What is share-of-answer?
Share-of-answer is the percentage of buyer-intent questions where an AI engine names your product. It’s the core metric for AI visibility — the answer-engine equivalent of keyword rankings or share-of-voice.
Updated June 2026
The short definition
Share-of-answer measures how often you show up when it counts. Take a fixed set of real buyer questions in your category, run them across the major AI engines, and count the share in which your product is named. That percentage is your share-of-answer — a single number that tells you whether AI is recommending you or your competitors.
How it’s calculated
The method is deliberately simple and repeatable:
- Define a prompt set — 20–50 real buyer questions (“best tool for X,” “X vs Y,” “how do I solve Z”).
- Run them on a schedule across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini.
- Score each response — are you mentioned? Recommended first? Described accurately? Who appears instead?
- Share-of-answer = prompts where you’re named ÷ total prompts, tracked over time and per engine.
Why it’s the metric that matters
Traditional analytics can’t see AI recommendations — they happen inside private chats, with no referrer and no “AI Search Console.” Share-of-answer makes the invisible measurable. It turns “are we showing up in ChatGPT?” from a guess into a tracked number you can move week over week, the same way you’d watch keyword rankings.
Beyond the headline number
Share-of-answer is most useful broken down:
- By engine — you might dominate Perplexity but be invisible in ChatGPT.
- By prompt type — strong on “best tool for X,” weak on head-to-head comparisons.
- By position & sentiment — being named first and described accurately beats a passing mention.
From share-of-answer to pipeline
The number only matters if it drives revenue. That’s why AEO work ties share-of-answer to downstream signals — AI-sourced visits, trials, and demos — so you can see that climbing visibility is producing customers, not just citations.