Which questions count
Answer Share is only as honest as the questions behind it. A question set full of support lookups, a developer’s pasted code or your own tools’ test searches measures the wrong audience. So every question is sorted by who is asking before it may count, and every question shows where it came from.
Where questions come from
Section titled “Where questions come from”| Origin | What it is |
|---|---|
| Built | A phrasing the topic builder wrote for the topic, the way a buyer types into an assistant. Most questions are these. |
| Search Console | A real search from the site’s Search Console that a buyer made. Only admitted searches (below) join a topic. |
| Yours | A question someone in the workspace added: on a topic’s page, or as a prompt through the API or an import. A prompt joins the topic it fits, word for word. |
A question that names a brand still counts, but not for that brand: see Answer Share.
Who is asking
Section titled “Who is asking”Each Search Console search, and each question from a page or a model, is sorted into one class, from its words, the pages it landed on and what the site offers. No model decides it; the rules are fixed and repeatable.
| Class | What it looks like | Enters measurement |
|---|---|---|
| Buying | Someone choosing or buying: best, alternatives, pricing, reviews, a tool for an audience, or what the site offers by name. | Yes |
| Problem | A question or problem the site’s offering answers: how to, why, fix, improve. | Yes |
| Brand | Names the brand, with no buying or support words. | Yes |
| Support | An existing customer’s question: signing in, setting up, the documentation. | No |
| Article reader | Lands on the site’s articles or knowledge pages and shares nothing with what the site offers. | No |
| Machine | Search operators, code, a web address or a pasted prompt: a tool or a researcher, not a buyer. | No |
| Our own check | The exact words one of the site’s own checks searched on Google; its impressions may be the check’s. | No |
| Unclear | Neither buying words nor a match with what the site offers. | No |
Only buying, problem and brand searches may join a topic. Among those, the searches people see most come first, and Search Console’s share of a site’s questions is capped, so a site with a large search footprint does not crowd out the phrasings that stand for the whole market.
Search Console, filtered to the site
Section titled “Search Console, filtered to the site”- A domain property (
sc-domain:example.com) is filtered to the site’s own host, so a sister site under the same domain does not lend it searches. - A property that cannot cover the site’s host is refused.
- Searches are sorted again on every sync, and a topic rebuild takes the admitted searches as they stand then.
Where you see it
Section titled “Where you see it”On a topic, each question carries its origin and, for Search Console searches, its class. Lists hide the classes that do not enter measurement and say how many they hide, so nothing is dropped silently. The same sorting is the first gate of the topic builder.
Private questions
Section titled “Private questions”A prompt your workspace added without marking it shareable stays private: it is asked live for your workspace only, and its words are never shared with other workspaces. Every question taken from Search Console is private in the same way, always: its words go only to the answer engines asked, and disconnecting Search Console deletes it with every answer to it. See The poll and the privacy policy.