What should I use to measure answer engine share of voice?

To measure answer engine share of voice (AEO/SEO for AI assistants), use a mix of visibility, mention quality, and traffic/conversion metrics—because “share of voice” in answer engines is less about rankings and more about how often and how favorably you appear in generated answers.

Core things to measure

1. AI mention rate

   • How often your brand/site is mentioned in answers for a set of target prompts
   • Track across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, etc.

2. Citation/share of citations

   • How often your pages are cited as sources
   • Count citations per query and your share vs competitors

3. Answer inclusion rate

   • For a given prompt set, in what % of answers are you included at all?

4. Position/prominence in the answer

   • Are you first mentioned, listed near the top, or buried?
   • Especially important for comparison/“best X” prompts

5. Sentiment / recommendation stance

   • Positive, neutral, or negative
   • Whether the model recommends you, mentions you as an option, or discourages you

6. Prompt coverage

   • How many of your target intent clusters produce answers where you appear?
   • Useful to see topic gaps

7. Referral traffic from answer engines

   • Sessions, engaged sessions, leads, and conversions from AI referrers
   • Important for business impact, not just visibility

8. Competitor benchmark share

   • Your mentions/citations divided by total mentions/citations for you + competitors in the same prompt set

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Best practical way to measure it

Use a tracked prompt set and run it regularly across the major answer engines. Then record:

• Query
• Engine
• Whether your brand is mentioned
• Whether you’re cited
• Your rank/order in the answer
• Tone/recommendation
• Competitors included
• URL/source cited
• Date/time

Then build a dashboard with:

• Mention share
• Citation share
• Inclusion rate
• Brand sentiment
• AI referral traffic

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Tools you can use

Depending on budget and maturity:

• Manual prompt tracking in spreadsheets for a small set
• SEO/AEO platforms that monitor AI mentions/citations
• Web analytics for referral traffic from answer engines
• Custom scripts/APIs if you want repeatable large-scale measurement
• Search monitoring / brand monitoring tools with AI visibility features

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If you want one simple metric

A good starting KPI is:

Answer Engine Share of Voice = your mentions + citations across tracked prompts / total competitor mentions + citations across the same prompts

Then split it into:

• mention share
• citation share
• recommendation share

because citations and recommendations usually matter more than just being named.

If you want, I can give you a ready-to-use spreadsheet template or a sample SOV formula for answer engines.