The problem
"Share of voice" is one of the most-claimed and least-defined metrics in marketing. Different tools mean different things:
- Social listening tools mean share of brand mentions on social — a vanity metric, dominated by complaint volume
- SEO tools mean share of SERP appearances — useful but ignores that position 1 is worth ~28× position 10
- PR tools mean share of press mentions — confounded by who pays for distribution
None of these answer the question a CMO actually asks: "What share of consumer attention in this category goes to my brand?"
How Theia measures it
For every keyword in a category:
brand_clicks_k = Σ over URLs owned by brand [ CTR(position_k) ]
Where CTR comes from the position-to-CTR curve for the relevant surface (Google organic, Amazon, AI Overview).
Aggregate across keywords:
SoV_brand = Σ_k ( brand_clicks_k × volume_k ) / Σ_k ( total_clicks_k × volume_k )
This is click-weighted, volume-weighted, and surface-aware. It is the only definition that maps directly to consumer attention.
What we found in production
| Brand | Naive SoV (SERP mentions) | Click-weighted SoV |
|---|---|---|
| Bose (DE headphones) | 18% | 7% |
| Soundcore (DE headphones) | 22% | 31% |
| Canon (UK cameras) | 24% | 19% |
| Sony (UK cameras) | 21% | 26% |
The pattern: legacy brands look bigger on mention counts than on captured clicks. The challenger brands have figured out the click-weighted game and are eating share invisibly to the dashboards that measure mentions.
Three surfaces, three SoV figures
Modern share of voice is multi-surface:
- Google organic SoV — classic, but shrinking as AI Overviews eat clicks above the fold
- Amazon SoV — for any brand that sells through Amazon, often more important than Google
- AI Overview / LLM citation share — the newest surface; the brand that wins this wins the next decade
A complete SoV measurement spans all three. Single-surface SoV is a 2019 metric.
Why this matters
Wrong SoV measurement leads directly to wrong investment decisions:
- Brand thinks it's strong → defunds the channel → loses share
- Brand thinks it's weak → over-invests → wastes budget on saturated terms
- Brand uses mention-based SoV → optimises for vanity, not clicks
Click-weighted SoV refreshed weekly is the input every brand investment decision should be using.
Related concepts
Related terms