Answer Share
The share of answers a brand appears in at all.
Industry Term
Full explanation
Answer share is the proportion of AI-generated answers on a given topic in which a particular brand appears at all, whether cited, named, or recommended.
It uses the same measurement protocol as citation share — the same buyer questions, run repeatedly across the same AI systems — but counts differently. Any appearance qualifies: a citation, a bare mention in passing, an inclusion in a list of options. There is no requirement that the brand be the source the system credits.
The gap between answer share and citation share is where the useful diagnosis lives. A brand can have a high answer share — it comes up often — and a much lower citation share, meaning it is recognized as a topic but rarely trusted as evidence. That gap describes a specific, fixable problem rather than a vague sense of underperformance.
Why this matters
It is broader than citation share, and the gap between the two shows how often a brand is mentioned without being treated as a source worth crediting.
Example
If a brand appears somewhere in thirty of fifty answers on a topic, its answer share is 60%. If it is named as the credited source in only six of those fifty, its citation share is 12%. The forty-eight-point gap between the two numbers is the finding: present, but rarely credited.
Where this sits
Answer Share belongs to Measurement & AI Visibility, one of the seven layers of the Aingworth Glossary. How to know whether recognition is improving. Aingworth defines these plainly and does not adopt proprietary-sounding scoring language that belongs to other tools.
Continue with: AI Visibility Is a Range, Not a Number.
Related terms
Ready to see where your brand stands?
Start with the free diagnostic to see which condition of the Recognition Triangle is leaking, or read the frameworks these terms belong to.