Calculate Share of Voice in the AI Era

The basic formula for share of voice is pretty straightforward: you take your brand's metric (like mentions or keyword rankings) and divide it by the total for the entire market. Multiply that by 100, and you've got your percentage. It’s a simple calculation that tells you how visible you are compared to the competition, whether that's in SEO, on social media, or even within AI answer engines. Getting a handle on this is the first real step toward owning your market.

Why Share of Voice Matters More Than Ever

Before we jump into the math, it's crucial to understand that Share of Voice (SOV) has evolved far beyond its old-school roots as a measure of ad spend. Today, it’s a holistic view of your brand's presence across every single channel your customers are on. Think of it as a leading indicator of your future market share and overall brand health.

This isn't just about ads anymore. Modern SOV pulls in everything from social media chatter and organic traffic to digital PR and engagement. It's not about what you've sold (market share); it's about how much of the conversation you own. It's a direct measure of how often your brand is being talked about compared to everyone else in your space.

The Strategic Edge of Tracking SOV

When you consistently track your visibility against competitors, you're giving yourself a serious strategic advantage. You stop guessing and start making decisions based on hard data, which shows you exactly where you're crushing it and where you're getting crushed.

Let's say a competitor is all over social media, but your brand is quietly dominating organic search for high-intent keywords. That single insight is gold. It tells you exactly where your resources need to go. Do you double down on your SEO strength, or do you start fighting back on their social turf? For example, if you see their social SOV is high but engagement is low, your actionable insight is to create more engaging content to steal the conversation, not just the mentions.

Share of Voice isn't just a number on a dashboard; it's a compass. It points you toward your competitors' weak spots and uncovers hidden market opportunities, steering your strategy toward real, measurable growth.

By keeping a close eye on your SOV, you can:

Benchmark your performance: Get an honest, real-time look at how you stack up against the competition.
Spot growth opportunities: Find the channels where your competitors are dropping the ball and you can score an easy win.
Measure campaign impact: See exactly how your marketing efforts are actually boosting your brand's visibility.
Predict market trends: A rising SOV is often a sneak peek at a future rise in market share.

At the end of the day, learning this calculation is the first move toward building a brand that can't be ignored. As you get ready to crunch the numbers, remember that you're not just doing math—you're drawing a map to market leadership. If you're ready to dig in, our guide on how to measure share of voice is the perfect place to start.

Gathering the Data for an Accurate SOV Calculation

Your Share of Voice calculation is only as good as the data you feed it. Getting this part right is less about complex formulas and more about smart, focused data collection. Before you can even think about plugging numbers into a spreadsheet, you need to lay the groundwork.

The first step is setting a consistent timeframe. Are you looking at this monthly? Quarterly? Pick a cadence and stick to it. This consistency is what allows you to see real trends emerge, rather than just reacting to random spikes and dips.

Defining Your Competitive Landscape

Next, you have to decide who you're actually measuring yourself against. It’s a common mistake to cast the net too wide. For a meaningful analysis, I always recommend splitting your competitors into two distinct groups:

Direct Competitors: These are the businesses you go head-to-head with every single day. They target the same customers and sell similar products or services. For a B2B SaaS company, this would be 3-4 other platforms with the same core features.
Aspirational Competitors: These are the market leaders. They might not be a direct threat right now, but they're who you want to become. For that same SaaS company, this could be an industry giant like HubSpot or Salesforce, whose content strategy you can learn from.

Taking the time to apply essential competitor analysis techniques is non-negotiable here. It stops you from comparing your local business to a massive global brand, a comparison that would only skew your results and give you absolutely nothing actionable.

Pinpointing the Right Metrics Across Channels

With your competitors and timeframe locked in, it’s time to hunt for the raw data. A truly insightful SOV analysis pulls information from several different channels to paint a complete picture of your brand's visibility.

For search engines, your focus should be on organic keyword impression share and branded search volume. My go-to tools for this are Semrush or Ahrefs. For a practical example, you can create a project in Semrush, input your top 20 commercial keywords, add your 3 main competitors, and the tool will track your visibility share against theirs over time. This gives you a tangible SOV number for your most important search terms.

Sourcing Social and Media Data

When you shift over to social media, the key metric becomes brand mentions. This is simply a raw count of how often people are talking about you online. A good social listening tool like Brandwatch or Meltwater is invaluable here, as they can track mentions of your brand, products, and key hashtags across all the major social platforms.

