Competitors and share of voice

Share of voice tells you what percentage of AI citations for a set of prompts go to your brand versus your competitors. It answers a simple question: when an AI engine recommends someone in your category, how often does it recommend you?

What you'll learn

• How share of voice is calculated in Outercite
• How competitors are discovered automatically and what the threat score means
• How to use surge alerts to catch competitor momentum early

What share of voice means

Share of voice is a competitive metric. It is not just about whether you appear in AI answers. It is about how your appearance rate compares to everyone else who is competing for the same answers.

Imagine four businesses are all cited in answers to the query "best accountant in Brisbane." If you appear in 30 of 100 checks, Competitor A appears in 25, Competitor B in 20, and Competitor C in 10, your share of voice for that prompt is 30%. That still means you are losing 70 citations to someone else.

Share of voice matters because AI answers are not ranked lists of ten blue links. Often an AI will name two or three businesses, sometimes just one. If your competitors own the recommendation more than you do, you are losing real commercial intent to them.

How Outercite discovers competitors automatically

When you add keywords to Outercite and run your first checks, the system reads the AI responses and identifies every other business that appears in answers alongside you. You do not need to manually build a competitor list from scratch.

The auto-discovery process works like this:

1. Outercite checks each of your tracked prompts across all six AI engines.
2. For each response, the verification pipeline identifies all named or linked businesses.
3. Businesses that appear repeatedly across engines and prompts are surfaced as competitor candidates.
4. You can confirm, ignore, or manually add competitors from the competitors dashboard.

This approach surfaces competitors you may not have thought to add. A business you have never considered a direct rival might be appearing in AI answers for your most commercial prompts. That is worth knowing.

Threat score and threat level

Each competitor in Outercite gets a threat score. It is a numerical measure of how much of a competitive risk they represent based on their citation behaviour.

The threat score is calculated from several factors:

• Citation overlap. How often does this competitor appear in the same prompts you are tracking? A competitor that shows up on your exact keywords is a direct threat. One that appears on loosely related queries is a lower threat.
• Citation rate. How consistently are they cited? A competitor with a high citation rate on buying-intent prompts is more threatening than one with a high rate on informational-only prompts.
• Trajectory. Are they gaining citations week over week? A competitor with a rising trajectory is more threatening than one holding steady, even if their current citation rate is lower than yours.

The threat level translates the numeric score into a plain label: low, medium, or high. This makes it easy to scan your competitor list and focus on the ones that genuinely need attention.

Average position complements the threat score. If a competitor is mentioned first in AI answers more often than you are, that suggests the AI engines regard them as the primary recommendation in your category. Average position tracks where in the answer each business tends to appear.

Surge alerts

A surge alert fires when a competitor's citation rate increases sharply over a short period. A steady competitor is one thing. A competitor who has suddenly tripled their citation rate in a week is a different situation. That spike often signals they have published new content, earned significant press coverage, or made a product change that AI engines are picking up.

Surge alerts let you act early. By the time a competitor shift shows up in monthly reports, the window to respond may have passed. Surge alerts give you a heads-up while there is still time to investigate and adjust.

Using share of voice data to make decisions

Here is how to move from data to action:

To set up alerts for competitor changes, see set up alerts.

Try this in Outercite

Go to your competitors dashboard to see which businesses Outercite has auto-discovered from your tracked prompts. Check the threat score and threat level for each one. If any are rated high, click through to see which prompts they are winning and what the AI answers look like.

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