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Every card compares a window — 1, 4 or 12 weeks of daily slots — against the equal-length window immediately before it. What it says about that comparison is one of four things, and only one of them comes with an arrow.

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A number moving is not a change

Suppose you measured 18% one month and 24% the next. Six points up. Is that a result? It depends entirely on how many answers each figure came from. From 25 answers a side, a six-point gap is well inside what re-running the same prompts on the same brand would produce by chance. From 2,000 answers a side, the same six points are a real movement. The number alone cannot tell you which. rekkal decides it for you, with an explicit rule:
The rule: rekkal shows a direction only when the two periods’ confidence intervals do not overlap. If they overlap at all, the movement is reported without a direction, an arrow, or a colour.
That is intentionally conservative. It means rekkal will sometimes stay quiet about a change that was real — and it means an arrow on your dashboard is worth something, because it was never given away to noise.

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The four verdicts

The two periods’ confidence intervals do not overlap, so this movement is measurable. This is the only verdict that carries a direction and a colour.
The point estimate moved — the card tells you by how much — but the two periods’ intervals overlap, so this sample cannot tell the difference from noise.Read this as “we do not have enough evidence yet”, not as “nothing happened”. More weeks, or more prompts, narrow the intervals and may resolve it either way.
One half of the comparison is missing, and the card names which half:
  • No prior period to compare against — the previous window recorded nothing to measure over.
  • Nothing measured in this period yet — so there is no change to report.
  • The prior period holds only n runs, below this measure’s threshold — too small to compare against.
Three different situations with three different next steps, which is why they get three different sentences rather than one shrug.
Only average position gets this. It is a mean, and rekkal’s stored data carries no interval for a mean, so there is nothing to test the two periods against each other with. Both periods are shown side by side instead. See What rekkal measures.

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Gaps stay gaps

If nothing ran in a given week — an outage, an engine failure, a workspace paused — that week has no point on the chart. The line stops and restarts on the other side, the week keeps its place on the axis with a dashed marker, and the missing week is named underneath. Nothing is interpolated across it, because a smooth line through a week that was never measured is a claim rekkal cannot support. Most charting libraries join across a missing point by default; rekkal’s charts are drawn by hand specifically so they cannot.
A measured zero is different from a gap, and is drawn differently. If a week did run and no answer named your brand, that is a real 0% against a real denominator, and it is plotted as zero. Absent data is absent; observed absence is zero. The dashboard never confuses the two.

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Empty states say why they are empty

“No data” is not an answer. Wherever a surface has nothing to show, it names the cause, because the causes have different remedies:
  • Nothing has been measured yet — set up your brand, or wait for the first slot.
  • Answers were collected, but their sources were never captured — the numbers on the dashboard for that window are real; only the sources are missing.
  • Sourced answers were read and cited nothing — a real result about your category.
  • No competitors are tracked yet — so there is nothing to be missing from.
  • Your plan does not include this view — a plan boundary, which is shown as its own screen naming the plan and the remedy, never as an empty chart. See Plans.

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What to do with a “No measurable change”

1

Check the sample size

If the n under the figure is below the reporting threshold, the honest answer is that you do not have enough evidence yet.
2

Widen the window

Switch from 1 week to 4 or 12. More slots means more runs on both sides of the comparison and narrower intervals.
3

Upgrade for a larger prompt allowance

Prompts are the fastest lever on sample size: doubling your prompts doubles the runs per week, and Pro also covers three engines rather than one. Your prompt set is chosen during setup and cannot be edited afterwards yet, so a higher allowance is how you widen it today. See Plans and limits.
4

Wait

Daily cadence does not lower the bar, it shortens the wait. A single day on this kind of data is mostly a report on sampling noise; a week of daily slots is seven times the sample a weekly cadence would have given you by then.