Answer Share
Answer share is the percentage of AI answers to a tracked set of questions in which your business appears at all, counted once per answer, unlike share of voice, which is your percentage of all business mentions across those answers.
Also known as: Answer inclusion rate, Presence rate
Answer share and share of voice sound interchangeable and measure different things. Answer share asks: out of every answer to these questions, in what percentage did my business appear? Each answer counts once, yes or no. Share of voice asks: out of every business mention across all those answers, what percentage were mine? An answer naming five businesses contributes five mentions to the share-of-voice pool but only one yes to your answer share.
A concrete example. Suppose you track 100 answers from Perplexity. You appear in 40 of them, so your answer share is 40%. But Perplexity names about 7 businesses per answer on average (Profound measured roughly 7.3 domains per response), so those 100 answers hold around 700 mentions, and your 40 are about 6% of them. Answer share 40%, share of voice 6%. Both are true. They describe different things.
Which one matters depends on the engine and the question. On an engine like Copilot, which cites about 2.5 domains per response according to Profound, answers are short and the two metrics converge: appearing at all means holding a large fraction of the mentions. On engines that list many options, answer share tells you whether you're in the conversation while share of voice tells you how crowded that conversation is. A rising answer share with a flat share of voice means engines are naming more businesses per answer, not that you're being singled out.
For a small business, answer share is usually the metric to start with because it maps to the customer's experience. A homeowner reads one answer. Either you're in it or you're not. Share of voice becomes more useful once you're consistently present and want to know whether you're one of two names or one of eight. Position in answer adds the third dimension: being in the answer, being one of few, and being first are three separate achievements.
Tibly reports both, per engine and per prompt, alongside position and sentiment, so you can see not just whether you're appearing but how much of the answer you own. The competitor benchmark uses the same runs to show how the mentions divide across every business named in your market.
Keep exploring the glossary
- Share of Voice (AI)AI share of voice is the percentage of tracked AI answers that name your business instead of a competitor's, measured per engine and across repeated prompts, since a single AI answer isn't a reliable sample.
- Mention Rate (Visibility Rate)Mention rate, also called visibility rate, is the percentage of AI answers to a tracked set of buying questions that name your business, calculated per engine over repeated runs, so it measures how reliably an engine recommends you.
- Position in AnswerPosition in answer is the rank at which an AI engine names your business within a single response, where position 1 means you were named first, and it matters because answers hold only a few slots.
- Competitor Benchmark (AI answers)A competitor benchmark in AI answers is a side-by-side comparison of how often each business in a market gets named for the same buying questions on the same engines, revealing who holds the slots you don't and why.
Common questions about Answer Share
- What's the difference between answer share and share of voice?
- Answer share counts answers: in what percentage of answers did you appear at all. Share of voice counts mentions: what percentage of all business names across those answers were yours. An answer naming you and six competitors gives you 100% answer share for that answer but about 14% share of voice.
- Is answer share the same as mention rate?
- Effectively yes. Both count the share of answers that name you, once per answer, per engine. Different tools use different labels. The important distinction is with share of voice, which divides by total mentions rather than total answers and can be much lower on engines that name many businesses.