Share of voice is your fraction of total impressions, citations, or mentions in a competitive set. If you and three competitors collectively earn 100 impressions on a topic and you earn 25 of them, your SOV is 25%.
The metric goes by different names in different surfaces:
- In SEO — share of impressions across the topic's query universe
- In AEO — share of citations across LLM responses to a set of tracked prompts
- In PR — share of mentions across a media corpus
Same shape: divide your slice by the total, watch the ratio over time.
Why it matters for AEO
Absolute citation count alone doesn't tell the full story. A brand can grow citations year-over-year and still be losing — if the category is growing faster and competitors are taking a bigger fraction. SOV catches that. Citation count up + SOV down means you're rising on a rising tide while losing the race.
The inverse is also useful: shrinking total category interest with stable SOV often means you're holding position while the category cools.
What b/cited does about it
- AEO citation tracking computes share-of-voice across tracked prompts per provider (ChatGPT vs Claude vs Perplexity) — you can see where you're winning and losing
- Competitor domains field on each project tells the tracker which brands to count as the comparable set
- Visibility Score is partially SOV-based — it weights your citation count against competitor citations in the same prompt set
Standalone "we got cited N times" is vanity. SOV is the comparable metric.