Share of Voice

Share of Voice expresses your mentions as a proportion of all brand mentions across the same set of questions. Where citation rate looks at you in isolation, share of voice places you in the competitive field where buyers actually see you.

The distinction matters because the two can move in opposite directions. Your citation rate can climb steadily while your share of voice falls, simply because competitors improved faster. Measured alone, that looks like progress. Measured relatively, it is losing ground.

The number is only as meaningful as the comparison set behind it. Choose the competitors you consider relevant and you will get a flattering figure. Let the data name them instead — count every brand the AI mentions across those questions — and the picture is usually less comfortable and considerably more useful.

Which points to the most valuable output, which is not your own percentage at all. It is the ranked list of who gets named instead of you.

Buyers do not evaluate you against your own past performance — they evaluate you against whoever else appears in the same answer. Share of voice is the only metric that shows that comparison directly, and it routinely reveals which companies AI systems treat as your real alternatives. That list is often not the one you would have written yourself.

Across 80 category questions a brand is named 24 times, which looks respectable in isolation. But three competitors are named 60, 52 and 41 times over the same questions, putting its share of voice at roughly 12%. Two of those three were not on the company's competitor list at all until the test surfaced them.