Methodology and glossary

All collected answers completed analysis. There were 62 collection failures, no duplicate or unexpected exported answer cells and no empty exported answers. The archive retains the missing-cell register. Failure causes for individual cells are not established by the exported aggregate status.

The cities collected 369 controlled recommendation answers. Those groups sum to the 1,094 collected answers.

The 193 exact questions are preserved with their approved metadata. Each baseline persona/output plans sixteen national answers: four wordings across four platforms. The regional plan supplies the same twenty-four controlled prompts to four platforms in each city. The additional thirty priority questions and sixty-seven guidance questions run at the national setting.

Collected answers is the number of collected result IDs in that group, including those without a qualifying named recommendation. The optional inclusion rate is recommended answers divided by collected answers.

A lender counts once per answer. Different lenders can count in the same answer. The measure is not exclusive share of recommendations. Conditional alternatives count when positively proposed. A citation alone, incidental name, contact directory, negative example or example of an unspecified current lender does not count. Adviser/distribution roles and expressly personal-loan alternatives are preserved separately.

For support, a named benefit must relate to the existing mortgage: service, refixing, repayment changes, cash-flow management or genuine restructuring. Underwriting-only benefits are excluded. Explicit refinancing to resolve an existing repayment/restructuring problem may count as a conditional support route. List order is not treated as preference unless the answer explicitly makes a top recommendation.

All 369 city recommendation answers were coded, including the twenty-nine answers excluded from the equal-city comparison because their group lacked another city result. All 360 national baseline recommendation answers remain in the ledger, including questions excluded from the all-four-platform comparison.

The narrative chapters also use selected journey and priority answer passages; they do not claim exhaustive qualitative review of all 365 national priority/guidance answers or verification of every product assertion.

The persona cases are purposive coverage, not a representative consumer sample. They have no population weights. The primary platform comparison equalises questions between platforms but does not create equal numbers of surviving questions per persona. The city comparison equalises the actual question/platform mix between cities.

Each answer cell is one observation in this baseline. Matched settings make the observed comparisons fair; repeat collection is needed to assess persistence. Recommendation frequency does not measure audience reach, applications, market share, actual customer-service quality or purchase outcomes.