share of answer
Also called: share of voice AI, AI share of voice, SOA, ai sov
Share of answer is the percentage of AI-generated answers, across a tracked set of prompts and models, that name your brand in the answer text, measured against competitors. It is the AI-search version of share of voice: how often you win the answer versus rivals.
No standards body owns this metric, so definitions vary a little by tool. The shared idea is consistent: pick a panel of buyer-intent prompts, run them across the engines your audience uses (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini), and count how many answers name your brand versus competitors.
How it is measured
The basic formula is a ratio:
share of answer = your appearances / (your + competitor appearances) x 100
Some tools weight it by position, so a brand named first counts more than one buried at the end (Digital Applied uses harmonic decay: position 1 = 1.0, position 2 = 0.50, position 3 = 0.33).
Keep three things separate. Being named in the answer body (share of answer) is not the same as having your URL cited as a source (share of citation), and neither is the same as being mentioned anywhere at all (share of mention). An answer can praise your brand without linking you, or cite your page without saying your name.
Two practical notes. Engines pull from different sources, so measure per platform instead of averaging. One large analysis of 680 million citations found only 11% of domains cited by ChatGPT also appeared among those cited by Perplexity. And results move a lot month to month, so track on a fixed cadence (monthly is common, weekly if you can measure it) rather than reading a single snapshot.
How it affects your traffic
Classic rankings and share of answer can diverge. You can sit at position 1 in Google and still be invisible when a buyer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity the same question, because the model names two competitors and skips you. Share of answer is the scoreboard for that shift, and it is the number our AI SEO work is built to move, by making your pages the source the models reach for. If your share of answer is near zero in your category, every AI-mediated research session is a lead handed to whoever the model does name.
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