Share of voice
Share of voice is the proportion of total mentions, coverage or advertising presence in a defined market that belongs to one brand compared with its competitors.
Last updated September 28, 2026
How it is measured
The calculation is a ratio: a brand's count divided by the sum of counts for every brand in the comparison set, multiplied by 100. The numerator can be news articles, social posts, ad impressions, search impressions or another unit of attention. The result depends entirely on two choices: which brands make up the set, and which channel and time window are counted.
Because the set defines the answer, a brand can hold a large share among three named rivals and a small share in a broader market. Reports should list the competitor set, the sources, the dates and the unit, and should not compare shares that used different definitions.
Variants include earned share of voice (news and social coverage), paid share of voice (ad spend or impressions) and share of search. Some teams weight mentions by outlet reach or by whether the brand is a headline subject rather than a passing reference.
A worked example with PeakMetrics data
PeakMetrics' September 2026 AI Perceptions free check includes a 30-day count of news mentions from the PeakMetrics news index for each of six US airlines. Over the 30 days to 28 September 2026 those counts were: American Airlines 32,299; United Airlines 19,798; Delta Air Lines 13,994; Southwest Airlines 7,856; JetBlue 4,710; and Alaska Airlines 3,138. The six total 81,795 mentions.
On that definition, earned news share of voice within this six-carrier set is about 39.5% for American and about 3.8% for Alaska. The figure applies only to this set of six, only to news mentions, and only to this window. It says nothing about how the coverage described either carrier.
The same free check also records how often each carrier appeared in 25 sampled answers to airline category questions from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok: 4 of 25 for American and 14 of 25 for Alaska. Press share of voice and appearance in AI answers are different measures, and here they point in different directions. That gap is covered in AI visibility. Because model answers vary between runs, the AI figures are a snapshot, not a ranking.
Why it matters to communications and risk teams
Share of voice gives a comparison that a raw mention count cannot. Twenty thousand mentions may be a lot for one brand and a normal week for another. It is useful for benchmarking a launch or campaign against competitors and for showing whether a crisis pushed a brand's share of coverage up or crowded out its intended message.
Common misconceptions
A higher share is not automatically better, since a large share of coverage during a crisis is not a win. And share of voice measures presence, not sentiment or persuasion. Finally, the term is different from PeakMetrics' AI visibility measure, which counts appearances in sampled AI answers rather than a share of a fixed pool of mentions.
See how these signals show up in your own coverage on the PeakMetrics platform or run the free AI Perceptions check. Back to the glossary.