Share of Voice (AI search)
Share of Voice in AI search is the percentage of buyer-intent queries — across one or more AI engines — in which a given brand is cited, divided by the total of all branded and competing citations.
Share of Voice in AI search is the percentage of buyer-intent queries — across one or more AI engines — in which a given brand is cited, divided by the total of all branded and competing citations. It is the headline metric most marketing teams report when measuring AEO progress month over month.
The math is intentionally simple. If a buyer-simulation set runs 25 queries against 5 models (125 model-query pairs), and the brand is cited in 30 of those pairs, the brand's Share of Voice is 30 / 125 = 24%. Competitors are computed the same way against the same denominator, so the percentages of all named players sum to ≤100% (the remainder is "no citation" or content sites).
Share of Voice has three useful properties. First, it normalises across engines: a brand that wins ChatGPT but loses Perplexity reads correctly as "mixed" rather than "winning". Second, it is comparable across time even when the query set evolves. Third, it is the buyer-side metric: customers care about whether the brand shows up when AI is asked, not about position numbers.
Watch for two common distortions. One: content sites (Reddit, Wikipedia, G2) often show up as the most-cited domain on category queries; many tools exclude them from competitor Share of Voice to keep the panel actionable. Two: branded queries (where the brand is named in the prompt) almost always yield citations and inflate the headline; reporting Share of Voice on unbranded queries only is usually the more honest cut.
AEOlens computes Share of Voice on canonical buyer queries only (excludes custom prompts), exposes it per-simulation with a delta vs the previous run, and surfaces the top cited URLs split by yours vs competitors so the metric is explainable, not just a number.
Frequently asked
Is Share of Voice the same as Citation Rate?
They're related but not identical. Citation Rate is the percentage of queries where you're cited (regardless of how often competitors are cited). Share of Voice is your citations divided by the total citations across all named brands. Citation Rate ignores competitors; Share of Voice doesn't.
What's a good Share of Voice score?
Category-leading enterprise brands tend to hover at 30–55% across the major engines. Mid-market SaaS in a competitive category typically lands at 10–25%. Pre-launch or low-AEO sites are often under 5%. The most meaningful number is the trend over time — is yours climbing or falling?
Why exclude content sites from the competitor view?
Reddit, Wikipedia, and large content publishers (Forbes, TechCrunch) appear in nearly every category-query answer. Counting them as competitors swamps the panel with non-actionable noise. Most tools filter them so the competitor list shows actual competing brands.
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