Share of Voice
Share of Voice (SOV) is a brand-level metric that answers the question every executive eventually asks: "how much of the conversation is mine versus my competitors'?"
It sits alongside AI Recommendations and AI Visibility as one of Genezio's headline numbers — and it's typically the one that ends up in board decks and quarterly reviews.
What Share of Voice Measures
SOV tracks the share of all brand mentions in your category — yours versus every competitor's.
Where AI Recommendations asks how often are you recommended and AI Visibility asks how often you appear, Share of Voice asks what slice of the total conversation is yours. It's broader than Recommendations: it counts every mention of you and your competitors across the answer engines Genezio monitors, not just the ones that ended in a recommendation.
That's what makes it useful as a market-share proxy. Hundreds of LLM signals collapse into a single percentage that's easy to compare period over period and easy to take to a stakeholder review.
Why It Matters
Until SOV, the platform answered two of the three questions a marketer needs to bring to leadership:
- "How often do I appear?" — AI Visibility
- "What do they say about me?" — sentiment, citations, narratives
Share of Voice adds the third:
- "How much of the conversation is mine vs. theirs?"
This is the metric leadership intuitively understands. It converts the platform's underlying signal into a market-share number — the same shape of metric marketing teams have always reported on for traditional channels.
When Share of Voice Is Shown
Share of Voice only appears when there's enough cross-model and competitive data to make it meaningful. When that signal isn't there, the metric is hidden rather than shown as a misleading number.
You won't see SOV, for example, when a brand runs against only a single answer-engine model, or for industry-only brands where there's no competitive set and a "share" doesn't apply.
In short: you'll only see Share of Voice when there's enough competitive, cross-model data behind it to make the percentage trustworthy.
How to Read Share of Voice
SOV is brand-wide and measured over a time range. The headline number is your share of all mentions across your tracked topics, for the period you've selected.
A few rules of thumb:
- Trend matters more than the absolute number. A 22% SOV that's been climbing for three months is a healthier story than a flat 35%.
- Compare against your top two or three competitors, not against an industry benchmark. SOV is meaningful within your category; cross-category comparisons aren't.
- Pair it with AI Recommendations. A high SOV with a low Recommendation rate tells a different story than a low SOV with a high Recommendation rate — the first means you're talked about but not picked, the second means you're a hidden favorite. Read them together.
The Share of Voice View
A dedicated Share of Voice section in the dashboard breaks the metric down three ways:
Overview
A pie chart of how mention share splits between your brand and each tracked competitor for the selected time range. This is the headline view — the single picture you'd put in a board deck.
Top Topics
A breakdown of which topics drive the most mentions overall — across you and competitors combined. Tells you where the conversation is concentrated, regardless of who's winning. Useful for deciding where to invest: a topic with low total mentions probably isn't worth a content push, even if you're losing it.
Competitors by Topic
A topic-by-topic view of who dominates each topic. For every topic you track, you see how share splits between you and your competitors.
This is where you find the actionable detail: the topics where you're winning the conversation, and the topics where a specific competitor is taking it. It's the input to a content plan — fix the topics where you're losing share, defend the ones where you're winning.
How to Use Share of Voice in Practice
- In monthly reporting — lead with the SOV number and its trend. Pair it with AI Recommendations to show both presence and conversion.
- In quarterly reviews — show SOV against your top two or three competitors, broken down by topic. This is where the Competitors-by-Topic view earns its keep.
- In planning content — start from Top Topics (where is the conversation?) and Competitors by Topic (where are we losing it?). Prioritize content that improves SOV in topics that have high total volume.
- In tracking outcomes — after publishing or fixing content, watch SOV in the affected topic. Movement there is one of the cleanest signals that the work mattered.