What is Share of Answer?
- Share of Answer
- Share of answer is a measure of how often an AI assistant names a given brand when answering a defined set of questions, relative to how often it names competitors. It replaces keyword rank as the headline metric for AI visibility, because an answer has no positions to occupy, only brands that appear and brands that do not.
01 In practice
Share of answer is measured by sampling rather than by querying an index. A fixed set of buyer questions is put to each engine on a schedule, and the answers are recorded: who was named, in what order, and which sources were cited. There is no ranking API to read, so the measure is only as good as the prompt set behind it.
The number is meaningless without its questions. A share of answer reported without the prompts that produced it cannot be reproduced or challenged, which is why any honest report publishes them alongside the figure.
Variance is the trap. Model answers differ between runs, so a single check is a sample rather than a measurement, and a screenshot of one good answer is not evidence of anything. The signal lives in trends across repeated runs.
The work behind it
Measure what analytics can't see.
Prompt-level reporting: where you're named, where a competitor is, and which sources built the answer.