Performance & Stack
Share of answers
Also called: Share of voice in AI, AI citation share, LLM share of voice
Share of answers is the percentage of AI-generated responses — from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews and similar — that cite your brand for a defined set of category prompts. It is the AEO-era equivalent of share of voice, and the leading indicator most B2B teams now track alongside organic rankings.
Share of voice measured how often your brand appeared in a ranked list of search results. Share of answers measures how often your brand appears inside the synthesised answer the model gives the user instead of that list.
To track share of answers usefully, a B2B team needs three things:
- A promptboard. A maintained set of 30–100 buyer-relevant prompts grouped by funnel stage and category — "best contextual AI marketing platform", "alternatives to HubSpot for lean teams", "what is AI engine optimisation".
- A repeatable run. The same prompts replayed across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews on a fixed cadence (weekly is typical), with the responses captured.
- A scoring rule. Each response is scored for brand mention (yes/no), citation (linked or named), sentiment, and competitive context (who else got cited).
The output is a percentage per engine, per prompt cluster, trended over time. Movement on this metric correlates with [AI Engine Optimisation](/glossary/ai-engine-optimisation) investments — schema, entity definitions, off-site authority, llms.txt — well before it shows up in pipeline.
Share of answers is not a vanity metric. As zero-click answers compress the SERP, it becomes the upper-funnel KPI: the brands that are cited in the answer are the brands buyers end up shortlisting.
Related terms
AI Engine Optimisation (AEO)
AI Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of making a website's content reliably discoverable, citable, and quotable by AI search engines and chat assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude, Gemini. Where SEO optimises for a ranked list of links, AEO optimises for being the source an LLM repeats in a synthesised answer.
Marketing ROI dashboard
A marketing ROI dashboard is the single view a CEO, CMO, or CRO uses to see what marketing spend produced, in terms of pipeline and revenue, over a given period. For lean B2B teams, it is the artefact that ends the recurring debate about whether marketing is working.
Single source of truth (marketing)
A single source of truth in marketing is the one system everyone on a team agrees to trust for what the strategy is, what campaigns are in flight, and what performance looks like. Without it, every weekly meeting starts with reconciling versions of the truth instead of deciding what to do next.