Everything else here concerns what is said about you when someone already knows your name. This is the larger question: whether you appear at all when a buyer describes their problem and asks who solves it.
Share of voice measured who was talked about. Share of answer measures who gets recommended — and increasingly that is the only list a buyer sees.
A search returns ten options and the buyer chooses. An assistant returns two or three and the buyer treats them as the shortlist. Being absent from that answer is not ranking poorly — it is not being considered.
Buyers no longer type a keyword and browse. They describe a situation and ask who handles it. Those are different questions with different winners, and almost nobody is measuring the second.
Ten blue links became three names. The difference between third and fourth used to be a scroll. It is now the difference between appearing and not existing.
No impression is logged, no click is lost, nothing appears in your analytics. The enquiry simply never arrives, and the quarter is attributed to market conditions.
We build the set of questions your buyers actually ask — by service, by problem, by region, by segment — and put every one of them to every major engine on a schedule. The output is a matrix, not an impression.
A question that names you nowhere is a defined, addressable gap. That is a far more useful artefact than a ranking report.
The useful part is not that a competitor leads. It is being able to see exactly which sources the engine drew on to reach that conclusion — because most of them are places you can also be.
Not just who is recommended, but what is being read to recommend them. Independent platforms and trade press dominate; a competitor's own marketing rarely does.
These answers change without announcement. Tracked on a schedule, a competitor's rise becomes visible while it is happening rather than afterwards.
Answers differ by region, by phrasing and by how the buyer frames the problem. A single national number conceals exactly the variation worth acting on.
The output is which sources to be present in, which facts to correct, and which gaps are worth closing first — ordered by what the engines are demonstrably reading.
The answer engines are where the growth is, not where all the volume is. The same analysis runs across conventional surfaces, and the two are read together.
Where you rank for the terms buyers use, measured across a geography rather than from one point, alongside who holds the positions you do not.
Ordering on the comparison and directory sites that buyers in your sector actually consult before shortlisting.
Who is being quoted, cited and profiled in your field — the input that most reliably feeds the engines later.