What is share of voice in AI search?

Share of voice in AI search is the proportion of AI answers that name you versus your competitors, across the set of questions your buyers ask. Where a raw visibility score tells you "how often am I mentioned," share of voice tells you the more competitive story: "of all the brand mentions AI is handing out for my category, how many are mine?" It reframes the measurement from a solo number into a standings table.

Why it matters more than a solo score

AI answers are zero-sum in a way search results aren't. A generated answer usually names only two or three brands. So being mentioned 40% of the time is great if your nearest rival is at 15% — and alarming if they're at 70%. The absolute number is less telling than your slice of the total. Share of voice captures exactly that: your presence measured against the competitors AI actually names instead of, or alongside, you.

How it's calculated

Across all your buyer questions and all engines, count every brand mention. Your share of voice is your mentions divided by the total mentions in your competitive set. Track it per engine, too — you might dominate Perplexity and be invisible on ChatGPT, which points to very different fixes.

What it reveals that a score can't

• Who your real AI competitors are — sometimes not who you'd expect, because the model's shortlist differs from your sales pipeline's.
• Which questions you're losing — the ones where a rival is consistently named and you're not.
• Whether you're gaining or ceding ground over time, relative to the field.

To measure it, you have to record not just whether you were named but who else was — which is why competitor tracking is built into serious AI visibility monitoring.