Share of Answer
A brand's proportion of the AI answers generated for a set of relevant questions, by analogy with share of voice. Widely used, variously defined, and recorded here as contested.
What it is trying to measure
Of the answers generated for the questions that matter to your category, what proportion mention you. It is an intuitive translation of a metric marketers already understood.
The intuition is good and the operationalisation is where it falls apart: the result depends entirely on which prompts were chosen, which models were sampled, how often, and what counts as a mention.
Why it is contested
Several practitioners and vendors use the phrase with confident but incompatible definitions, and no dated first use establishes a claimant. Two tools can report share of answer for the same brand and disagree wildly without either being wrong.
Ghost citation makes it worse. A source can shape an answer without appearing in it, so any share-of-answer figure systematically undercounts influence by an unknown amount.