Before you pay anyone — us included — to get your business named by ChatGPT, there is a question nobody in this industry seems to want to answer: how stable is the answer in the first place?
By David William, Founder, Get AI Cited (getaicited.ai), Dubai. Get AI Cited Technology, DET licence 1635658. Updated 14 July 2026.
Key finding of this study: “27.8% of the answers changed with no intervention at all.”
Cite this study: William, D. (2026). How much does an AI answer change on its own? Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21606840
We took a fixed basket of buyer questions — the kind a real customer types when choosing a business — and asked them on a clean engine surface. Then we asked exactly the same questions again in later windows. We changed nothing in between. No new pages, no citations, no listings, no work of any kind.
If the engine were stable, every window would return the same businesses. It did not.
Roughly a quarter to a third of the movement in an AI answer, on the evidence we have, is the engine moving on its own. That has three consequences, and they are uncomfortable for everyone selling this service — us first.
It does not say AI visibility work is pointless — the opposite. It says the work has to be measured properly to be worth anything, and that the industry's default proof (one screenshot, one date) is worthless. It also does not say your engine behaves exactly like ours did: this is one basket, one engine, three windows. It is a directional finding from a small sample, not a law.
You can reproduce it: pick ten questions your customers actually ask, open a logged-out temporary chat, ask them, write down who gets named. Do it again a week later, having changed nothing. Count how many answers moved.
This is the reason our reporting looks the way it does: multi-run averages, a published method, dated logs, and results reported either way. It is slower and less flattering than a screenshot. It is also the only version of this that survives contact with the engine's own behaviour.
Read the full method · Get the same measurement run on your business
In our July 2026 testing on a clean, logged-out ChatGPT surface, the answer changed 27.8% of the time across three measured windows with no intervention at all (25.0%, 33.3%, 25.0%). This is a small-sample, directional result, not a published statistic.
If an engine changes its own answer roughly a quarter to a third of the time with nothing changed, then a single before-and-after screenshot is not evidence of anything. A result has to be measured across multiple runs to be distinguishable from noise.
No. At the noise levels we measured, a guaranteed citation or ranking is not something an honest operator can promise. Get AI Cited does not sell a citation guarantee; it sells a published method and multi-run measurement.