What is share of voice in AI answers?
Share of voice in AI answers is the portion of all brand mentions within a set of questions that belongs to one brand. Unlike citation rate, it does not compare against the number of answers but against the competitors that appear in the same answers.
The term comes from media planning, where it describes a brand’s portion of all advertising pressure in a category. Applied to AI search, you count how often each brand is named in answers about a category and divide your own count by the total. If an engine names forty brands across ten answers and yours appears eight times, your share is one fifth.
The metric has a built-in weakness: it depends entirely on which brands are counted as competitors and which questions were asked. A narrow question list that fits your own positioning produces a high share without anything changing in how the market sees you. It is therefore only comparable over time within the same, unchanged question set.
Share of voice also counts mentions, not recommendations. A brand mentioned as a cautionary example counts the same as one that is explicitly recommended.
What it means for your website
The number becomes useful when the question list is fixed, competitors are named up front and tone is looked at separately. If you only want to know who gets named in a category at all, a list of named brands per question often tells you more than a percentage, because it shows who appears instead of you.
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Sources
This entry contains no figures and relies on generally documented terms.
Terms help you understand. Whether AI crawlers can reach your site is something you measure.
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