Competitors and share of voice
Share of voice is your portion of the naming across your tracked prompts. Here is how it moves, and what each kind of movement means.
Share of voice is the competitive number. It answers "of all the naming happening on my prompts, how much is mine", and it is more honest than a rate on its own because it accounts for the size of the conversation.
What you'll learn
- What share of voice counts
- The two very different reasons it moves
- How competitors get onto your list without you adding them
What it counts
Across the prompts you track, in the window shown, count every time a business is named in an answer. Your share is your portion of that total.
Two properties worth internalising:
- It is relative. Your rate can hold steady while your share falls, because more businesses are being named.
- It is bounded by your prompt set. A prompt a rival wins that you do not track is not counted at all. Share of voice is a measure of the space you chose to measure.
The two reasons it moves
| What you see | What happened | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Your share fell, your rate fell | You lost citations | Read Changes and Proof for what shifted |
| Your share fell, your rate held | The space grew. More businesses are being named | Usually add prompts, and check whether a new entrant is being recommended |
| Your share rose, your rate held | Others lost ground | Worth understanding before you celebrate. A rival's outage is not your win |
| Your share rose and your rate rose | You gained | Find which page did it in Sources and do it again |
Where your competitor list comes from
- You add them. The businesses you know you sell against.
- The judge finds them. Every answer read records every business named in it, so rivals arrive by themselves.
The second source is where the value is. It is routinely the case that the business being recommended most often in your category is not on anybody's internal list.
An absence is not a zero
If your tracked rivals were not named in a stored answer this window, the lens says exactly that. It does not show zero. They may not come up on the prompts you track, and a prompt they win that you do not track is never counted at all, so a rival at zero may simply be a rival you are measuring in the wrong place.
The most expensive competitive blind spot in this product is a prompt you never added. If a rival is winning questions you are not asking, nothing here can see it. Discovery keeps proposing prompts for exactly this reason.
Using it in a review
- Lead with share, not rate. It is the number that survives the question "but is the category growing?"
- Show the rival trend beside your own. A flat line against a rising rival is a finding. A flat line on its own is not.
- Take one contested prompt into the meeting with the actual answer text. One sentence an engine wrote about your rival, read out loud, does more work than any chart.
Try this in Outercite
Ask the assistant "How do I compare to @" and pick your closest rival. Then descend to the answers naming them and read two.
Related
Competitors
The lens: landscape, rival, and the answers underneath.
Add a competitor
The mechanics.
Recovering lost citations
What to do when the movement is against you.
Last updated on
Intent classification
Every prompt is sorted into one of five intent types before anything is asked, so a buying-intent citation is never averaged with a passing mention in an explainer.
Forecasts and ranges
A forecast is a range, not a number, and its value is the record of what happened last time one was made. How to read it and what not to promise.