Glossary entry
Share of Voice (SoV)
Also known as: SoV, share of citations
The proportion of citations within a defined category that go to a given brand. The category-relative complement to citation rate.
Share of Voice (SoV) is citation rate normalised to the category. Citation rate tells you how often a source is cited; SoV tells you what fraction of the category's total citations went to that source.
A formal definition:
For a prompt set P targeting category C, an LLM L, and a brand B,
SoV (B, C, P, L) =
Σ count(B in cited_sources(L, p)) for p in P/Σ count(any brand in cited_sources(L, p)) for p in P
A SoV of 0.40 means: of all the brand citations across the prompt set, 40% pointed to B.
When to use which:
- Citation rate — when you care about absolute visibility ("is our brand cited at all?").
- Share of voice — when you care about competitive position ("how do we compare to the field?").
SoV is heavily category-dependent. A brand can have 70% SoV in a narrow category (good news) and 2% SoV in a broader category that subsumes it. Always disclose the category prompt set.
See also: Methodology for how we define prompt sets.