The bar
14
How small a cited site gets. The weakest quartile.
Median cited site
46
What a typical incumbent scores.
Content share
100%
Cited sources that are articles, not vendor sites.
Brand tested
0
keelway.com
Verdict
Open. A newcomer has a realistic route in.
Freight was tested to answer a specific question: does a market need a consumer-facing identity before the engines will build a citation set for it? It does not. The bar came out at 14 with a median cited site of 46, which is the widest gap between floor and middle in the entire study.
A wide gap between the bar and the median is the most favourable shape a market can have. It means the engines are citing a few large trade publications and, underneath them, a scattering of much smaller sites — industry blogs, operator write-ups, niche directories. The small sites are the opening, and at a bar of 14 almost any serious page clears it.
Content share was 100%, so this is again a market you enter through other people's pages, but the pages in question are trade media with far lower barriers than consumer health or legal publishing.
Trade publications in this sector will take a contributed article from an operator. That is the whole route in, and the bar is low enough that one or two land it.
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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