The goal is straightforward: Collect the total number of mentions for your brand and for each competitor within your set timeframe. This raw count is the bedrock of your social SOV.

Finally, don’t forget about PR and media coverage. I always track backlink velocity—how quickly new domains are linking to your site. It’s a powerful signal of authority and shows that other credible sources are validating your brand. You can pull this data from the same SEO tools mentioned earlier. For example, set up an alert in Ahrefs to notify you whenever a competitor gets a new backlink from a high-authority site. This is an actionable insight, showing you which publications to target for your own PR outreach.

Pulling together these different data points gives you a solid, well-rounded dataset that reflects how visible you really are across the channels that matter.

Essential Data Sources for SOV Calculation

To make this process clearer, here's a breakdown of what to track, where to find it, and why it's important for your SOV calculation.

Channel	Metric to Track	Recommended Tool(s)	Why It Matters
Organic Search	Organic Keyword Impression Share	Semrush, Ahrefs, Google Search Console	Measures your visibility in search results for your most important keywords.
Paid Search	Impression Share	Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising	Shows the percentage of ad impressions you received out of the total you were eligible for.
Social Media	Brand/Keyword Mentions	Brandwatch, Meltwater, Sprout Social	Tracks the volume of conversation around your brand versus your competitors.
Media/PR	Backlink Velocity & Media Mentions	Ahrefs, Semrush, Cision	Indicates your authority and how often credible third-party sites are talking about you.

This multi-channel approach is what separates a vanity metric from a truly strategic one. It ensures your final Share of Voice number is meaningful, actionable, and a genuine reflection of your position in the market.

Putting the Share of Voice Formula to Work

https://www.youtube.com/embed/EEjr4cyNqec

Now that you've got your data, it's time to actually run the numbers. The good news? The Share of Voice (SOV) formula itself is incredibly straightforward, and you'll use the same basic math no matter which channel you're measuring.

The core principle never changes:

(Your Brand's Metric / Total Market Metric) x 100 = Your SOV %

This simple equation is your go-to, whether you're looking at keyword impressions, social media chatter, or even ad spend. The only real rule is to make sure you're always comparing apples to apples—your metric has to be the same unit as the total market metric.

How to Calculate SEO Share of Voice

Let’s walk through a common SEO scenario. Imagine you run a project management software company and you're tracking your performance against three main competitors. You've gone into an SEO tool and pulled the impression data for your top 50 target keywords over the last three months.

Here's what your data looks like:

Your Brand (ProjectPro): 150,000 impressions
Competitor A (TaskMaster): 250,000 impressions
Competitor B (TeamFlow): 120,000 impressions
Competitor C (WorkHub): 80,000 impressions

First things first, you need to find the Total Market Metric. Just add up all the impressions from every brand you're tracking.

150,000 + 250,000 + 120,000 + 80,000 = 600,000 total impressions.

Now, plug your brand's number into the formula:

(150,000 / 600,000) x 100 = 25% SEO Share of Voice.

Just like that, you have a concrete benchmark. A 25% SOV tells you exactly where you stand. You own one-quarter of the visibility for your most important keywords, giving you a clear starting line to measure future growth against.

The real magic of this formula is how it translates a pile of data into a single, strategic KPI. A 25% SOV isn't just a number; it's a clear indicator of your current position in the organic search landscape, ready for you to improve.

This same logic applies to paid advertising. In its most traditional sense, Share of Voice was about ad spend. For instance, if a company spends $5 million on ads in a market where the total industry spend is $100 million, they have a 5% share of voice. If you want to dig deeper into these classic methods, you can explore traditional SOV calculation methods.

How to Calculate Social Media Share of Voice

Moving over to social media, the process is identical—you just swap out the metric. Instead of impressions, let's use brand mentions that you’ve collected from a social listening tool over the same quarter.

Here's the data for our software example:

Your Brand (ProjectPro): 1,200 mentions
Competitor A (TaskMaster): 3,000 mentions
Competitor B (TeamFlow): 900 mentions
Competitor C (WorkHub): 900 mentions

Again, start by calculating the total market conversation:

1,200 + 3,000 + 900 + 900 = 6,000 total mentions.

Now, apply the SOV formula for your brand's social presence:

(1,200 / 6,000) x 100 = 20% Social Share of Voice.

