Share of Voice
The key metric for your market share in AI-generated responses.
What is Share of Voice?
Share of Voice (SOV) measures the percentage of your brand's mentions out of all brand mentions in AI-generated responses. When AI models like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, or Perplexity answer a question and name brands, every single mention counts — your Share of Voice shows how large your slice of the pie is.
Simple example
Imagine an AI model answers 100 prompts from your industry. Across all responses, brands are mentioned a total of 500 times. If your brand appears 75 times, your Share of Voice is 15%.
How is SOV calculated?
The calculation is based on a straightforward formula:
SOV = Your brand's mentions / Total brand mentions × 100%
Importantly, the total includes all brands mentioned in AI responses — not just the competitors you have defined in ucited.ai. This ensures that SOV reflects your true market share and is not distorted by a narrow competitor selection.
Important: All brands count
The denominator of the SOV calculation includes all brands mentioned in AI responses, not just your defined competitors. However, the dashboard chart only displays the brands you have selected.
Reading the SOV chart
The SOV timeseries chart shows the trajectory of your Share of Voice over time. It has two display modes:
Absolute view
Shows the actual number of mentions per brand. This helps you determine whether a SOV increase is due to more of your own mentions or fewer mentions of competing brands.
Relative view
Shows the percentage share of each brand. The areas add up to 100%. This view is ideal for tracking market share shifts over time. Use the toggle in the top-right corner of the chart to switch between Absolute (raw values) and Relative (percentage shares).
Why does Share of Voice matter?
Share of Voice is the leading metric of Generative Engine Optimization because it answers the core question: “How present is my brand in the new AI search landscape?”
- Competitive benchmarking: SOV does not just show your own performance — it puts it directly into market context
- Early warning system: A declining SOV indicates that competitors are gaining ground, often before this shows up in traditional SEO metrics
- Success measurement: After content optimizations or new publications, the SOV trend reveals whether your efforts are paying off
- Strategic planning: Cross-model SOV helps you allocate resources effectively
How to use this metric
Here are concrete steps for leveraging Share of Voice in your strategy:
1. Establish your baseline
Note your current SOV as a starting point. This serves as the reference for all future optimizations.
2. Analyze competitors with higher SOV
Identify which brands have a higher SOV than yours. Use Mentions and the Citation Table to understand why those brands are mentioned more frequently.
3. Identify temporal patterns
Compare different time periods. Are there days or weeks where your SOV is particularly high or low? Correlate these with your content activities.
4. Optimize by model
If your SOV is particularly low on one model, switch to the SOV by AI Model view to optimize specifically for that model.
Related metrics
SOV gives you the big picture. For deeper analysis, we recommend these metrics: