In Part 1 of our series, we introduced Share of Voice (SOV) as a critical metric for understanding your brand’s digital market presence. Now, let’s dive deeper into how this powerful metric is calculated and why it provides insights that simpler metrics simply can’t match.

The Science Behind SOV Calculation

Let’s look at how our DX Studio data platform calculates Share of Voice in practice through a systematic five-step process:

1. Data Collection

First, we gather search data for your target keywords by:

• Identifying keywords that define your market
• Collecting SERP data across these keywords
• Capturing both your brand’s and competitors’ positions

Our experience shows that 250-1000 keywords provide the optimal balance for statistical significance, depending on your sector.

2. Position Analysis

We analyze the raw position data to understand:

• Your brand’s placement in search results
• Position changes over time
• Competitor presence for your target keywords
• Position distribution across keyword groups (awareness, consideration, action)

3. Traffic Estimation

To estimate potential traffic value, we combine:

• Search volume data
• Position-based CTR models
• Search features that affect CTR

This transforms position data into visibility and potential traffic estimations.

4. Share Calculation

We calculate market share by combining position and traffic data across all competing brands, expressing your brand’s portion as a percentage of the total market. This gives us your Share of Voice – the percentage of potential search visibility belonging to your brand.

5. Monthly Aggregation and Reporting

Daily data is aggregated and reported monthly using DX Spotlight to provide:

• Stable metrics that smooth daily fluctuations
• Period-over-period comparisons
• Progress tracking against targets and competitors

What makes this metric particularly powerful is its ability to account for both the quality of your positions (through CTR curves) and the quantity of potential traffic (through search volume data). This combination provides a much more accurate picture of market presence than simpler metrics like average position or keyword rankings alone.

SOV in Action: A Real-World Example

Let’s dive into a real-world example that demonstrates how Share of Voice translates into actionable insights. Looking at one of our client performance charts, we can see significant growth in both Position Score and SOV over time:

A detailed analysis of position ownership across keyword categories reveals:

Key insights from the data:

• Increased Top 3 positions across all stages driving SOV growth
• Strong dominance in awareness stage (47.1% of Top 3 positions)
• Weaker presence in action stage despite recent gains
• Concentrated growth in high-CTR top positions
• Only 30% of consideration and 25% of action keywords owned by tracked competitors, revealing unidentified market players

The month-over-month improvements might seem incremental, but they represent significant gains in market visibility when you consider:

• The competitive nature of these positions
• The high search volume associated with these terms
• The compounding effect of improvements across different keyword groups

Short-Term vs. Long-Term Value of SOV

The example above demonstrates the immediate value of SOV in tracking and improving digital performance. While this client is already seeing tangible benefits, the real power of SOV lies in both its short-term insights and long-term predictive capabilities.

As seen in our research and echoed by experts like Les Binet, SOV delivers value across multiple time horizons:

Short-Term Benefits:

1. SEO Focus and Prioritization
   • Forces assessment and pragmatic prioritization of SEO factors
   • Drives focus on the most valuable keywords based on search volume
   • Encourages consideration of click-through rates, not just rankings
2. Competitor Intelligence
   • Reveals competitors you didn’t know you had in search
   • Provides insights into competitive strategies
   • Measures the whole sector, not just a few pre-selected competitors
3. Brand Visibility Insights
   • Spotlights opportunities to improve brand visibility
   • Identifies weaknesses relative to competitors
   • Provides a list of actionable improvements
4. Organizational Capabilities
   • Helps CMOs inform search strategy direction
   • Enables tracking of consumer demand
   • Provides a framework for reporting progress to stakeholders

As Richard Game captures here, these immediate benefits make SOV valuable even before its long-term impact on market share is realised.

In our final instalment, we’ll show how to transform SOV insights into strategic action and reveal how leading brands use this metric to drive sustainable growth.

To learn more about how Cressive DX can help you measure and improve your brand’s Share of Voice, contact our team for a personalised demonstration of our DX Spotlight platform.

The post The Science Behind Share of Voice: How It’s Measured and Why It Matters appeared first on Cressive DX.

