Share of voice in AI answers
Every AI answer names someone. Share of voice is your slice of those names - how often the engines recommend you versus the competitors they recommend instead, across the prompts that matter, tracked week over week. Free to start.
What share of voice means in the answer-space
Share of voice in AI answers is how often the engines name your brand versus the rivals they name instead, across the questions your buyers ask. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for the best tool in your category, the answer doesn't list everyone - it names two or three. Your share of voice is how regularly you are one of them. It turns a pile of individual answers into a single number you can track, defend, and improve.
It reframes the competitive question. Instead of "where does my page rank," it asks "when a buyer asks the AI, how often does it put me forward, and who does it put forward instead." That is much closer to the question your revenue actually depends on.
It is not your SEO share of voice
SEO share of voice is built on rankings and estimated clicks: your visibility across a keyword set relative to competitors. It assumes a buyer scans a list and chooses. AI share of voice is built on the synthesized answer, where the engine has already done the choosing and handed back a shortlist.
Those two numbers can diverge hard. A brand can own the rankings and still be rarely named in the answer, because the engine weighs authority, clarity, and corroboration across many sources, not just whose page ranks. Measuring your slice of the rankings tells you nothing about your slice of the recommendation.
Who the AI names instead of you
This is the part most teams find genuinely useful, and occasionally uncomfortable. The competitors the engines surface in your place are often not the ones on your battlecard. The AI assembles its shortlist from what the open web and public discussion say, so it can elevate a newer or noisier rival you weren't watching, and quietly leave out an incumbent you assumed you were measured against.
Sonarvue records exactly which rivals appear, per prompt and per engine, and turns it into your share of voice against the real competitive set the AI is presenting to buyers. That is the set you have to win, whether or not it matches the one in your CRM.
Movement over time
A single snapshot is a curiosity. Share of voice becomes a metric when you watch it move. Sonarvue tracks it on the cadence you choose and shows the trend week over week, so you can tell whether your content and GEO work is actually shifting the answer or whether a competitor is gaining ground. When a rival overtakes you on a prompt that matters, an alert fires rather than you finding out a quarter later.
Across eight default engines, the trend is per-engine too. You might be climbing in Perplexity and slipping in Google AI Mode at the same time, and a blended figure would hide it. Seeing each engine's share of voice on one timeline is how you decide where to spend the next bit of effort.
Why it matters
Share of voice is the number that tells you whether you are in the game. You can be named occasionally and still lose, because the buyer reads one answer and the brand it leads with gets the shortlist slot. Tracking your share of the answer - and who is taking the rest of it - turns "are we visible in AI" from a vague worry into something you can report on and move. And finding out costs nothing: no install, no tag, your first read in minutes.
Frequently asked
What is share of voice in AI answers?
It's how often the AI answer engines name your brand versus the competitors they name instead, across the prompts your buyers ask. Where SEO share of voice counts your slice of the rankings, AI share of voice counts your slice of the answer itself - the place the recommendation now happens.
How is it different from SEO share of voice?
SEO share of voice is built on rankings and estimated clicks across a keyword set. AI share of voice is built on the synthesized answer: for each prompt, who does the engine actually name, and how often is that you? A brand can hold strong SEO share of voice and near-zero answer share of voice, because ranking a page and being cited in the answer are different things.
Who does the AI name instead of me?
Often not the competitors on your battlecard. Sonarvue records exactly which rivals the engines surface in your place, per prompt and per engine, so you see the real competitive set the AI is presenting to buyers - which is frequently different from the one you track in your CRM.
How is share of voice tracked over time?
On the cadence you set. Sonarvue shows movement over time so you can tell whether you're gaining or losing ground in the answer-space, and alerts you when a competitor overtakes you on a prompt that matters.