# Competitors and share of voice

> Share of voice is your slice of every brand the AI engines named. EOMA shows two competitor sets — the ones the engines chose, and the ones you did.

Source: https://eoma.ai/docs/concepts/competitors-and-share-of-voice
Product: EOMA — AI search visibility for brands (https://eoma.ai)
Last updated: 2026-08-14

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## In 10 seconds

- Share of voice is your slice of all the brand mentions across your answers — yours against everyone else's.
- EOMA shows two different competitor sets: the brands the engines named on their own, and the list you keep.
- Your score's ceiling is set by the strongest rival in your market, not by a perfect 100.

## The short version

When someone asks an assistant "what are the best options for X?", the answer
names two or three brands. Share of voice counts how often one of them was you.

The uncomfortable part is who else is in the ring. The engines cite whoever
answered the question well: a directory, a marketplace, a forum thread, a
newspaper, a rival three times your size. For the purpose of that one question,
those are your competitors, whatever your competitive analysis says. Villa
sepeti's ring holds around seventy names; the nineteen it tracks deliberately are
a small part of the picture.

So EOMA keeps both views and lets you switch between them.

**What the AI named** is the open world — every brand the engines mentioned,
whether or not you consider it a competitor. This is the default, and it is the
honest answer to "who is winning this conversation".

**My tracked list** is the set you chose. It is smaller, it is stable, and it is
the right view when you want to answer "am I beating the three companies my board
asks about".

They will disagree, and the disagreement is not a bug. One customer wrote in
unable to reconcile "#3 of 12" on one card with a ring of seventy rivals on
another; both numbers were right, and they were answers to different questions.

## How it works

1. **Every answer is read for the brands it named.** Names are folded together
   first — "Airbnb" and "AirBnB" are one company, not two — so a rival that
   spells itself three ways does not appear as three weak competitors instead of
   one strong one.

2. **Your slice is computed from mention instances, not from answers.** If one
   answer names a rival twice, that is two instances. This is worth knowing
   because it makes the donut's percentage and the headline mention rate two
   different figures describing the same reality on different denominators.

3. **In the open-world view, the chart makes room for the tail.** The top five
   rivals always get a slice, so one dominant leader cannot erase rivals two
   through five. Beyond those five, a rival needs at least 2.5% to appear, and
   the chart shows at most ten. Your own slice is always lifted with a ring and
   stays lifted while you hover elsewhere — you never lose your own anchor.

4. **In the tracked view, none of that filtering applies.** No cap, no threshold.
   A list you chose is already bounded, and a tracked rival with a single mention
   is the finding, not noise worth hiding.

5. **Rivals the engines never named are listed on the back of the card.** A zero
   has no arc — on a donut, a competitor with no mentions looks identical to one
   that was never tracked. Flip the card and they are named explicitly.

6. **The strongest rival sets your ceiling.** The five demand axes of your
   visibility score are each expressed as a fraction of the best rival's score on
   the same instrument, measured on the same questions. That is why the back of
   this card and the donut on the front belong together: one shows your slice, the
   other shows the number that slice is measured against.

## What this means for you

**Expect names you did not plan for.** Directories, marketplaces and publishers
routinely out-cite operating businesses, because they answered the question in a
form the engine could quote. Treating them as "not real competitors" does not
recover the answer.

**A tracked rival at zero mentions is a signal about them, not about your data.**
It usually means the engines do not know them either — occasionally useful, and
worth checking before you assume the tracking is broken.

**Your percentage moves when you filter, and that is arithmetic, not
measurement.** Percentages are computed after any category filter, so switching
a filter changes your own share. Compare like with like.

**Edit your tracked list from the chart, not from Settings.** The "Adjust list"
control sits at the top right of the donut area and is always visible, including
when you have no competitors tracked at all.

**A single strong rival can be the whole ceiling.** In thin markets, one company
above the observation floor sets the number your demand axes are graded against.
Where no rival clears that floor, EOMA says there is no ceiling rather than
inventing one.

## Common misunderstandings

| People assume | Actually |
|---|---|
| "The competitor list is wrong — half of those are not our competitors." | In the open-world view it is not a list of your competitors; it is a list of who the engines named when your buyers' questions were asked. Switch to the tracked view for the list you chose. |
| "Two screens show different competitor counts, so one is broken." | They answer different questions. The tracked card counts your list; the donut counts everyone named. Both numbers can be right at once. |
| "A rival with no slice is not being tracked." | On a donut, zero is invisible. Flip the card — rivals the engines never named are listed there by name. |
| "Getting to 100% share of voice is the goal." | No brand in any market EOMA has measured is close. The measured leaders sit between roughly 10% and 47%. Your target is the ceiling in your market, and that number is on the card. |
| "Adding competitors will improve my score." | Tracking a rival changes what you can see, not what the engines say. The score's ceiling comes from the strongest rival the engines actually named, tracked or not. |

## Related

- [How your visibility is scored](/docs/concepts/how-visibility-is-scored) — how the ceiling turns into your number
- [Share of Voice](/docs/pages/share-of-voice) — the screen where this lives
- [Competitors](/docs/pages/competitors) — the search-side competitor view