Glossary
AI Share of Voice
AI share of voice is your brand's proportion of all brand mentions returned across a fixed prompt set. If ten prompts return sixty brand mentions and twelve of them are yours, your share of voice is twenty per cent. It is a relative measure, so it moves when competitors move too.
In plain terms
Share of voice answers a comparative question: out of everyone the engine could have named, how often did it name us?
Why it matters
Absolute mention counts flatter you when a category is quiet and punish you when it is crowded. Share of voice normalises for that, which makes it the honest number to report quarter over quarter.
How to apply it
- Fix the prompt set and the competitor list before the first measurement.
- Count mentions per engine as well as in aggregate — the mix differs sharply between engines.
- Segment by funnel stage: category questions behave differently from vendor-comparison questions.
Example
In a set of 20 prompts about "enterprise expense management software", an AI engine names five vendors a combined 80 times; a finance-software brand appears in 16 of those mentions, giving it a 20% AI share of voice against its four named competitors for that prompt set and engine.
Related reading
Related terms
Back to the full glossary (75 terms).
Ranking is no longer enough
You need to be cited, mentioned, and recommended.
Being cited, mentioned, and recommended are three different outcomes, and most brands only ever achieve the first one. Ranking is no longer enough because AI engines answer buyers directly and name only a short list of vendors as the recommendation — everyone else is cited in passing, if at all. Get a free AI Visibility Report to see exactly where your brand appears today across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot, where competitors are winning the recommendation instead, and what's keeping you from moving up the shortlist.