The bar
12
How small a cited site gets. The weakest quartile.
Median cited site
25
What a typical incumbent scores.
Content share
96%
Cited sources that are articles, not vendor sites.
Brand tested
8
nobeldental.net
Verdict
Open. A newcomer has a realistic route in.
A bar of 12 against a median cited site of 25. Both numbers are low in absolute terms, which means the engines answering questions about Invisalign in a specific city are drawing on a set of small sites: local practice pages, regional dental content, review aggregators with modest authority.
The tested practice scored 8, below the bar but within sight of it, which in a market with these numbers is a quarter of work rather than a year of it. Compare it with men's health supplements, where the equivalent distance would be the gap between 62 and 66 at a scale where every point is harder to win.
This is the clearest demonstration in the set that absolute authority is not what decides AI visibility. A score of 12 gets you cited here and would not get you read in supplements. The bar is set by the market, not by a universal standard.
A handful of well-made procedure and cost pages is enough to clear a bar of 12. This is a market where a small practice can realistically be in the answer within a quarter.
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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