Share of voice is your visibility across a whole keyword set, weighted by how much each keyword is searched. It shows how much of the available attention in your market you hold, and who holds the rest.
Why average position misleads
An average position treats every keyword as equally important, which none of them are. Ranking third for something searched ten thousand times a month and thirtieth for something searched twice are not comparable achievements, and averaging them produces a number that describes nothing.
Worse, an average can improve while your business gets less visible, if the keywords that improved are the ones nobody searches. Share of voice weights by volume, so the number moves when something that matters moves.
It is competitive, which is the point
Your own metrics tell you whether you are doing better than last month. Share of voice tells you whether you are doing better than the people you are competing with, which is a different and more useful question.
A rising share while your rankings hold steady means competitors are slipping. A falling share while your rankings hold steady means somebody is doing something you are not, and it is worth finding out what before it compounds.
The competitors you did not nominate
Because it is computed from the results we store rather than from a list you supply, every domain appearing in your market shows up, including the ones you have never heard of.
That is regularly the most useful part. The competitor taking your share is often not the business you think of as your rival: it is a directory, a marketplace, or a national player who added a page about your town.
Where this shows up in the tracker
Every term in this glossary is something the product actually measures or acts on. Plans start at £29 a month, with rank tracking, AI visibility, the daily AI readiness scan, security and domain health, Search Console, backlinks and audits on every one of them.
Related terms
Rank tracking
Rank tracking records where your website appears in search results for chosen keywords, checked on a schedule so you can see movement over time. It answers where you are, and it is no longer sufficient on its own to explain what that is worth.
Striking distance
Striking distance keywords are the ones ranking just below where the traffic is, usually positions four to fifteen. They are the cheapest improvements available to most websites, because the hard part is already done.
Mention rate
Mention rate is the share of AI answers, on a set of questions you choose, in which your business is named. Measured over time and across platforms, it is the closest thing AI search has to a ranking.
AI Overview
An AI Overview is the AI-generated answer Google places above the ordinary search results for many queries. It answers the question on the results page, citing a handful of sources, which means a share of searchers never click through to any website at all.