that tells a real month-over-month change from ordinary movement.
Without it, repeat measurement is an assertion rather than an argument.
What it costs to leave this loose
Without the spread, every difference between two rounds looks like a result. A good share of them are the ordinary movement of the surface.
The spread is measured from the repeats and printed beside the figure, so a change is judged against it.
Who you want measuring this
One reading does not settle a term like this. The answer an assistant writes today can name different companies tomorrow, so a Panorama round puts 50 buyer questions to every place on our US list, 7 separate times each, and reads all 17 of them — ChatGPT · Perplexity · Claude · Gemini · Grok · Google AI Overviews · Google AI Mode · Bing Copilot · DuckDuckGo AI Assist · Google Search · Bing Search · Yahoo Search · DuckDuckGo Search · Google News · Bing News · YouTube · Google Short Videos. Radar starts at 5 questions and covers the same list under the same rule.
We put the same questions to the competitors you name inside the same runs, so you see both in one table. The conditions are sealed, so you can reproduce the round and check it, and every planned observation is published with its state, failures included. When you choose who measures this, check that all three are in place.
That describes how the measuring is done. It is not a promise about where your numbers land.
Pages that use this term
Terms worth pinning at the same time