Glossary
share of voice
In short: Share of voice in AI answers is the proportion of brand mentions across a prompt set that belong to you rather than to your tracked competitors.
Share of voice (SoV) borrows a term from advertising and applies it to generative answers. Instead of asking "am I mentioned?", it asks "of all the businesses the assistant mentioned, how often was it me?". That makes it the closest thing GEO has to market share.
Seoptist computes it as your brand's mentions divided by the sum of your mentions and all tracked competitor mentions, for each prompt, engine and day. If a prompt about "emergency electricians in Leeds" is sampled three times on Gemini and the answers name you twice and three competitors a total of seven times, your share of voice for that prompt and engine is 2 ÷ 9, roughly 22 per cent.
Share of voice is useful for three reasons:
- It is comparative, so a drop tells you a rival is gaining rather than simply that answers changed.
- It is stable across engines with different answer lengths; a long Perplexity answer and a short ChatGPT list are judged on the same basis.
- It translates directly into reporting, which is why agencies tend to lead with it.
Starter plans track up to three competitors, Growth up to eight and Agency up to ten per brand, which sets the denominator for the calculation.