A prospect asks an AI assistant which suppliers to consider. The answer mentions your brand once, or five times. But what has that buyer actually read? One answer. That difference determines how you read a Share of Voice figure, and how you back it up when a director or a prospect asks about it. That is why the GripIQ Intent Engine counts each brand at most once per answer, and there are good reasons for that.
What Share of Voice means in the Intent Engine
On the Dashboard of the GripIQ Intent Engine, Share of Voice appears as a card, next to Answers, Optimisations and Competitors. The screen itself gives this definition: the percentage of AI answers in which your brand is mentioned, compared with all tracked competitors combined.
The calculation is simple. GripIQ takes the AI answers within your filter and checks which brands appear in each answer. If a brand is in an answer, it gets one point there, even if the text mentions it five times. The figure is then the share of answers in which your brand appears.
Two consequences are worth knowing:
- The brands don't add up to 100 percent together. One answer can mention your brand and two competitors, and then all three score in that answer.
- The figure only changes when an answer starts or stops mentioning your brand, not when a text becomes longer or more glowing.
Why not per mention
Counting per mention seems more precise, but it measures something other than what you want to know. There are three reasons not to do it.
A buyer reads an answer, not a count. Whether an assistant mentions your brand three times or once, the buyer has seen one answer, and your brand was either in it or not. For a shortlist, what matters is whether you are on it.
Long answers would distort the figure. One model writes an extensive comparison, another a short recommendation. If you count per mention, the model that rambles on the most wins, even if the buyer gains nothing from it. If you count per answer, you can compare the models with each other.
You need to be able to explain the figure. Compare these two example sentences. "Our brand appears in 40 percent of the answers" is something everyone understands. "Our brand appears 212 times in a collection of texts of varying length" raises questions you would rather not answer. In a management meeting, only a figure you can defend in one sentence stands up.
What this means for your sales conversations
Sales uses this figure differently from marketing. You want to know whether your brand is already part of the conversation before you are there yourself.
- Low Share of Voice: in many answers to your buyers' questions, your brand doesn't appear. A prospect who starts their orientation with an AI assistant then sees your competitors first. Expect to have ground to make up in the first conversation.
- High Share of Voice: you are on the list more often. Then check in the answers how you are described, because being mentioned is not the same as being described well. Sentiment and Rankings show you that.
- Difference per model: the Dashboard also shows Share of Voice per model. A prospect using ChatGPT hears a different story from a prospect using Gemini or Claude. As a result, the average can hide that you appear in one model and barely in another.
For more background on measuring AI answers, see Generative engine optimization: what it is and where to start. For the comparison with your competitors: Competitor analysis: the model, an example and what AI answers add.
The trend: the last 7 days versus the 7 days before. Next to the percentage, the card shows a trend. It compares the last 7 days with the 7 days before. The screen only shows the trend when there are enough days with data.
That short period is a deliberate choice. A week gives a signal you can still link to what you did: a new reference page, a press release, a change to your website. But such a short period also has its limits. If there are few answers in a period, a handful of answers can make the trend swing considerably. So read a trend as a direction, and look at the underlying answers before you draw conclusions.
Share of Voice in Social Media is something else. The same term means something else on a different screen. In Social Media, Share of Voice is the share of engagement: the likes, comments and shares a brand gets on its posts, compared with all tracked brands. So it is not about mentions there, but about people's reactions.
These are two different questions. AI Visibility answers: does my brand appear when a buyer asks an AI assistant? Social Media answers: does the audience respond to what my brand shares, compared with the others? So don't put them together in one chart, and don't call them both "our share". Always say which of the two you mean.
Using the figure in a sales deck. A few agreements keep the figure honest:
- State the unit: "the share of AI answers to our buyer prompts in which our brand appears".
- Mention the prompts and the country the figure is based on. A different set of questions produces a different figure.
- Mention the model if you are talking about a single assistant.
- Don't present it as market share. It says how often you are mentioned, not how much you sell.
What you can do now
- Open the Dashboard and note your Share of Voice, the trend and the figure per model. Summarise the three in one sentence.
- Click through to AI model comparison and read three answers in which your brand doesn't appear. Who does?
- Agree with your colleagues on the wording you use in decks, so everyone presents the same figure in the same way.
How big is your Share of Voice for the questions your buyers ask? Book a demo.