---
title: "AI share of voice"
url: https://marketingsignals.com/glossary/ai-share-of-voice
type: Page
---

# AI share of voice

AI share of voice explained: how to calculate it, why share beats ranking position in AI answers, what the research shows and how brands can improve it.

GEO glossary

## AI share of voice

AI share of voice is the proportion of AI-generated answers in a category that mention a brand, measured against competitors across a fixed set of prompts. It shows how often ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI features recommend a brand compared with its rivals.

## How is AI share of voice calculated?

Two versions are common. Mention rate is the percentage of responses that name the brand at least once. Share of voice divides the brand's mentions by all brand mentions in the same responses, so the figures for every brand in the set add up to 100%.

Some trackers weight mentions by position in the answer or by whether the brand is also linked as a source. Whichever method is used, it has to stay the same between reporting periods, with the same prompts, platforms and location settings.

## Why measure share rather than rank?

AI answers vary from one run to the next. Research by Rand Fishkin of SparkToro and Patrick O'Donnell of Gumshoe.ai, reported in January 2026, ran 12 recommendation prompts 60 to 100 times each per platform on ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI. ChatGPT and Google's AI returned the same list of brands less than 1% of the time, and the same list in the same order less than 0.1% of the time.

How often a brand appeared was steadier. Across varied, human-written prompts about headphones, Bose, Sony, Sennheiser and Apple appeared in 55% to 77% of responses. The study was not peer reviewed, but it explains why share across many runs is a more reliable measure than a single position.

## How to improve it

Share of voice rises when a brand appears in more of the sources AI systems draw on: comparison articles, review sites, trade press and forums, as well as its own pages. In our experience, digital PR and reviews move it more than on-site changes alone.

## Example

Take 50 prompts about UK running shoes, each run five times. A retailer named once in 90 of the 250 answers has a 36% mention rate. If those 250 answers contain 600 brand mentions in total, the retailer's 90 give it a 15% share of voice.

## Related terms

- [Prompt tracking](https://marketingsignals.com/glossary/prompt-tracking)
- [LLM visibility](https://marketingsignals.com/glossary/llm-visibility)
- [AI citations](https://marketingsignals.com/glossary/ai-citations)

## Further reading

- [Top UK Fashion & Apparel AI Visibility Index](https://marketingsignals.com/llm-fashion-retailers-study)
- [How to Measure Performance in AI Search](https://marketingsignals.com/insights/how-to-measure-performance-in-ai-search)

Our [AI SEO & GEO](https://marketingsignals.com/service/ai-search-optimisation) service puts this into practice for brands in the UK and US.

## Sources

- [AI recommendations change with nearly every query: SparkToro, Search Engine Journal (30 January 2026)](https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ai-recommendations-change-with-nearly-every-query-sparktoro/566242)
- [AI recommendation lists rarely repeat: study, Search Engine Land](https://searchengineland.com/ai-recommendation-lists-rarely-repeat-study-468076)

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