Track share of voice against competitors

Share of voice is your visibility divided by the combined visibility of you and your tracked competitors, shown as a percentage. If you and four competitors together get 1,000 mentions or rankings in a month and you get 150, your share is 15 percent.

The measure only means something inside a fixed frame. So the first job is to decide the frame: which topics, which competitors and which channels.

Pick three to five competitors your buyers actually compare you with. Include one bigger player and one smaller, fast-growing one. Do not add companies just because they are well known.

Then list eight to fifteen topics or search phrases your buyers use when they have the problem you solve. Avoid brand names in this list. Your sales call notes and interviews are the best source. If you want to see which phrases people use, look at Update messaging with fresh insights.

Use a search tool such as Semrush or Ahrefs to see how each domain ranks for your topic list. Most give an estimated visibility or traffic share for a set of keywords. Record your figure and each competitor's for the same keyword set on the same day. Your own click and impression data lives in Google Search Console, which is accurate for you but not for competitors, so do not mix the two sources in one calculation.

Choose the one or two channels where your buyers actually are, such as LinkedIn. Each month, count for you and each competitor: posts published, total reactions and comments, and follower growth. Use a simple weighted sum, such as one point per reaction and three points per comment, and apply the same weights to everyone. The exact weights matter less than staying consistent.

More buyers now ask AI assistants which tools or providers to consider. Pick ten questions your buyers might ask. Run them in the assistants you care about and note which brands appear. Tools such as Otterly.AI, Peec AI, Profound, Scrunch AI and Ahrefs Brand Radar automate this. You can also do it by hand in a quarterly session. Share of voice here is the percentage of answers that mention you.

If you run ads, compare how many active ads competitors have. Google's ads transparency tool shows ads by advertiser, and the ad libraries of Meta and LinkedIn show what competitors run there. This is a rough count, not a spend figure, so treat it as direction only.

Create a sheet in Google Sheets with a row per competitor and a column per channel. Fill in each month's measure, then calculate your percentage per channel. Add a line chart per channel so the trend is visible. Keep notes next to any odd month, such as a competitor's big launch.

Look for the channel where your share is lowest compared with your share of revenue or customers. That is where you are under-represented. Set one target for the quarter, such as plus three percentage points of search share on one topic cluster. Then choose actions: publish content for the topics you rank poorly on, post more consistently, or earn mentions in the places AI answers draw from.

Link the decision to your channel choices in Test a new channel each quarter and Reallocate budget based on CAC by channel.

• Changing the competitor list or keyword set every month, which breaks the trend.
• Mixing numbers from different tools in one calculation.
• Treating tool estimates as exact.
• Tracking vanity topics your buyers never search for.
• Collecting the data and never choosing an action.

You have at least three months of comparable data. You can state your share per channel in one sentence. When your share falls, you can name the competitor and topic behind it, and you have a target and an action for next quarter. Over time, your share rises where you put effort.