Ah, the joy. The moment when you pull up your monthly performance dashboard and see those trend lines heading in the right direction. A rare point of agreement for both client and consultant. That steady climb in Search Performance KPIs isn’t just a validation of the underlying strategy; it’s a clear signal that your brand is gaining ground in the digital battlefield.

But what exactly are we looking at here, and why does it matter so much for a digital Brand?

Understanding Search Performance: The Digital Battleground

In a digital-first world, your brand’s search performance is arguably its most critical competitive advantage. Think about it – when was the last time you, or anyone you know, made a significant purchase decision without consulting Google? Search performance represents your brand’s ability to be present and prominent when potential customers are looking for solutions you provide.

But what exactly constitutes search performance? At its core, it’s your brand’s visibility and ranking in search engines compared to your competitors across the keywords that matter in your market. It’s not just about ranking well for a few terms – it’s about dominating the digital conversation in your industry.

Ranking position equates to being found, being ‘in the game’, to be seen by prospective customers at the top of the search funnel.

Share of Voice vs Position Score: The Two Pillars of Search Performance

At Cressive DX, we summarize search performance through two high-level KPIs: Position Score and Share of Voice (SOV). While both are important, they serve different purposes and provide different insights.

Position Score is the simpler of the two metrics. It provides a straightforward summary of your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) positions across all your target keywords.

For instance – from the below chart (which our tech team calls the “position tube map”) Cressive ranks No. 1 for the keyword Digital Brand Governance in March 2025.

Each keyword has similar daily position data that we collect, which when averaged out over all keywords and a period of time leads to Position Score. Think of it as your brand’s average ranking report card. It’s useful because:

• It gives you a quick snapshot of your overall ranking health
• It’s easy to understand and communicate to stakeholders
• It helps track basic SEO progress over time

But Share of Voice? That’s where things get really interesting.

Share of Voice goes beyond simple rankings to tell a more powerful story. While Position Score tells you where you rank, SOV reveals how much of the market you actually own by measuring your brand’s share of the digital conversation. It’s a sophisticated metric that analyses your visibility across search results, weighted by search volume and click-through rates. It takes into account:

• The actual search volume for each keyword
• The click-through rates at different positions
• Your competitors’ presence and rankings
• Both organic and paid search results
• The relative importance of different keywords in your market

This complexity makes SOV a more accurate representation of your brand’s true digital market presence and potential impact, relative to your competition. As referenced in multiple contributors on shareofvoice.com, SOV has historically been one of the most reliable predictors of market share growth, and in the digital age, this relationship has become even more pronounced.

Furthermore, as we cover here, a focus on Share of Voice/ Share of Search delivers value to the business in the short term.

The Market Dimensions of Share of Voice

Understanding Share of Voice requires thinking about your digital market in three key dimensions:

• the search terms people use when engaging with your market i.e. keywords
• the platforms where these conversations happen
• and the geographic location of your audience.

Let’s break this down.

The Keyword Dimension: Defining Your Market Space

Your market isn’t just about what you sell – it’s about the entire conversation surrounding your industry. Think of keywords as the language your potential customers use when they’re in your market space. This language can be understood through two complementary lenses:

First, looking at user intent:

• Problem Space Keywords: Terms people use when trying to understand or solve a problem (e.g., “how to gain muscle mass”)
• Solution Space Keywords: Terms related to specific solutions or product categories (e.g., “whey protein powder”)

Second, considering the buyer’s journey:

• Awareness Stage: Broad industry terms and educational queries (e.g., “what causes hair loss”)
• Consideration Stage: Comparison and evaluation terms (e.g., “minoxidil vs finasteride”)
• Conversion Stage: Purchase-intent keywords (e.g., “buy hair loss treatment online”)

Importantly, your market definition specifically excludes brand-specific terms (like your company name or product names). Why? Because brand searches don’t represent market share – they represent brand awareness. To truly understand your competitive position, you need to focus on non-branded searches where you’re competing for new customers. This becomes even more critical in the era of Google’s AI Overviews which are changing search behaviour, especially at the top of the funnel.

