Share of voice has been a marketing metric for decades, but its meaning has expanded considerably.
Originally, share of voice was primarily an advertising concept. It measured how much a brand was spending or appearing compared with competitors. Today, PR and communications teams use share of voice to understand something broader: how much of the relevant media conversation a brand owns compared with its competitive set.
That makes share of voice, or SOV, a useful way to benchmark visibility, evaluate campaigns, track competitors, and understand how a brand’s position in the media changes over time.
But there’s an important catch. A higher share of voice isn’t automatically a better one.
Modern SOV analysis needs to account for what is being said, where the coverage appears, which topics the brand is associated with, and whether that visibility is positive, neutral, or negative.
What Is Share of Voice?
Share of voice measures a brand’s presence relative to other brands competing for attention within the same market or conversation.
A basic media SOV calculation looks like this:
For example, imagine four pharmaceutical companies receive a combined 2,000 relevant media mentions during a quarter. If one company accounts for 500 of those mentions, its share of voice is 25%.
That percentage provides context that raw media volume cannot.
Five hundred mentions might look impressive on its own. But if the company’s closest competitor received 1,100 mentions during the same period, the competitive picture looks very different.
This relative measurement is what makes SOV valuable.
Where Did Share of Voice Come From?
The roots of share of voice are in advertising.
One of the seminal works in this area is John Philip Jones’ 1990 Harvard Business Review article, Ad Spending: Maintaining Market Share. Jones examined the relationship between advertising intensity and market share, helping establish the foundation for what marketers would come to discuss in terms of Share of Voice, Share of Market, and Excess Share of Voice.
The basic strategic idea was compelling: brands should not evaluate advertising activity in isolation. They should evaluate it relative to their position in the market and the activity of competitors.
Later research added important nuance.
A 2005 study by Sharmila Chatterjee and Arjun Chaudhuri found a statistically significant, moderate positive relationship between advertising share of voice and market share, meaning brands with greater relative advertising presence tended to have greater market share as well.
But their research revealed something more interesting than the relationship alone.
Brand trust mattered.
The researchers found that trust enhanced the positive effect of share of voice on market share. Their explanation was that trusted brands may be more perceptually salient, making their advertising more likely to stand out, be processed, and reinforce brand recall.
That’s an early indication of something communications teams should keep in mind today: not all voice has equal value.
Share of Voice in PR and Media Monitoring
In PR, SOV shifts from primarily measuring advertising expenditure to measuring earned media visibility. With media monitoring, teams can track that visibility across relevant sources and compare their presence against competitors over time.
Instead of asking:
How much of the category’s advertising activity belongs to us?
PR teams can ask:
How much of the relevant media conversation belongs to us?
Depending on the objectives of the analysis, that conversation might include online news, print, broadcast, podcasts, social media, trade publications, or a combination of channels.
This allows communications teams to compare media performance against competitors rather than relying on standalone numbers.
For example, an organization might increase earned media mentions by 20% year over year. That’s encouraging.
But suppose its competitors collectively increased their coverage by 50% during the same period. The organization’s media volume increased while its share of voice actually declined.
SOV exposes that competitive context.
Why Is Share of Voice Important?
For PR and communications teams, SOV can answer several important questions.
It can show whether a brand is gaining or losing visibility against competitors, whether a campaign changed its competitive media position, which companies dominate particular issues, and how media attention shifts following major announcements or events.
That makes it useful for both ongoing reputation measurement and campaign analysis.
Consider a healthcare company launching new clinical trial results. Measuring the number of stories generated by the announcement tells the team how much coverage it earned.
Measuring SOV can tell the team how much attention it captured relative to competing companies discussing the same therapeutic area.
That is a much more meaningful benchmark.
SOV can also be tracked over time. Rather than treating it as a one-off percentage, organizations can examine whether their competitive visibility is increasing, decreasing, or remaining stable across months, quarters, campaigns, and major industry events.
Share of Voice vs. Share of Market
Share of voice and share of market are related concepts, but they measure different things.
Share of voice measures a brand’s relative presence within a defined communications environment. Share of market measures the brand’s portion of sales or another commercial market measure.
The historical advertising literature created a strong connection between these ideas. But communications professionals should be careful not to turn that relationship into a universal rule.
The 2005 Chatterjee and Chaudhuri study, for example, found a positive relationship between advertising SOV and market share, but it also demonstrated that brand trust affected the strength of that relationship.
