How to Increase Your Share of Voice in AI Search Engines?

Share of Voice is a metric that shows your brand’s percentage presence in AI-generated answers, within a given industry or product and service category, benchmarked against the competition. It counts how many citations and mentions feature your brand in tools like ChatGPT, and it gauges the sentiment of those answers, meaning whether the model recommends your brand and speaks about it positively, or does the reverse.

When a user puts a complex business question to an LLM, the model returns a long-form answer that, instead of the traditional list of links you know from Google, usually names just two to four brands. As a result, your chance of appearing in an AI-generated answer is lower than your visibility in Google, which is exactly why monitoring brand visibility and benchmarking against rivals with the Share of Voice metric matters so much.

To compete effectively for presence in AI tools, you first need to understand how language models pull in the knowledge they use to build answers. The mechanism behind it is RAG architecture, or Retrieval-Augmented Generation. It works by retrieving data from external web indexes and then synthesizing it.

The prompt a user types is converted into a vector and compared against a database of content held in the index, in order to find matching fragments. The query and the selected data fragments are then passed to the AI model, which generates an answer based on them. The user receives a response grounded in real facts, along with information on which pages were cited and used as sources.

For a CMO, this means one thing: if your brand’s content does not match the AI model’s mathematical vector, the brand will be left out of the recommendation entirely.

Source: Translated image from https://www.senuto.com/pl/blog/co-to-jest-rag/

The Correlation Between SEO and Visibility in AI Tools

Google’s search algorithms are among the most advanced information-quality systems in the world, so the analytics built into them directly support RAG mechanisms. If criteria that strict deem a domain trustworthy and authoritative, AI systems are far more willing to pick it as a credible source for their recommendations.

An analysis by ZipTie.dev found that brands ranking first in Google search results have a 25% chance of being cited for the same queries in AI tools. The further down the ranking, the lower the chance. (3) The conclusions from that study point directly to the important role of solid SEO foundations in building Share of Voice.

Academic research conducted at Princeton University identified which content-modification techniques had the strongest effect on page visibility in generative AI answers within the Google ecosystem (AI Overviews, AI Mode).

The most effective methods were:

• Citing sources, the study added trusted sources to the text to back up specific claims. This simple move increased visibility in generative answers by as much as 132.4%.
• Including statistics and hard data, adding numerical data in place of purely descriptive paragraphs raised visibility by 65.5%.
• An authoritative tone, the third of the most effective tactics shifted the tone to something more confident and persuasive, drawing on the author’s expertise and command of the topic. This change translated into an 89.1% increase.

What else helps improve Share of Voice?

Building authority with AI Authority Link Building. LLM algorithms verify a page’s reputation based on trusted sources. That is why one element of any Share-of-Voice strategy should be AI Authority Link Building, meaning earning mentions and links that point to your site with the specific aim of building authority in the eyes of AI. The work involves selectively choosing trusted industry sources, so the brand gains valuable mentions and links that reinforce its authority.

Digital PR and shaping positive brand sentiment. LLMs are happy to cite sources like Reddit and check a brand’s presence on social media. Monitor brand opinions across forums and social platforms, since a high volume of negative voices can erode AI tools’ trust in the brand. Encourage customers to leave positive reviews, because positive user-generated content has a favorable effect on AI visibility. Also focus on earning positive mentions in industry sources as part of Digital PR, for example in roundups of the top X companies in sector Y and similar rankings.

Identifying and filling content gaps. Test the prompts that matter most to your business in LLMs. Check queries from different stages of the buying funnel, and do not skip the important research stage. If you notice competitors showing up in citations while your site is absent, check whether you cover the topic thoroughly enough. You may uncover gaps that, once filled with new content, will improve your presence in AI answers.

For a CFO, Share of Voice will not be as important a metric as Share of Market, the brand’s real share of the market and sales volume. In practice, the two are closely linked.

In marketing, we talk about the ESOV model, or Excess Share of Voice. When a brand meets this model, meaning it holds a higher Share of Voice than its market share, it has a surplus that fuels natural growth and rising revenue. When the trend reverses and SoV falls, that is a clear warning sign that Share of Market will start to decline in the near future too.

Users who type purchase-intent prompts into LLMs are looking for concrete recommendations and expect to be pointed to suggested providers. If your brand does not appear in those recommendations and posts a low SoV against the competition, it translates directly into:

• A drop in branded queries in Google search
• A drying up of the top and middle of the sales funnel, because potential customers never learn about the brand at the research stage
• And finally, Share of Market starting to shrink in favor of competitors that AI treats as the industry leaders

At Delante, we monitor our clients’ Share of Voice using our proprietary tool, Cerber AI. Among other things, we track:

• Direct mentions, meaning how often AI names the client as a leader and a recommended company for business-critical queries.
• Citations, meaning how often AI tools point to the domain as a source for generating an answer.
• LLM sentiment analysis, meaning the context in which AI mentions the brand, whether it is a positive recommendation or a warning and a negative comment.

We set all of these parameters against competitor results, and on that basis we arrive at a percentage Share of Voice figure.

The most popular SEO tools, such as Ahrefs and Semrush, also offer Share of Voice monitoring.

Share of Voice is one of the key metrics for measuring a brand’s effectiveness in AI tools. It has a direct impact on Share of Market, which makes monitoring it a valuable signal for protecting revenue. A brand’s absence from language models means losing presence at every stage of the buying funnel and quietly handing potential customers to the competition.

Allocating budget to AISO protects the competitive advantages you have built and secures revenue for the quarters ahead. Once LLM algorithms have built authority around your competitors, the cost of closing that gap will be many times higher than the cost of earning and holding the leader’s position now.

Sources:

1. Aggarwal, P., Murahari, V., Rajpurohit, T., Kalyan, A., Narasimhan, K., & Deshpande, A. (2024). GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Barcelona, Spain. https://doi.org/10.1145/3637528.3671900
2. https://www.semrush.com/blog/share-of-voice-how-to-increase/
3. https://ziptie.dev/blog/seo-still-matters-for-ai-search-engines/