Share of voice, mention rate and citation share
Three different numbers that are often confused for one.
Mention rate
The proportion of runs in which the brand was named at all. It answers “does the engine know we exist in this context”. It has no competitor denominator, so it can rise for everyone at once — which happens when a category gets more AI attention generally.
Share of voice
The brand's share of *all* mentions of the declared competitor set, across the same runs. It is zero-sum by construction: for your share to rise, someone's must fall. This is the number a client's board understands, and the one that is meaningless without a published competitor set.
Citation share
The proportion of cited sources that belong to domains the brand owns. It is the closest thing in the product to a controllable lever — you cannot make an engine mention you, but you can make the sources it reads say more about you.
Owned-citation share is only as correct as the owned-domain set. Getting that set wrong understates it silently. See Quick start, step 2.
Prominence
Where in the answer the mention fell — first named, in the body, in a trailing list. A first-named mention in a three-brand answer is not the same event as a footnote in a list of twelve, and averaging them into one “visibility” figure loses the distinction that matters commercially.
See it against your own client list
A working demo runs your prompts, in your market, on live engines — not a sandbox with seeded data. Bring one client brand and three competitors.