Share of voice vs competitors
On this pageWhat it is
What it is
Share of voice measures your visibility as a proportion of the total visibility in a market. You choose a set of search terms or questions and a list of competitors, and the tool shows what percentage of the results or answers feature each brand. For example, if your brand appears in 20 of 100 tracked AI answers and a rival appears in 40, the report shows that gap and tracks it over time. Tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush and Otterly.AI offer a version of this.
Why it matters
A raw ranking tells you where you stand alone. Share of voice tells you where you stand against the companies you actually compete with, which is what a board or a client usually wants to know. It is useful for deciding which topics to invest in and for showing progress. It matters when you have defined competitors and a fixed topic list. It means little if the keyword set is chosen carelessly or is too small.
What to check
- Which competitors can you add, and is there a limit on how many.
- Is the measure based on rankings, on traffic estimates or on mentions in AI answers, and is that explained.
- Can you segment by topic, country or engine.
- Can you export the history for reports.