More recent research is even more explicit about the limitations of treating visibility as a direct proxy for business performance.
A 2025 Journal of Business Research paper by Stephen L. France, Nebojsa S. Davcik, and Brett J. Kazandjian identifies share of voice as one of many indicators organizations can use to evaluate digital brand performance. The authors caution that SOV describes the percentage of online conversation about a brand relative to competitors but, on its own, does not establish current or future market performance or brand value.
That’s an important distinction.
SOV tells you how visible you are. It doesn’t automatically tell you why you’re visible or what that visibility will do to the business.
How to Calculate Share of Voice
At its simplest, calculating SOV requires three steps:
- Define the competitive set and conversation you want to measure.
- Measure your brand’s relevant coverage.
- Divide that coverage by total relevant coverage for all brands in the competitive set.
Suppose an energy company wants to benchmark its earned media visibility against three competitors.
During one quarter:
| Company | Relevant Media Mentions | Share of Voice |
| Brand A | 1,200 | 40% |
| Brand B | 900 | 30% |
| Brand C | 600 | 20% |
| Brand D | 300 | 10% |
| Total | 3,000 | 100% |
Brand A has a 40% SOV.
The calculation is straightforward. The difficult part is making sure the underlying data actually represents the conversation you’re trying to measure.
Different Types of Share of Voice
SOV doesn’t have to be one company-wide number. Breaking it down often produces much more useful intelligence.
- Overall media SOV measures total relevant earned coverage against competitors.
- Topic SOV measures competitive visibility around a specific issue, product category, technology, policy area, or strategic message. A healthcare company, for example, might have a modest overall SOV but lead competitors in coverage related to a particular therapeutic area.
- Geographic SOV compares visibility within specific countries, states, cities, or markets. This can be particularly valuable for utilities, healthcare networks, and organizations with significant regional operations.
- Channel SOV separates performance across online news, broadcast, print, social, trade media, or other channels.
- Spokesperson or executive SOV can measure how frequently an organization’s leaders appear in relevant media conversations compared with executives from competing organizations.
These variations help turn SOV from a reporting number into a diagnostic tool.
Why Raw Share of Voice Can Be Misleading
The biggest mistake with SOV is assuming that every mention has equal value.
Imagine Brand A has 40% SOV and Brand B has 25%.
At first glance, Brand A appears to be winning.
But what if much of Brand A’s coverage resulted from a product recall, regulatory investigation, executive controversy, or service outage?
Brand A still has the largest share of the conversation. It just doesn’t have the conversation it wants.
This is why communications teams should evaluate SOV alongside qualitative measures.
The 2025 digital brand equity research makes a similar distinction. It identifies brand sentiment as an important digital brand measure and describes it as consumers’ overall attitudes, experiences, and perceptions toward a brand. The authors recommend tracking sentiment frequently to determine how campaigns, events, product issues, and broader trends affect brand attitudes.
For PR measurement, the same principle applies to media coverage.
Moving From SOV to Quality of Voice
A more sophisticated analysis asks not only how much coverage a brand received, but what kind of coverage it received.
That can include factors such as:
- Sentiment or tone
- Publication or outlet relevance
- Audience reach
- Article prominence
- Message penetration
- Spokesperson inclusion
- Topic association
- Competitive positioning
Consider two brands with identical 30% shares of voice.
Brand A’s coverage is predominantly positive, appears in influential industry publications, includes company spokespeople, and reinforces strategic messages.
Brand B’s coverage is predominantly negative and driven by an emerging reputational issue.
Their quantitative SOV is identical. Their communications performance clearly isn’t.
This is where human-reviewed media analysis becomes especially valuable. Automated systems can process enormous amounts of coverage quickly, but sentiment and relevance can become complicated at the brand level. An article may discuss several organizations, contain mixed sentiment, or be positive about an industry development while criticizing one company specifically.
Combining technology with human analysis can help distinguish those nuances rather than assigning the tone of an entire article to every brand mentioned within it.
How PR Teams Use Share of Voice
SOV becomes especially valuable when it is tied to a specific communications objective.
For a product launch, teams can compare the media visibility generated by the launch against competing products or announcements. During a crisis, SOV can reveal how much of the wider industry conversation has become focused on the organization and whether that attention is beginning to subside.
