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Competitor share-of-voice shows how often each brand — yours and your competitors’ — is named across your tracked prompt set, expressed as a proportion of all brand mentions. It answers: when a buyer asks an AI assistant about this category, whose name comes up?

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How the competitive set is built

Ryze records every brand named in tracked answers, not only the competitors you nominate. The resulting set is frequently different from the one you track commercially. Two things usually surface:
  • Established players you do not compete with directly but who dominate category-level questions, because they are strongly represented in training data.
  • Adjacent-category tools the model considers substitutable even when buyers do not.
Both matter, because they are what a prospect is being shown.

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Reading the number

Compare within a prompt category, not across all prompts. A brand can dominate recommendation prompts and be absent from problem-led ones. The blended average conceals exactly the structure you would act on. Look at the gap, not your absolute figure. Going from 2% to 4% while the leader holds 30% is real progress but not a competitive change. Separate mentions from citations. High share of voice with low citation share means competitors are named from the model’s memory rather than from anything it read. That is a different problem with a different, much slower remedy.

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What moves it, and what does not

Moves it slowly, over months to years: sustained third-party presence — reviews, comparison sites, forums, press, and being written about by people who are not you. Brand mentions come largely from training data, and training data is other people’s content. Does not move it: publishing more of your own pages. Your own content can earn citations, but it rarely makes a model name you from memory. This is the single most common misunderstanding about AI visibility. Moves it indirectly: being cited consistently over time contributes to broader presence, which eventually feeds future training. This is a long, indirect path, not a tactic.

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Setting expectations

If you are starting from zero mentions, the honest sequence is: citations first (weeks to months), mentions much later (many months), competitive share last. Content work buys the first. Only sustained presence buys the rest. Treat any claim that share of voice can be moved quickly with suspicion.