Share of VoiceSOV

What share of voice means in AI

In an AEO context, share of voice is your share of the brand mentions and recommendations in AI answers across a defined set of buyer prompts, measured against your competitors. It answers a sharper question than “am I mentioned?” It asks how much of the recommendation is mine, and how much belongs to everyone else.

A higher share of voice means the engines recommend you more often relative to the alternatives. It is a relative number by construction: your slice only grows if it grows at a rival’s expense, which is exactly what makes it a competitive measure rather than a vanity one.

A worked example

Suppose you assemble 100 prompts that reflect how buyers actually ask about your category and run each one through the engines. Across those answers, competitors are named 88 times and you are named 12 times. Your AI share of voice is about 12% — one mention in eight belongs to you, the rest to the field.

How you measure it

Share of voice comes from counting, not estimating. The method is straightforward, though it only holds up if the prompt set is representative:

• Define a representative prompt set.Gather the questions your buyers genuinely ask — categories, comparisons, and “best tool for X” queries — so the sample reflects real demand rather than the prompts you wish they asked.
• Run them through the engines. Send the set through the AI answer engines your buyers use, capturing each answer as returned.
• Count mentions per brand. Tally how often each brand — yours and every competitor — is named or recommended across the answers.
• Divide to get the share. Your mentions over the total mentions is your share of voice; track it over time to see whether you are gaining or losing ground.

Why it beats a simple presence check

Asking “am I mentioned?” gives you a yes or a no. Share of voice gives you a position. Because it is relative and competitive, it tells you not just whether you appear but how you stack up against rivals — and, tracked over time, whether the gap is closing or widening. A brand can be present in every answer and still be losing, if competitors are named more often and more prominently. Share of voice is what surfaces that.

Share of voice vs. AI visibility

The two are closely related and easy to conflate, but they answer different questions. Visibility is about your presence; share of voice is that presence expressed as a slice of the whole.