Definition
Share of Voice (AI)
The percentage of AI-generated answers in your category that mention your brand, compared to the total mentions of all brands in that category.
Share of voice (SOV) is a traditional marketing metric that measures your brand's presence relative to competitors. In the context of AI search, AI share of voice measures what proportion of relevant AI-generated answers mention your brand versus competing brands.
If AI platforms mention your brand in 30 out of 100 relevant queries, and mention your top three competitors a combined 70 times across those same queries, your AI share of voice is approximately 30%.
AI share of voice is a more actionable metric than raw mention counts, because it contextualises your performance within the competitive landscape. A brand with 40 mentions but operating in a space where competitors have 200 mentions has significantly less effective visibility than the raw count suggests.
Tracking share of voice over time reveals whether your AEO efforts are gaining or losing ground relative to competitors, making it a key input to strategic decisions around content investment, schema implementation, and entity-building.
Example
A cybersecurity vendor tracks AI share of voice monthly. In January they have 18% SOV on Perplexity for 'endpoint security tools'. By June, after publishing comparison content and improving schema, this rises to 31%.
Common questions
How many competitors should I track for SOV?
Track your 3-5 most direct competitors. Too many makes the metric noisy; too few misses important shifts in the competitive landscape.
What's a good share of voice benchmark?
There's no universal benchmark — it depends on how many credible competitors exist in your category. Being in the top 3 mentioned brands for your primary use case is a reasonable target.
Related feature
Competitor Monitoring
Related terms
AI Visibility
A measure of how frequently and accurately your brand appears in AI-generated answers across platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Grok.
Answer Engine Optimization
The practice of optimising your content so that AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude mention and recommend your brand accurately in their generated answers.
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