GLOSSARY
Share of voice (AI)
- Share of voice (AI)
- Share of voice, in AI search, is your slice of total brand presence across a set of AI answers — what percentage of the mentions or citations in your tracked prompts belong to you versus competitors. It's the tool-dashboard framing of the same ground covered by mention rate and citation share.
The term migrated from advertising, where share of voice meant your portion of a market's total ad spend, and monitoring tools like Profound and Peec adopted it for AI answers: across these prompts, this month, what share of all brand appearances were yours? It's an intuitive executive metric — one number that says whether you or the competitor owns the conversation engines are having about your market.
Its relationship to our core metrics is close but not identical. Mention rate asks 'in what share of answers do I appear?' — measured against the prompt count. Share of voice asks 'of all competitor appearances, what share are mine?' — measured against the field. The second is more sensitive to competitive dynamics: your mention rate can hold steady while your share of voice falls, which means engines are naming more rivals alongside you. Reading both together catches that.
One caution from practice: share of voice is only as honest as the prompt set and competitor list behind it. A dashboard configured with weak competitors or flattering prompts will report a comfortable share while buyers hear other names entirely. Whatever tool or service produces the number, ask to see the prompts, the competitor set, and per-engine breakdowns — blended numbers across engines obscure the fact that each engine has its own favorites. See prompt set for what a defensible basket looks like.