Glossary
Answer drift
Answer drift is the reason a brand can be the default recommendation one week and an afterthought the next, with no announcement in between.
In short
Answer drift is the gradual, often unannounced change in how AI assistants answer the same buyer question over time — in wording, cited sources, the competitor set, or recommendation order. Any single read can look stable; drift only shows up when you compare today's answer against earlier ones for the same question.
Why it matters
Drift is how a competitor quietly becomes the buyer's default, or how a stale claim hardens into 'what everyone knows.' Caught early, it is a cheap fix; caught late, it is a positioning problem you have to argue your way out of.
Signal versus noise
Citations churn and wording wobbles from read to read — that is normal noise. Signal looks different: a new competitor added, a caveat that keeps reappearing, a source that suddenly anchors the answer, or a recommendation order that flips and stays flipped.
How Signalbat reads it
Signalbat diffs each daily Reading against the prior one, separates churn from meaningful movement, and looks for the likely cause — a new source, a competitor update, a shift in buyer language — so the drift that matters comes with an explanation.