What is share of voice in marketing?

Share of voice equals your brand's metric divided by the sum of that metric for all brands in the set, times 100. If your brand appears in 300 of 1,200 tracked mentions, your share of voice is 25 percent. The result is always relative to a defined set of competitors and a defined scope, such as keywords, prompts, or publications, so state both whenever you report it.

Each channel uses its own unit of visibility.

For SEO, a common method is to take a keyword set, estimate each brand's clicks from its ranking position and the keyword's search volume using a click-through-rate curve, and divide each brand's total by the sum. Many rank trackers call this a visibility score. It is more meaningful than counting rankings, because position one on a high-volume keyword matters more than position eight on a rare one.

Marketers have long observed a relationship between share of voice and market share: brands whose share of voice exceeds their market share tend to grow, and those below it tend to shrink. This is an empirical pattern from advertising research, not a law, and it holds loosely at best for individual channels. Use it as a strategic lens rather than a forecast.

There is no universal target. A useful comparison is your share of voice against your market share, and your trend against your main competitors. In AI answers, the number is especially sensitive to the prompt set and the number of runs per prompt. SerionFlow's AI visibility checks report mention rates for the prompts used to plan pages, labelled as directional. SerionFlow is the wrong tool for share of voice in ads, social, or earned media; it only samples AI answers for planning.