Share of voice in AI answers
Your mentions as a proportion of all company mentions across a prompt set. The competitive version of citation rate.
Checkable · the test is below
What it means
Citation rate tells you how often you appear. Share of voice tells you how much of the available naming you took, against everyone else being named. You can hold a steady citation rate while your share falls because a competitor got busy.
Why it matters for an HVAC company
In a local trade the total number of names an engine will hand out is small, often two or three. Share of voice is closer to the real commercial question, which is what fraction of recommendations in your town are yours.
What would settle it
Count every company name returned across the whole prompt set. Yours divided by the total. Report the competitor breakdown alongside, because the shape of the rest is the finding.
A worked example
Across 600 runs, 1,740 company names are returned. Yours appears 144 times, a 8.3% share. One competitor holds 19%. Three months later your citation rate is unchanged at 24% but your share has fallen to 7.1%, because two new firms started appearing.