Answer share is the new market share
When an assistant names three brands, the fourth does not exist. That is the whole shift, and it is already priced into your traffic.
A category used to have ten blue links. It now has one paragraph and three names in it. Shoppers ask an assistant which running shoe suits flat feet, which CRM fits a two-person team, which protein powder has no sucralose — and they act on the answer without opening a single tab.
The share you can no longer see
Nothing about this shows up in analytics. There is no referrer for a recommendation that was never clicked. The lost demand looks like a slow quarter, not a visibility problem, so teams optimise the funnel they can measure and leave the one that decides the purchase untouched.
Nine prompts about flat feet cite a single competitor guide.
Answer share is the fix: the percentage of a category's buying questions in which an assistant names you. It behaves like market share, moves weekly, and traces back to specific pages an assistant read.
What to do this month
Build the prompt set for your category — the real questions, phrased the way customers phrase them. Run it across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Record who gets named and which sources the answer leans on. That baseline is the only number that tells you whether the next six months of content worked.
