Alvaro Peña de Luna 
Share of voice (SOV) is the share of the total market conversation your brand owns compared to your competitors. It measures your visibility and influence within the conversations that matter to your industry, whether those happen on social media, in search results, in paid advertising, or inside AI-generated answers.
Put simply, share of voice answers one question: of all the attention in your market, how much is yours?
What is share of voice?
Share of voice started as an advertising metric, the share of total ad spend a brand held in its category. It has since expanded to cover any channel where brands compete for attention. The principle stays the same: your presence divided by the total presence of everyone competing for the same audience.
A high share of voice signals that your brand leads the conversation. A low or falling share of voice is an early warning that competitors are capturing attention you used to own.
Share of voice formula
The core formula is straightforward:
Share of voice = (Your brand metrics / Total market metrics) x 100
The “metric” changes with the channel. It can be mentions, impressions, ad spend, clicks, or AI answer appearances. If your brand is mentioned in 30 of 100 relevant results where competitors also appear, your share of voice is 30%.
Share of voice vs share of market
Share of voice measures attention. Share of market measures actual sales or revenue. The two are linked: brands whose share of voice is higher than their share of market tend to grow, because attention often leads revenue. Tracking the gap between them helps you predict momentum rather than just report it.
Types of share of voice
Share of voice applies across every channel where brands compete:
- Social share of voice: your mentions and engagement versus competitors on social platforms.
- Media share of voice: your earned press and editorial coverage versus the rest of the market.
- PPC share of voice: your impression share in paid search, the percentage of available ad impressions you actually capture.
- SEO share of voice: your visibility across organic rankings for a shared keyword set.
- AI search share of voice: your share of brand mentions inside AI answers from engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI.
The last one is the newest and the least covered by traditional tools, which is exactly where it pays to look.
Share of voice in AI search (GEO)
As users move from search results to AI answers, a new layer of share of voice has appeared: how often AI engines mention your brand compared to competitors for the same questions. This is the share of voice that matters in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
A basic AI share of voice counts mentions, but counting alone is misleading. A direct recommendation should not weigh the same as a passing reference in a long list. A more useful approach weights each mention by how the brand is referenced, the sentiment attached to it, and whether the mention is direct or conditional. We cover this in depth in our guide to AI share of voice in GEO.
How to measure share of voice
- Define your competitive set and queries. Decide which competitors and which topics or keywords you are measuring against.
- Pick the channel and metric. Mentions for social and AI, impression share for PPC, ranking visibility for SEO.
- Collect data consistently. Use the same sample and cadence each time so the trend is reliable.
- Calculate your share. Divide your metric by the total across all tracked brands.
- Segment the results. Break share of voice down by topic cluster to find where you lead and where you lag.
How to increase your share of voice
- Publish consistently around the topics your audience cares about most.
- Participate in trending conversations where your brand can add real value.
- Create content worth sharing and citing, not just worth ranking.
- Earn mentions from authoritative third parties through PR and partnerships.
- Target the query clusters where competitors currently dominate.
How Mencoro measures share of voice
Mencoro calculates your share of voice inside AI search, shown in the app as AI Share of voice, weighted by mention quality rather than raw counts. Each mention’s weight combines its type (a recommendation counts for more than a comparison, listing, example, or passing reference), its sentiment, and whether it is direct or conditional. Your score is your weighted mentions as a share of every tracked brand’s weighted mentions, and you can segment it by query cluster to find your strongest and weakest competitive positions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI. See the competitor analysis feature for more.
Related glossary terms
- AI visibility: how often and how well your brand appears in AI answers.
- AI brand sentiment: the tone AI engines use when they mention you.
