answerz

/ˈɑːn.sərz/ noun — the thing a buyer is looking for, in the place they look for it.

Intent Creator Marketing · a Tribeez product

The hole in most brand strategies

Your buyers aren't
searching for you.

They're searching for an answer. And they don't want it from you — they want it from somebody who has actually used the thing. That shift is the biggest change in discovery in a decade, and almost no brand is structured for it.

Not your name — a problem, a comparison, a question. Google's own research shows buyers arrive undecided and get won or lost mid-search.

Ahrefs · ~150m US keywords · 2025  ·  Google/Ipsos · 310,000 scenarios · 2020

73% of TikTok users search there daily — more than they search Google. Discovery moved, and discovery is where the unbranded question gets asked.

eMarketer · Social Search Usage & Trends · 2025

Whoever answers the question gets the shortlist. Share of search tracks share of sales and moves up to a year earlier — so presence today is revenue later.

Les Binet · IPA Share of Search · EffWorks Global 2020 · 30 cases, 12 categories

Here's the gap

You're making content about your product.
They're asking a question.

  • They weren't looking for a product. They were looking for a reason to choose one.

  • The brief was the product. The search was a question. The two never met.

  • Paid puts you beside the answer. It doesn't make you the answer.

And the buyer typed a question — which somebody else answered. Not because your work was bad. Because it was never built to be retrieved, and nobody was measuring whether it was.

"The best ads are now answers."

Scott Sinclair
Head of Search+ EMEA, Google

Performance Marketing World · July 2026. Written about AI search — but it describes the whole shift.

Brands aren't absent because they don't want to be there. They're absent because nobody has built the thing that puts them there — finds the gap, briefs the creators, gets the answers found, and measures whether it worked.

That's Answerz →
The same check, at depth

What an answerzGap
actually finds.

The free check tests eight questions on Google. The full Answerz Gap is the same method — 150 to 300 questions, and all five surfaces instead of one. On a skincare brand, Google was tracking 12,100 monthly searches. Across all five surfaces the real figure was 35,900, and 66% of that demand had no creator content standing in front of it. Not an estimate. Counted.

Read the sample audit → Get this for your brand
35,900actual monthly searches — across 5 surfaces
66%of that demand was invisible to the brand
5surfaces with significant search demand
3×Google alone under-counted the real number
Where the question gets asked
One buyer.
Five places they look.

The unbranded question doesn't get asked once. It gets asked across five surfaces in a single week, for a single purchase — and each one does a different job. Most brands are measured on one of them.

Five surfaces · in the order buyers hit them
AI answersFirst stop. The shortlist gets built here.ChatGPT · AI Overviews · Perplexity
SearchTo verify what they've just been toldGoogle · 5 trillion searches a year
RetailTo compare, and to check the priceAmazon · TikTok Shop · Bol
SocialWhere a real person answers — and the decision gets madeTikTok · Instagram · Pinterest · Reddit
VideoThe long answer that settles itYouTube · the second-largest search engine

AI and Search shortlist you. Retail shows them the price. Social and Video decide it — because that's where a human answers the question. It's also where most brands aren't.

77%

of TikTok users search for more information after seeing affiliate content.

Affiliate content is the most commercial thing on the platform — and three quarters still leave to go and check. If they verify after that, they verify after everything.

TikTok

The AI layer

Google's AI Overviews increasingly answer with YouTube. Creator video is now how you get cited inside the AI answer itself — not just below it.

What it costs you
Four brands.
Four ways to lose the sale.

Same demand, same five surfaces, completely different answers to who's winning them. Pick the one that looks most like you.

Interactive

What they type

Illustrative

Real questions and volumes come from the Answerz Gap, pulled per market.

THEIR answerz SHARE

What you buy
One engine.
Three parts.

Your buyers ask hundreds of questions a month across five surfaces. Answerz finds them, gets real creators to answer them, and measures whether you started showing up. One engine, three parts.

answerz Gap

Find out what you're
not answering.

A two-week paid diagnostic. Every question driving demand in your category, the real monthly volume behind it, and who's answering it instead of you.

Fixed feeScoped up front. No retainer to start.
Two weeksFull report plus a working session with your team.
Fully creditableAgainst your first three months if you go on.
Book a 20-minute call

What lands

  • 150–300 real buyer questions, clustered by intent
  • Absolute monthly volumes — Google and TikTok
  • Your Answerz Share baseline vs the category
  • Who holds each answer right now, by surface
  • A teardown of the category's paid creative
  • A 90-day activation roadmap and the methodology annex

Question set mirrors the real market split — roughly 45% branded, 55% not.

answerz Bank

Answers that
compound.

A campaign spikes for 72 hours and dies. A bank accumulates. Every month we answer a set number of questions and the asset gets bigger.

Built to be found. The question spoken aloud in the first three seconds, on screen, and in the caption. Literal language over clever language.

Then bought into intent. Partnership Ads and Spark Ads put the answer in front of the person asking — whether or not they typed the query.

Talk about a monthly bank →
QuestionThe answer we make
"is this purging or breaking out"90-sec explainer · TikTok
"best retinol for sensitive skin"3-creator comparison · YouTube
"can I use salicylic acid every day"Street interview · TikTok
Questions answered — not posts deliveredIllustrative
Campaign resets to zero every time
Bank compounds every month
answerz Loop

One number,
every month.

The Loop is the monthly report. The number in it is your Answerz Share: the share of your category's priority questions where your brand comes back in the results — across all five surfaces.

Measured against absolute monthly search volumes, not relative indices. Most tools read your own Search Console clicks. We read total market demand.

Share of SearchThe outcome — how many people are asking for you by name. Les Binet showed it predicts share of sales.
answerz ShareThe input — whether you're there when they ask. It's the one you can act on.
Get a baseline for your category →

What the number breaks into

CoverageHow many priority questions return you at all
WeightedThe same, weighted by volume — the headline number
PositionTop three, top ten, or buried
SourceCreator or brand-owned. A brand answering its own question isn't proof.

Published methodology

  • Fixed question set, fixed monthly cadence
  • Clean, logged-out, market-locked sessions
  • AI answers checked 3–5 times — output is non-deterministic
  • Platforms chosen per category — Pinterest in interiors, Reddit in tech
  • Every check logged, dated and screenshotted
  • Branded and non-branded reported separately

We publish the method because a number you can't interrogate isn't a measurement.

Book a 20-minute call Why this is happening →
How it runs
The 10-step Intent Engine

One goal: grow your Share of Search. Four stages, ten steps, running alongside your existing awareness — not instead of it.

  1. Map the questions your buyers actually ask
  2. Score every one — that number is your Answerz Share
  3. Report the gap: the questions you're absent from, and who owns each
  1. Find the creators already surfacing for those questions, in your market
  2. Verify their audience and performance in Sprout before anyone is booked
  1. Brief one creator per question — product in hand, question on the brief
  2. Remunerate — affiliation, payment or gifting
  3. Amplify what converts: paid media and creator landing pages
  1. Re-measure Answerz Share and watch Share of Search follow
  2. Report cost per question won — then start again
Go deeper
Three things worth reading.
TikTok Recommended Search Three placements after every video that push viewers into the search bar. Whoever owns those terms owns the next purchase. Read it → The Intent Gap Playbook A leading beauty brand mapped across four surfaces. 74% of buying intent — 43,200 searches a month — had zero matching creator content. Read it → The sample brand audit The full Answerz Gap on a skincare brand — every question, every volume, every surface. Read it →
Every first meeting
The questions
we get asked.

We'd be poor advertisements for our own argument if we listed them and answered none. Click any question.

Creator performance

  • Watch whether branded search rose in the weeks after it ran. Reach and engagement tell you it was served; search tells you it landed.

  • Views mean it was pushed at someone. Sales need it found by someone already looking. Feed distribution and search distribution are different jobs.

  • Fewer than you think, answering more questions than you think. One creator answering ten questions beats ten creators saying the same thing once.

  • Per post for the questions you must own. Affiliate for scale where the volume is uncertain. Most brands end up needing both.

  • The ones whose content still gets found months later. Check what still surfaces in search, not who had the best launch week.

  • Usually because their content states the question and yours states the product. Same spend, very different retrievability.

Social search

  • Almost certainly, at lower volume than Google. The bigger number is the unbranded category search around you — which is where most brands are absent.

  • Their content matches the words buyers type. Yours probably matches the words you use internally.

  • Question spoken aloud in the first three seconds, written on screen, repeated in the caption. Literal language over clever language.

  • Captions and spoken audio carry far more weight than hashtags now. Hashtags help categorisation, not ranking.

  • Depends on the category. Reddit is heavily cited by AI systems; Pinterest carries real intent in interiors, beauty and food. The Gap shows which surfaces hold your demand.

  • Because it was made to be watched, not to be retrieved. Good content and findable content are different briefs.

AI visibility

  • Testable in minutes. Being named is fairly common; being cited as a source is rare, and much stronger.

  • Be present in the sources those systems draw from — creator video, reviews, community discussion. Your own site alone rarely does it.

  • Because more third parties describe them in the context of that question. It's a citation problem, not an awareness problem.

  • Not as a separate discipline. The work that gets you cited in AI is largely the same work that gets you found in social search.

  • It repeats what its sources say. Correcting it means changing the sources, not appealing to the model.

  • Measurable, with a caveat: output varies between runs. Any honest number is a modal result across several, not a single check.

Zero click

  • People are getting their answer without reaching you. Traffic stopped being a reliable measure of visibility.

  • Yes — as a source others cite. Much less as a destination.

  • Count presence in the results rather than clicks from them. That's exactly what Answerz Share measures.

  • Usually between the ad and the purchase — at the verification step you aren't present for.

  • Nobody, in most businesses. It falls between all three, which is a large part of why the gap exists.

  • Usually the third and fourth creator saying the same thing. This is a redirect, not an addition.

The product
What you're
actually buying.

The wider questions — social search, AI visibility, zero click — are answered on the homepage →

Let's look at your category.

Tell us the brand and we'll come back with the questions your buyers are asking — and who's answering them right now. Two working days.

Thanks — a consultant will be in touch within two working days.
We'll come prepared with your category's live search data.