Share of voice has been there for decades now. It measures how much space you brand owns in a medium like television or search engine. Share of Model is now quickly replacing it as majority of searches on the web are directed to answer engines resulting in zero click searches. Hence, the focus on which AI model mentions your brand, for what query and how many times.
Share of model is an important parameter now because AI answers are curated. If you are not cited, you are invisible. The output of search engine in the form of blue links are designed to psychologically prompt scrolling further in research mode. Hence share of voice was relevant. With AI models, users get answers up front and only the most curious ones go for deeper research.
Concepts in Share of Model
1. Human AI Awareness gap
The present problem with the share of model is the ‘Human-AI Awareness Gap’. This gap measures the discrepancy between the brand awareness in people vs. brand awareness in AI. For example, A brand like Jeep cars may have 80% human awareness but a 5% Share of Model because its digital footprint is not optimised for AI retrieval. Similarly, a startup may have 2% human awareness but a 40% Share of Model because their site is built with structured data and clear entity signals optimised for AI retrieval.
2. Merciless Zero-Sum Game
Zero click searches are on rise with use of LLM based answer engines. In the old Share of Voice concept, you may appear in top 10 search engine result pages for some keywords, you may not appear in top 10 for some. There would be some fluctuating traffic depending upon your position in SERPs.
In the Share of Model world, the AI synthesises an answer using primary sources. If you are not in that citation circle of AI model, your share of model becomes zero for that user query. It is almost as good as not existing.
3. Strategy and Approach
Normally in Share of Voice strategy, optimising for ranking, increasing the Pay per click (PPC) budget, spending on social media advertisements would be the go to strategy to say on the top of the mind of the users.
However in Share of Model strategy it is important to improve the basics. Clean up. The schema markup, publish original content, provides facts and statistics, build authority and trust are all crucial.
There will be a time in the nearest future when advertisements become a part of the Share of Model. Then, both the concepts of share of voice and share of model will integrate. Conceptually, we will be able to draw parallels between advertisements on the search engine and advertisements within the LLM based answer engines. Now is the time to develop and optimise our digital footprint for visibility on the web.