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Analytics

Share of Voice in the AI Era

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#Share of Voice#Metrics#Brand Monitoring
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You are ranking #1 on Google. Congratulations. You are also invisible to 100 million ChatGPT users.

For decades, “Share of Voice” (SOV) was a simple calculation: How much of the advertising or search market do I own compared to my competitors? It was measured in ad impressions, organic clicks, and social mentions.

In 2025, that metric is obsolete.

When a user asks Perplexity “What is the best CRM for small business?”, they don’t see a market. They see one answer. If you aren’t in that answer, your Share of Voice is effectively 0%.

Welcome to the era of Share of Model (SoM).

Table of contents

The death of traditional SoV

Traditional Share of Voice was a game of probabilities.

  • If you ranked #1, you got ~30% of clicks.
  • If you ranked #3, you got ~10%.
  • If you bought ads, you bought impressions.

You could buy your way into the conversation.

AI Share of Voice is a game of binaries. AI engines are deterministic in their output but probabilistic in their reasoning. When ChatGPT generates a response, it typically recommends 3-5 options maximum.

If there are 50 competitors in your niche, 45 of them effectively cease to exist in that conversation. The long tail is cut off. You cannot “buy” a sponsored mention in a ChatGPT organic response (yet). You have to earn the model’s trust.

What is Share of Model (SoM)?

Share of Model (SoM) is the frequency with which a specific Large Language Model (LLM) cites, recommends, or references your brand in response to relevant non-branded queries.

It is a measure of brand salience within the neural network.

Does the model “know” you? Does it associate your brand with the solution?

Example:

  • Query: “Best email marketing tools for creators”
  • Response: “ConvertKit and Mailchimp are popular options…”
  • SoM Analysis: ConvertKit and Mailchimp have high SoM. ActiveCampaign, effectively absent, has low SoM.

The three dimensions of AI visibility

Measuring SoM isn’t just about counting mentions. It requires a nuanced look at how you are mentioned.

1. Mention Frequency (Volume)

The raw number of times your brand appears across a set of relevant queries.

  • Metric: “We appeared in 40 out of 100 ‘Best CRM’ queries.”

2. Share of Recommendation (Rank)

Being mentioned is good. Being recommended is better.

  • Metric: “We were the #1 recommended tool in 15% of queries, and in the top 3 for 60%.“

3. Sentiment & Context (Quality)

Is the AI praising you or warning users about you?

  • Metric: “80% of mentions highlighted our ‘ease of use’, but 20% flagged ‘high pricing’.”

Measuring the unmeasurable

Traditional SEO tools are blind here. Google Search Console cannot see inside Claude’s context window.

To measure AI Share of Voice, you need a new toolkit. You need to simulate thousands of conversations to map the model’s latent knowledge.

The manual way: Type 50 queries into ChatGPT. Tally the results in a spreadsheet. (This is slow, biased, and unscalable).

The automated way: Use a dedicated AI visibility tracker like cloro.

cloro automates the “mystery shopper” process for AI. It runs thousands of queries across different models (GPT-4, Claude 3.5, Perplexity) and calculates your exact Share of Voice relative to your competitors.

The winner-takes-all dynamic

The most dangerous aspect of AI Search is the consolidation of authority.

In traditional search, users might click to the 2nd page of Google to find a niche provider. In AI search, users rarely ask “Give me 10 more options.” They accept the first answer and move on.

This creates a Winner-Takes-All dynamic.

  • The top 3 brands get 90% of the visibility.
  • The middle market gets crushed.

If you are a “challenger brand,” your primary goal in 2025 must be to break into that top tier of AI recollection.

How to increase your AI share of voice

You cannot edit the model’s weights directly. But you can influence the data it consumes.

1. Surround the Sound

AI models read the entire web. They read Reddit threads, G2 reviews, TechCrunch articles, and YouTube transcripts. To increase SoM, you must be present where the model learns.

  • Action: a digital PR campaign that gets your brand cited in high-authority lists (“Best X for Y”).

2. Define Yourself

Don’t let the AI guess what you do. Tell it.

  • Action: Implement llms.txt on your site. Provide a clear, concise definition of your value proposition in a format the robot can digest effortlessly.

3. Data as a Moat

Publish proprietary data. When you become the source of a statistic, you force the AI to cite you.

  • Action: Publish an annual “State of the Industry” report. When users ask “What are the trends in X?”, the AI will cite your data.

4. Technical Accessibility

Ensure AI Crawlers can actually read your site. If GPTBot is blocked, your newest features simply do not exist to the model.

The new dashboard for cmos

In 2024, CMOs stared at Google Analytics dashboards showing “Organic Traffic.” In 2026, they will stare at dashboards showing “AI Share of Voice.”

The metric tells you something deeper than traffic: It tells you if your brand has cultural relevance.

If an AI trained on the sum of human knowledge doesn’t mention you, do you really matter?

Don’t wait for the monthly report. Start tracking your AI Share of Voice today. Use cloro to benchmark where you stand against your competitors and watch how your GEO efforts translate into real visibility.

The conversation is happening without you. It’s time to speak up.

Check what AI says about your brand Read our docs