Glossary · last updated 2026-06-08
Share of voice (AI search)
Also known as: AI share of voice, SOV
A competitive framing of citation share: across a query set, how much of the total AI-engine citation goes to your domain versus named competitors. The metric that maps AI visibility onto the competitive language marketing teams already use.
Share of voice predates AI search; it has long described a brand's slice of total advertising or earned-media presence in a category. Applied to answer engines, share of voice is citation share framed competitively: for a defined set of queries, what fraction of the citations across all the answers go to you, and what fraction go to each competitor.
The distinction from raw citation share matters for how teams report. Citation share answers "how often are we cited"; share of voice answers "how often are we cited relative to the competitors we care about." For a marketing team whose mandate is "beat these three named rivals in the category," share of voice is the more legible number, which is why several vendors build their reporting around it.
The caveats are the same as for any AI measurement: the number depends entirely on the query set, methodologies differ across vendors so the absolute figures are not comparable, and the trend over time is more informative than any single snapshot. The measuring AI visibility guide covers how to build a defensible query set and reporting cadence.
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