TL;DR: Measuring share of voice lets you see how often your brand appears in discovery touchpoints such as traditional search, social media, press mentions, and AI citations relative to other brands. As AI use continues to increase, it's important to include AI in your share of voice measurement to get a full understanding of where your brand stands and determine effective steps to close visibility gaps. Here are some insights on what share of voice is, how to measure it, and how to improve it.
What is Share of Voice?
Share of Voice, often referred to as SoV, measures how often your brand appears in relevant discovery moments compared to competitors. Traditionally, this included visibility across channels such as organic search, social media engagement, and press coverage. As AI search increases, share of voice measurement now extends to AI-powered platforms, where brands can surface through citations.
Why Should I Pay Attention to Share of Voice?
Consistent, comprehensive share of voice measurement provides a holistic view of your brand's performance, helps you uncover visibility gaps, reveals competitive positioning, and surfaces emerging trends. It not only shows how your brand has performed compared to competitors during key decision moments, but also indicates evolving customer behavior. Share of voice data can complement other metrics — such as clicks on links and SERP rankings — helping you make more informed decisions about which strategies, tactics, and tools will drive visibility.
How Do I Measure Share of Voice?
First, define your competitive set. Then choose which metrics and channels matter most for your brand. For instance, you can track brand impressions on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, mentions in major newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today, and citations on AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok. It's crucial to measure a mix of relevant touchpoints to get a big-picture understanding of where your brand stands, as customers use brand websites, social media, search engines, review sites, maps, AI platforms, andmore in the discovery process. You'll also need to define a time period for the measurement, such as during the 2026 Winter Olympic Games or from Thanksgiving to New Year's Day. Then, deploy a robust competitive intelligence tool to gather data about your brand and competitors for that specific time period. The results will show how your brand stacked up against others in its competitive set.
Yext's competitive intelligence tool Scout can help you measure your brand visibility and performance across traditional search engines like Google and AI search engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok.
How do I Increase My Share of Voice?
Your specific steps depend on your brand goals. However, a good starting point is to focus on areas you can more directly influence than those that are more outside your control. Consider the touchpoints where customers, journalists, AI systems, and traditional search engines go for information. Then take these steps:
Extend your brand presence across multiple platforms. AI models and search engines pull from many sources, so make sure your brand's key messages appear across credible platforms, not just your own domains.
Keep your brand facts accurate and consistent. Make sure listings, directory profiles, reviews, pages, and social profiles all have corresponding, up-to-date information. This signals reliably across the digital ecosystem.
Present information in clear, discrete fields. Structured data formatted in a predictable, machine-readable way makes it easier for search engines and AI systems to interpret your content and use it in their listed results and summarized answers.
Maintain an active, authentic social presence. Post on your brand pages, respond to comments, and encourage users to tag you to boost visibility and increase signal relevance.
Solicit reviews from satisfied customers. Reviews not only build customer trust. They also provide rich signals for AI models to assess trust, as well as relevance.**