Definition
Share of Voice
Share of Voice is the percentage of a category's paid and earned media coverage attributable to a specific brand. In the AI era, it is increasingly measured alongside Share of Model and Share of Placement.
Share of Voice (SOV) is a marketing measurement metric capturing the portion of a category's total media exposure that belongs to a specific brand. Historically, SOV has been measured across paid media spend, press mentions, and social media presence. In 2026, the category is extending into AI: Share of Voice in AI measures how often a brand appears in AI-generated conversations and responses within its category.
Why Share of Voice Matters in AI
The classical SOV metric was built for a media landscape where consumers consumed ads and content through discoverable channels like TV, search, and social feeds. AI changes the topology: a user asks an AI assistant, receives a synthesized answer, and often acts on it without visiting a single channel. If a brand has high paid SOV but is absent from AI responses, it has a coverage gap that traditional SOV tools do not reveal.
AI Share of Voice tools — including Profound, Otterly, Goodie, LLMrefs, and Writesonic's AI Search tools — sample a representative query set, record brand appearances, and compute category-level SOV scores. Results vary significantly across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini because each model surfaces different brands from its training data and retrieval layers.
Share of Voice vs Share of Model vs Share of Placement
Share of Voice measures earned and paid exposure inside AI outputs. Share of Model, coined by Tom Roach, specifically measures the percentage of responses in which a brand appears. Share of Placement, proposed by Surfacedd, measures paid-surface coverage inside AI inventory. In 2026 dashboards, all three are tracked together.
How Surfacedd Helps
Surfacedd operates the ad network that underwrites the Share of Placement metric and integrates with LLM brand-monitoring tools so brands can see paid and organic SOV side by side.
Related Terms
Related Terms
Share of Model is a proposed brand-measurement metric capturing the percentage of AI-generated responses about a category in which a brand appears. Coined by Tom Roach in Marketing Week, it is an AI-era counterpart to share of voice.
Share of Voice vs Share of PlacementShare of Voice measures how often a brand is mentioned across a conversation space; Share of Placement measures the percentage of disclosed sponsored surfaces a brand occupies in an AI ad network over a time period.
AI Brand MonitoringAI brand monitoring is the practice of tracking how, where, and how often a brand appears inside AI-generated responses across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
AI VisibilityAI visibility refers to how frequently and prominently a brand, product, or website appears in AI-generated responses across platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and other AI assistants.