Every discipline gets the metric it deserves. SEO got rankings: where do we sit for this keyword? The question made sense when a results page was the battlefield. It makes very little sense now, because the customer increasingly never sees a results page.
The number that matters now is simpler and harsher: when buyers ask the questions that lead to your product, how often are you in the answer? We call it share of answer, and it is the single figure we judge our own work by.
How to measure it honestly
The method is straightforward, and the discipline is in doing it properly.
- Start from real questions, not keywords. Nobody asks an assistant "best accounting software UK". They ask what a small consultancy should use for invoicing, or whether a certain tool handles their country's tax rules. Collect the questions your actual buyers ask, from sales calls, support tickets and your own team.
- Ask across engines. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google's AI Overviews answer differently and are used by different people. A share that only covers one engine is a partial truth.
- Ask repeatedly. Answers vary between sessions and drift over weeks. A single spot check is an anecdote. A schedule of the same questions, asked the same way, is a measurement.
- Record competitors, not just yourself. Share is relative. Knowing you appear in three answers out of ten matters less than knowing a rival appears in eight.
Reading the number
Share of answer behaves differently from rankings, and the differences are worth internalising. It moves slowly, then suddenly, because engines form consensus rather than reorder a list. It rewards depth in a niche over breadth across many. And it compounds: once you are the name an engine gives, users act on the recommendation, and that behaviour reinforces the pattern.
Rankings told you where you stood in a queue. Share of answer tells you whether you exist in the conversation.
Tie it to money or ignore it
A share of answer number floating on its own is as decorative as a ranking report ever was. It earns its keep when you connect it to the rest of the funnel: assistant referred sessions, the enquiries they produce, and what those enquiries close at. In our experience assistant referred enquiries convert unusually well, because the customer arrives pre sold by a recommendation they trust more than an advert.
That connected picture, share, traffic, enquiries, revenue, is what a GEO report should look like. If your current agency cannot show it to you, ask them why.