Query Decay Horizon

Query Decay Horizon is the point at which a listening query stops returning clean signal and starts returning noise that a human must adjudicate. Every boolean string has a shelf life: slang shifts, a competitor rebrands, a product name collides with a celebrity, and precision falls. The framework says agencies should price monitoring retainers against the decay rate of the query set, not the volume of mentions captured. A query that held 90% precision in month one may sit at 60% by month four, and the gap is paid for in analyst review time. Brand24, Awario, and YouScan all let teams tune boolean filters, but none of them bill you for the hours your analyst spends discarding false positives. That labor is the real cost line, and it compounds quietly until a client asks why the monthly report is thinner than the invoice.