A bar of 37 and a genuine newcomer scoring 6. The widest gap in the set.
The bar
37
How small a cited site gets. The weakest quartile.
Median cited site
51
What a typical incumbent scores.
Content share
100%
Cited sources that are articles, not vendor sites.
Brand tested
6
caloriecue.app
Verdict
Closed. The floor is above what a new entrant can reach.
This is the hardest case in the set and the most honest one to publish. A real new entrant scored 6 against a bar of 37, cleared nothing on any of the four questions, and sat at position 0 among the cited domains. On one question out of four a site weaker than the bar did get cited, which is the only crack in it.
Content share was 100%, as in legal CRM, so the mechanism is the same: the engines answer consumer nutrition questions out of health publications and app roundups, not out of app store listings or product sites.
What makes this market harder than legal CRM is not the bar, which is lower. It is that the publications doing the citing are health and fitness media with their own editorial standards and no commercial interest in a four-month-old app. The distance between 6 and 37 is not a content problem, it is a credibility problem, and it is measured in months.
caloriecue.app scored 6 against a bar of 37. It cleared the bar on 0/4 of this market’s questions, and on 1/4 of them a site scoring below the bar was cited anyway.
The second number is the one that matters. When sites under the bar keep appearing in answers, the bar is describing the middle of a distribution rather than guarding a gate, and there is a tail to get into.
Do not expect movement inside a quarter. Pick the one question where a weaker site was cited and work only on that, rather than spreading across four.
We asked the questions a buyer in this market actually asks, read every domain the engines cited in the answers, and scored each cited domain with the proprietary Peak Answer Link Ranking system. The bar is the score of the weakest quartile of cited sites, which tells you how small a site can be and still get quoted — basically how winnable the niche is for new players entering the space. Measured 09/23/2026. Engines change mentions overtime, so these may drift.
Two honest limits. The sample is the questions we chose, and a different set of questions in the same market would move these numbers. And scores are a model of authority, not a measurement of it: they are the same model the product uses on itself, which is the reason to trust the comparison between niches more than any single figure.
Peak Answer asks your buyers’ questions every week, reads every source the engines cite, and tells you which questions name a competitor instead of you.
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