Share of Voice (AI)
Share of voice in AI search is the proportion of relevant AI answers in which your brand appears, measured across a fixed set of questions, as a gauge of how present you are in the conversation.
Also known as: SOV, AI share of voice
Share of voice is how big a slice of the AI conversation is yours. Across a fixed set of questions your customers ask, it's the percentage of answers where your brand shows up at all — named, mentioned, or cited — usually measured against your competitors so you can see who dominates a topic.
It's the headline AEO metric because, in a zero-click world, presence in the answer matters more than rank. Share of voice tracks the trend you actually care about: are engines naming you more or less often over time, and where are competitors winning answers you're absent from? Measuring it requires a stable prompt set and repeated sampling — the adaptability discipline of instrumenting and watching the trend rather than any single reading.
Example. If you track 25 questions across ChatGPT and Perplexity and your brand appears in 8 of the 25 answers, your share of voice is roughly 32% on that set. Watching that number move month over month tells you whether your AEO work is compounding. For the stricter, cite-only version of this metric, see citation share.
Relevant pillar
Related terms
- Citation ShareCitation share is the percentage of AI answers to your target questions in which your site is specifically cited as a source, the strictest measure of whether you're winning the citation, not just being mentioned.
- Branded MentionA branded mention is any reference to your brand name across the web, linked or not, that helps AI systems recognize you as a known entity and weigh how often and how favorably you're discussed.
- Prompt SetA prompt set is the fixed list of real questions you run across AI engines to measure your visibility, the stable foundation that makes citation tracking comparable over time.