LR LLM Results

How to Measure Your Share-of-Answer

Share-of-answer is how often the AI engines name you when someone asks a question you care about. Measure it by fixing a set of target questions, asking each engine on a regular schedule, and recording whether you're cited, what's said, and how it changes. Rankings are no longer the scoreboard — this is.

A weekly citation-tracking loop from prompts to trend data
A weekly citation-tracking loop from prompts to trend data

What exactly am I measuring?

For a defined set of prompts, the rate at which a given engine mentions or cites your brand in its answer — and, beyond a yes/no, the position and sentiment of that mention. "Cited in 4 of 10 target questions on Perplexity, usually favorably" is a share-of-answer reading. Track it per engine, because they retrieve and cite differently.

How do I pick the questions?

Start from how real buyers phrase things, not your keyword list. Collect the actual questions your audience asks an assistant — from sales calls, support tickets, and the "people also ask" style prompts around your category — and lock a representative set. Keeping the set stable is what makes the trend line meaningful.

What to measure

Share-of-answer is the percentage of sampled prompts where your brand or URL appears in the AI response. Track it weekly per engine, per topic cluster. Even a 5% baseline is meaningful.

How do I collect the data?

Ask each engine your fixed questions on a schedule and log the results: which sources it cited, whether you were among them, and the gist of what it said. You can do this by hand for a small set, or with tooling that queries the engines and parses citations for a larger one. Either way, consistency of method matters more than volume.

How often should I check?

Often enough to catch movement, not so often you drown in noise — weekly or biweekly suits most. Models, indexes, and your own content all change, so a single snapshot is nearly worthless; the value is in the trend across runs.

What do I do with the results?

Find the target questions where you're absent or described poorly, and treat each as a content brief: publish or sharpen the page that best answers it, then watch whether your share-of-answer on that question rises. That feedback loop — measure, fix the weakest answer, re-measure — is the entire game.

The short version

Fix your questions, query the engines on a cadence, log citations and sentiment, and act on the gaps. Share-of-answer is the one number that tells you whether your GEO work is paying off.