If you track one thing in AI answers, track AI Presence, the metric much of the industry still calls AI Share of Voice. If you track five, you can actually manage your discovery. The five that matter are AI Presence (are you in the answer), recommendation rate (are you the pick), accuracy (is the answer correct), source share (which cited domains are yours), and movement (did it change after you acted). Each answers a different question, and together they tell you not just where you stand but what to do next.
1. AI Presence: are you present
AI Presence, formerly and still widely called AI Share of Voice, is the share of answers about your category that name or recommend you, weighted by how prominently you appear, measured per engine and blended. It is the headline number, the one you move over time. A low AI Presence means buyers rarely hear your name when they ask an assistant about your space.
Because engines are non-deterministic, AI Presence is sampled across several runs per engine, not read from a single answer. Watch the trend over weeks, not the wiggle between two runs.
2. Recommendation rate: are you preferred
Presence is not preference. Recommendation rate is the share of answers where you are the pick or named first, not merely listed. Tracking it separately from AI Presence stops a pile of low-value mentions from masking the fact that a competitor owns the actual recommendation.
The gap between your AI Presence and your recommendation rate is a to-do list: those are the questions where you are in the answer but losing it.
3. Accuracy: is the answer right
An answer that recommends you but misstates your fee, your coverage, or a guarantee is worse than silence, especially in a regulated category. Accuracy is the share of answers about you that match your approved facts. Every inaccurate answer is both a lost sale and, sometimes, a compliance exposure.
Accuracy is measurable: sample what engines say about you and compare it against a set of approved, source-backed facts. What fails the check is your highest-priority fix, because it is actively working against you.
4. Source share: which sources are yours
Answers cite sources. Source share is how many of the domains an engine cites, for your questions, are yours versus third parties versus competitors. It tells you whether the answer is built on ground you control or ground you need to influence.
This is the lever behind the other four. If the sources shaping an answer are all third-party pages that ignore you, presence and preference will not move until you earn a place among them. Trace the sources and you find the work.
5. Movement: did it change
The only metric that proves the work matters. Movement is the before-and-after: did AI Presence, recommendation rate, or accuracy change after you published or corrected something? Without it, you are optimizing blind and cannot tell a real gain from run-to-run noise.
Tie movement to what you shipped. A recommendation rate that rises the week after you published a comparison page, and holds, is signal. Re-measurement closes the loop and tells you which actions to repeat.