Position tracking made sense when search returned ten links. In 2026 the metric that predicts enquiries is answer share: across the questions your buyers ask AI assistants and Google's AI surfaces, how often is your business the one named? It is measurable with a monthly routine.
A number one ranking under an AI Overview that answers the question is a trophy on a shelf nobody visits. What converts is being inside the answer, and that is a different measurement.
Answer share is simple to define: take the twenty questions that precede a purchase in your category, ask them monthly across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI surfaces, and record where your brand appears. Score it, chart it, and treat movement the way you once treated rankings.
Make it operational
Every question where you are absent becomes a content task: publish the best standalone answer on your own domain, marked up and consistent with your entity data. Recheck next month. Attribution is fuzzier than the old rank reports, but the correlation with inbound enquiries is not.
Agencies selling you position charts without answer share are reporting on 2023. Ask for both.