The bar
66
How small a cited site gets. The weakest quartile.
Median cited site
81
What a typical incumbent scores.
Content share
100%
Cited sources that are articles, not vendor sites.
Brand tested
62
gnc.com
Verdict
Closed. The floor is above what a new entrant can reach.
This market is closed and the numbers are not close. The bar is 66 and the median cited site is 81, both the highest in the set by a wide margin, and GNC — a national retail chain with decades of brand equity — scored 62 and cleared the bar on one question out of three.
When a brand that size cannot clear the bar, the question of whether a new supplement brand can is settled. The reason is the subject matter: these are health questions, and the engines answer them out of medical and institutional sources, which score very high on any authority measure. You are not competing with other supplement brands for the citation, you are competing with health publishers.
On two of three questions a site below the bar was cited, so it is not hermetically sealed. But a market where the floor is 66 is a different kind of market from one where the floor is 14, and treating them the same is how content budgets get wasted.
gnc.com scored 62 against a bar of 66. It cleared the bar on 1/3 of this market’s questions, and on 2/3 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 attempt the health questions directly. Compete on the product and buying-comparison questions, where the cited set is retail rather than medical.
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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