This simple workflow shows just how easy it is to get a baseline. From here, an actionable insight would be to analyze the sentiment of those mentions. If Competitor A has high volume but negative sentiment, you have an opportunity to position your brand as the positive alternative.

As the visual confirms, it's all about gathering your data, stacking it up against the total market, and running the simple calculation. For a more thorough look, our complete guide on share of voice measurement gets into more advanced techniques.

Turning Your SOV Analysis into an Actionable Strategy

Getting your Share of Voice percentage is the easy part. The real magic happens when you turn that number into a concrete plan. A percentage in a spreadsheet is just data; a percentage with context becomes your strategic compass, showing you exactly where to go next.

The first thing I always do is benchmark my results against the top three competitors, breaking it down channel by channel. This side-by-side comparison is where the gold is. You’ll quickly spot your biggest wins and, more importantly, your most glaring weaknesses. The point isn't just to see who's on top, but to figure out why.

Decoding Your SOV Report

Let’s walk through a common scenario. Imagine your analysis shows a huge disconnect: your social SOV is a solid 35%, driven by great community engagement, but your organic search SOV is a paltry 8%.

That’s not bad news. It's a crystal-clear signal. It tells you that your brand connects well on social media, but you’re practically invisible on Google where customers with high buying intent are searching for solutions.

This single insight makes your priorities obvious. Instead of pouring more resources into another social campaign, your focus for the next quarter should be a dedicated SEO push. An actionable first step would be to analyze the top-ranking content for keywords where your SOV is lowest and create a content plan to fill those gaps. To get the most out of this, you need to embed strong principles of data-driven decision-making into your workflow, which helps turn these insights into real growth.

A Share of Voice report isn't a report card—it's a roadmap. Each metric highlights a different path, showing you where to build, where to defend, and where to attack.

Building a Simple Strategic Framework

Once you’ve identified the gaps, you can build a simple framework to guide your next moves. This keeps you from getting bogged down in the data and helps you move straight from observation to execution.

For each channel, I ask myself three core questions:

Where are we strong? Find the channels where your SOV is highest. The goal here is to defend and optimize. If you're dominating paid search, how can you protect that lead without letting your costs spiral?
Where are we weak? Pinpoint the areas where your competitors are eating your lunch. Here, the objective is to challenge and grow. If a rival owns the conversation on LinkedIn, it's time to dig into their content strategy and find your angle of attack.
What surprising tactics are competitors using? I always look for outliers. Maybe one competitor has a surprisingly high SOV from podcast mentions. That could be a totally new channel for you to explore.

Setting Smarter Goals for the Next Quarter

Using this framework makes goal-setting so much easier and more effective. You can move beyond vague targets like "improve marketing" and set precise, data-backed objectives.

Here’s what that looks like in practice, turning your findings into quarterly goals:

Objective 1 (SEO Growth): We need to increase our organic search SOV from 8% to 12%. We'll do this by targeting five high-volume keywords where Competitor A is currently crushing us.
Objective 2 (Social Defense): Our goal is to maintain our social media SOV above 30%. To do this, we’ll launch a new user-generated content campaign to neutralize Competitor B's recent ad push.
Objective 3 (Channel Exploration): Let's test the waters with a pilot podcast sponsorship program. The goal is to see if it’s a viable channel, and we’ll measure success by aiming for 500 attributed website visits by the end of the quarter.

This structured approach transforms your SOV calculation from a backward-looking metric into a powerful, forward-looking strategic tool. It ensures every marketing dollar you spend is backed by data and intent.

Calculating Your SOV in the Age of AI Answer Engines

The definition of a search engine is changing right before our eyes. As AI tools like Google's AI Overviews and Perplexity become the go-to interface for finding information, your brand's visibility needs to evolve. Showing up in these AI-generated answers is the next big thing.

To really get a handle on your share of voice today, you have to look beyond traditional SERPs.

This brings a new, critical metric into the fold: Share of Citation. Think of it as a direct measure of how often your brand gets name-dropped as a source in AI answers for your most important topics. It’s a powerful reflection of your authority and relevance in the eyes of large language models.

Tracking Your Share of Citation

You can't improve what you don't measure. Keeping a close eye on your presence in AI answers is non-negotiable, and specialized tools are popping up to help. Our own platform, LLMrefs, was built for exactly this—tracking keywords at scale to see how often your domain is cited across different AI models versus your competition.

