AI answers rotate the brands they name every couple of days, so a single check measures nothing and the vendor selling one is selling noise.
AI answers rotate the brands they name every couple of days. A single check measures nothing, and a vendor selling one is selling noise. What a real measurement looks like, and what to ask before you pay for one.
A founder forwarded me a report last month with a proposal stapled to it. The report showed one screenshot: a competitor named in the AI answer to the buyer’s question, her company absent. The proposal quoted a five-figure fee to fix that.
I ran the same question through the same assistant six times. Her company appeared in three of the answers and the competitor in four. Nobody was invisible, and nobody owned the answer. The vendor had measured one die roll and sold her the result as a verdict.
At ESBO Ltd, the link-building and brand-mentions agency I run, we have checked what assistants say about client brands every month since early 2025, and the routine’s first lesson was to distrust our own screenshots. The early ones were just as misleading as the report that the founder received.
The instability has now been measured at scale. Ahrefs tracked more than 43,000 queries with AI Overviews for about a month and found that the answer had changed in 70% of cases between one check and the next, with the average version lasting about two days. 5% of their cited sources, and the entities named in them, which is where brands live, overlapped 54%.
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