For executive visibility, teams can compare how often their leaders appear in relevant coverage against executives at competing organizations. SOV can also support brand awareness campaigns by showing whether sustained communications activity is increasing the brand’s presence within important conversations.
And because the metric is inherently comparative, competitor monitoring is one of its most natural applications. A sudden increase in a competitor’s SOV can prompt teams to investigate what is driving the change, whether new messages are gaining traction, and whether the development requires a response.
Share of Voice vs. Share of Search
Another increasingly important metric is share of search.
Share of search measures the percentage of online searches for a particular brand relative to competing brands.
The 2025 Journal of Business Research study identifies share of search as one of three important constructs for understanding digital brand equity, alongside digital brand awareness and digital brand sentiment. The researchers argue that digital measures can complement traditional brand-equity metrics, which may be slower to reveal emerging changes in brand performance.
SOV and share of search therefore measure different parts of the communications environment.
SOV helps show how much visibility a brand is receiving.
Share of search can help indicate how much active interest the brand is generating relative to competitors.
Looking at both can provide a richer picture than either metric alone.
Common Share of Voice Measurement Mistakes
SOV looks simple mathematically, but methodological choices can dramatically change the result.
- One common mistake is choosing the wrong competitors. Comparing a regional company with several global category leaders may produce a technically correct number that has little strategic value.
- Another is including irrelevant coverage. Ambiguous company names, syndicated duplicates, passing mentions, job listings, stock-market feeds, and unrelated references can inflate the numerator or denominator.
- Teams can also create misleading comparisons by changing search criteria between reporting periods.
- Then there’s sentiment. A sudden spike in SOV during a crisis should not be reported as a straightforward communications success simply because the brand captured more attention.
- Finally, SOV should not be presented as proof of business impact on its own. Contemporary research specifically warns against assuming that individual digital indicators such as share of voice necessarily predict sales or brand value.
How AI Improves Share of Voice Measurement
The challenge with SOV is not the formula. It’s processing enough relevant information to calculate it accurately and understand what is driving the number.
AI-powered media monitoring can analyze large volumes of coverage, identify brand and competitor mentions, assess sentiment, and detect shifts in visibility. Teams can track changes as they happen and quickly identify the topics, announcements, or events behind an increase in SOV.
But automation does not eliminate the need for context. Brand-level sentiment, relevance, and complex coverage can still require human judgment. Combining AI’s scale with human analysis helps ensure the data is interpreted accurately.
How to Make Share of Voice More Actionable
The most useful SOV programs start with the communications question, not the formula.
A corporate communications team might want to know whether its organization is becoming more prominent on sustainability issues. A public affairs team might track SOV around a proposed regulation. A healthcare communications team might compare visibility around a therapeutic category. An executive communications team might measure spokesperson visibility.
Once that objective is clear, teams can establish the appropriate competitive set, sources, topics, geography, timeframe, and qualitative measures.
From there, SOV becomes much more than a pie chart.
It can reveal why a competitor gained visibility, which messages are breaking through, which outlets are driving the conversation, where sentiment is changing, and which emerging issues deserve attention.
That’s the difference between counting coverage and analyzing it.
How Fullintel Helps You Measure Share of Voice
Measuring SOV effectively requires both comprehensive coverage and confidence that the information going into the calculation is relevant.
Fullintel combines AI-powered media monitoring with human expertise to help communications teams measure their visibility against the competitors, topics, markets, and media sources that matter to them.
Rather than stopping at mention counts, teams can use Fullintel to examine competitive media performance alongside sentiment, coverage trends, topics, and other contextual information. Custom dashboards and reporting can then make those insights easier to track and share with stakeholders.
Human analyst validation is particularly important when SOV analysis becomes more nuanced. Filtering irrelevant coverage and interpreting sentiment at the brand level helps ensure that competitive comparisons reflect meaningful coverage rather than simply a larger volume of data.
For organizations operating across multiple markets, business units, or complex stakeholder environments, this combination provides a more reliable foundation for ongoing SOV measurement and competitive benchmarking.
The Future of Share of Voice
SOV has evolved alongside communications measurement. What began as a way to compare advertising activity now sits within a much broader set of signals, including media coverage, search, sentiment, engagement, and awareness.
These digital indicators can provide a more timely view of brand performance, though researchers caution against relying on any single metric as a complete measure.