So, how does this look in practice? Let's walk through a quick example.

Grab Your Keywords: Start with a focused list, say 20 of your most important non-branded keywords. These are the terms you absolutely need to own.
Run the Queries: Pop each keyword into the major AI answer engines you care about, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini.
Count the Mentions: For every query, tally up how many times your brand is cited as a source. Do the same for your top three competitors.
Do the Math: Now, just plug it into the classic SOV formula. If your brand was cited 15 times and the total citations across all competitors (including you) was 100, your Share of Citation is 15%.

This number isn't just a vanity metric. It's a leading indicator of your content's authority and trustworthiness. A low Share of Citation is a major red flag that your content strategy isn't resonating with how AI models process and prioritize information.

How to Get Your Brand Cited More Often

Boosting your Share of Citation isn't about gaming an algorithm; it’s about creating exceptionally clear and credible content. LLMs are designed to synthesize information from authoritative sources, so your job is to make it incredibly easy for them to see you as one.

Here’s where to focus your efforts with practical, actionable tips:

Be a Stickler for Facts: Make sure your content is deeply researched, backed by data, and always points to primary sources. Actionable Tip: Add a "Sources" or "References" section at the end of your articles to explicitly list your primary data points.
Structure is Everything: Use structured data like schema markup, along with clean headings (H2s, H3s), lists, and tables. This helps models parse your content and understand the key takeaways instantly. Actionable Tip: Use FAQ schema on your pages to directly answer common questions, making it easy for an AI to pull your answer.
Answer the Question, Directly: Stop writing long, winding intros. Create content that gets straight to the point and answers the specific questions people are asking. Think in terms of entities, facts, and clean, direct statements. Actionable Tip: Start a blog post with a concise, bolded summary that gives the answer in the first paragraph.

Getting this right is crucial for keeping your brand visible. For a much deeper look at the tactics involved, check out our complete guide on AI search optimization to get ahead of the curve.

Common Questions About Calculating Share of Voice

Even with a solid formula in hand, you’re bound to hit a few practical questions once you start digging into the data to calculate your share of voice. It happens to everyone. Let's walk through some of the most common sticking points to clear things up and help you sidestep a few rookie mistakes.

One of the first things people ask is how often they should be running these numbers. It’s tempting to want real-time data, but a monthly or even quarterly check-in often gives you a much more stable and strategic picture. This rhythm helps you ignore the daily chatter and focus on the trends that actually matter, rather than overreacting to a one-day blip.

What Is a Good Share of Voice Percentage?

Honestly, there's no magic number here. A "good" share of voice is completely relative to your industry, your goals, and who you're up against. Instead of fixating on a specific percentage, it's far more useful to look at your SOV in relation to your direct competitors.

A much better benchmark is to aim for a share of voice that’s a bit higher than your actual market share. This idea is called "Excess Share of Voice" (ESOV), and it’s one of the best predictors of future growth. For instance, if your SOV is 15% but your market share is 10%, you’re well-positioned to expand your footprint.

The real goal isn't just volume; it's about being more visible than the competition that matters. A 20% SOV is an incredible lead if you're in a crowded market with ten other players. But that same 20% feels very different if you're the underdog in a market dominated by a single, massive competitor. Context is everything.

How Do I Choose the Right Competitors to Track?

Figuring out who to measure yourself against is probably the most important decision you'll make in this process. A classic mistake is to track every company that vaguely looks like a competitor. This just muddies the waters and leaves you with data that's impossible to act on.

For a sharp, insightful calculation, try this approach:

Direct Competitors: Keep this list tight. Focus on 3-5 companies that are genuinely after the same customers with a similar offering. These are the brands you clash with every single day.
Aspirational Competitors: It's also smart to include 1-2 big players in your space. You may not be competing with them for deals today, but they set the standard for success and give you a benchmark to strive for.

This focused method keeps your analysis grounded and realistic. You get a clear view of the immediate landscape—the fights you can win right now—while also keeping an eye on the leaders you want to become.

Ready to stop guessing and start measuring your visibility in the new era of AI search? LLMrefs gives you the tools to track your Share of Citation across AI answer engines, benchmark against competitors, and build a winning GEO strategy. Get started for free and see where you stand.