Measure Your Brand's Share of Voice in Perplexity and Gemini
Short answer: to measure your brand's share of voice in Perplexity and Gemini, ask a fixed set of buyer questions weekly, count how many brand mentions each answer contains, and divide your mentions by the total. Track mention share, citation share and first-pick share separately for each assistant. Three numbers, one spreadsheet, twenty minutes a week.
The three numbers that matter
1. Mention share. Your mentions ÷ all brand mentions across the answers. This is the headline number.
2. Citation share. Links to your pages ÷ all links the assistant showed. Both Perplexity and Gemini show sources; a citation means the AI read you directly.
3. First-pick share. How often you were the first brand named. Being first in a list is worth more than being fifth, and people act on the first name.
The formula
| Number | Formula | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Mention share | your mentions ÷ total brand mentions | 6 ÷ 30 = 20% |
| Citation share | your cited pages ÷ total cited pages | 2 ÷ 40 = 5% |
| First-pick share | answers where you were first ÷ answers | 1 ÷ 10 = 10% |
Keep the assistants in separate columns. Perplexity leans on its own live index and footnotes heavily; Gemini leans on Google's index and structured data. Averaging them hides the gap you need to fix.
What we see measuring our own sites
- Citation share is usually near zero at first. Even when a brand is mentioned, the link next to it points at a directory or a review page, not the brand's site. The directory gets the citation.
- Share swings by 20 points between runs. That is normal. A 4-week rolling average is what we actually look at.
- Brand questions inflate the number. If your question list includes “is Acme good?”, your share jumps for a reason that brings no new customers. Keep brand questions out of the share calculation.
Step by step in a spreadsheet
- One sheet per assistant. Columns: question, date, brands named (in order), your position, cited links.
- Ask the 10 questions weekly, paste the answers, fill the columns.
- Count mentions with a simple COUNTIF on your brand; count total mentions as the number of names in the list.
- Add a “4-week average” row for each of the three numbers.
- Once a month, list every cited domain you are not on. That list is your next month's work.
How to raise each number
Mention share: get onto the comparison pages and directories the assistants quote. Mentions come from third-party pages far more than from your own site.
Citation share: publish one clear page per buyer question on your own site so a live-search assistant can read and link you directly. Make sure AI crawlers are allowed in your robots.txt — we found one of our own sites was blocking them, which made citation impossible.
First-pick share: this comes last. It follows from being on more trusted pages and having proof (reviews, numbers, case studies) that the AI can repeat.
If you would rather not run the spreadsheet
ListNetworks does this on a schedule and keeps the trend for you — mentions, cited pages and first picks on every run, scored from buyer questions only. It tracks Google's AI with live search today, with more engines on the way. The sample report shows the numbers for an example brand; a free report for yours starts here.
Questions people ask
The share of recommendations that go to you versus everyone else when buyers ask AI for options. If 10 answers name 30 brands in total and you appear 6 times, your share is 20%.
They search the web differently and cite different pages. Measure them separately and never average them into one number.
Ten questions asked weekly gives a usable trend within a month. Fewer than that and one odd answer swings the whole number.
For live-search assistants, yes. If the AI cites your page, it has read you directly — that is stronger than being mentioned from someone else's list.
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