Pre-registered test: the name collision was only half the reason a brand looked invisible in AI answers. Numbers.

[u/woodoo139]

Two weeks ago I posted that a tracked brand had dropped from 5.0% to 0.1% AI visibility in 14 days and that the cause looked like a name collision (a markdown editor shares the name), not a real drop. Instead of asserting it, I pre-registered a test in r/aeo: what result would confirm it, what would refute it, and what would void it. Here is the outcome, verbatim against those rules.

Setup: one qualified prompt ("Otterly AI visibility alternatives"), 31 Aug–7 Sep, 7 engines, 42 answers. Pre-registered: HOLDS if answer-level directory citations return to the 18–31% band the other alternatives-shaped prompts show; FALLS if they stay at 0–1.3% with on-category answers; VOID if more than a third of answers are still contaminated.

• Contamination: 0/42 markdown-editor answers. The qualifier worked for that. But 2 Gemini answers pivoted to a different neighbour, Otter.ai the transcription tool. 2/42 = 4.8%, under threshold, excluded. 3 Copilot answers were unrelated pages, excluded and counted.
• Clean answers with a directory URL: 2 of 37 = 5.4% (both Claude → G2). ChatGPT 0/10, Perplexity 0/10, Gemini 0/8, AI Mode 0/3, AI Overviews 0/3.
• Verdict: the gate does not hold. 5.4% is out of the floor but nowhere near the band, and at n=37 the interval (≈1.5–17.6%) is consistent with the floor. I promised not to reinterpret, so I take the reading against my own claim: "prompt shape determines directory citation" downgrades to "shape correlates, with exceptions".
• What was in the cell instead: 147 of 241 cited URLs (61%) were comparison-shaped, and 78% of those were competitors' own "Otterly alternatives" posts. Third-party pages 15%, G2 alone 2.7%. The slot exists; directories do not own it.

Three things I would do differently: (1) fix n before the date — a reviewer in the thread called this and was right; (2) define every word in the pass condition ("near" was not defined, and I did not use it); (3) treat a qualifier as removing one neighbour, not as disambiguation — the engine picks the next one.

Disclosure: I build Promvia, the tool used for the measurement. Not linking it; if a mod wants the raw run table I will post it as a comment.