The Platform Dimension: Where the Conversations Happen

While Google remains the dominant player in search, the digital landscape has evolved significantly, especially post-2020. Here’s how the platform dimension breaks down:

• Google Organic and Paid: Still accounts for the majority of website traffic and remains the primary battlefield for digital visibility
• Social Media: Brands generally have a strong presence across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn in order to expand their audience and build engagement
• Community-based Platforms: These include the likes of Quora and Reddit
• eCommerce: Organic and Paid positions in Amazon are critical for consumer products

As discussed in our Top 5 DM issues for 2025 article, we know the customer journey is becoming more non-linear and ‘across channel’ so data capture of these platforms and attribution to each of them is key to understanding the complete picture.

The Location Dimension

Geographic location of the searcher is also an important dimension as search results are localised and are becoming more so. This dimension is more important to search engine platforms rather than social media and community-based platforms.

In our next article (Part 2 of the series), we’ll dive deeper into how Share of Voice is calculated and analyse a real-world example that demonstrates its impact on digital performance. We’ll explore the science behind the metric and reveal how leading brands are using it to drive measurable growth.

To learn more about how Cressive DX can help you measure and improve your brand’s Share of Voice, contact our team for a personalised demonstration of our DX Spotlight platform.

The post Understanding Share of Voice: The Digital Brand’s North Star Metric appeared first on Cressive DX.

Google’s AI Overviews (AIO)—the generative summaries sometimes appearing at the top of search results—are creating new opportunities and challenges for SEO. They provide quick, synthesised answers, often citing multiple organic pages. For marketers, AIOs can potentially reduce clicks on traditional organic links while also spotlighting the websites Google trusts most.

As we cover in our analysis of the top issues facing digital marketing in 2025, we believe AIOs will cause substantial disruption to search marketing in the months and years to come.

To understand how AIOs work “in the wild,” our team analysed 4,000 search queries (2,000 each from the US and the UK). These queries covered awareness, consideration, and conversion keywords as well as question vs. non-question formats and short-tail, medium-tail, and long-tail variants. The analysis was carried out on 23rd January 2025.

Below, we share our 10 biggest takeaways.

Note: For those who want to dive into statistical significance tests (e.g., Kruskal-Wallis, Z-statistics, McNemar’s test), check out the Detailed Methodology & Stats at the end.

1. AIOs Appear for Almost Half of Searches

Across the full range of search terms, 47% triggered an AI Overview while 53% did not. In other words, you’ve got nearly a 50-50 chance of seeing an AI Overview for a given query.

As Google refines its generative approach, this rate may well increase—making it crucial to understand how (and why) AIOs surface.

2. Minimal Geographic Differences: US vs. UK

Breaking down the same dataset by location, we see a 46.63% incidence for the UK and 47.76% for the US. Given how closely these figures align, it appears that Google’s AIO rollout is similarly advanced in both markets.

If you’re ranking for queries in either region, anticipate a comparable chance of generating an AI Overview.

3. Question-Based Queries Are Far More Likely to Yield AIOs

One of the standout findings involves query intent:

Question-format keywords: ~85% show an AIO

Non-question keywords: ~43% show an AIO

If your audience tends to type “How do I…?” or “What is…?”, these types of queries are extremely likely to trigger an AIO.

4. Funnel Stage Influences AIO Appearance

We classified each query as awareness, consideration, or conversion. Here’s how often each stage displayed an AI Overview:

• Awareness: ~56% AIO incidence
• Consideration: ~23%
• Conversion: ~42%

5. Long-Tail Keywords Trigger AIOs Most Frequently

Next, we grouped queries into short-tail, medium-tail, and long-tail:

• Long-tail: ~65% include an AIO
• Medium-tail: ~49%
• Short-tail: ~34%

Specific, more detailed queries tend to invite more thorough AI Overviews—likely because Google sees a stronger need to synthesize multiple sources for these narrower topics.

6. The Nuanced Story of AIO Length

We also looked at the word count of AI Overviews based on funnel stage, keyword length, and whether it was a question or not.

Although these differences are statistically significant, the real-world impact may be relatively small. For example, consideration queries produce slightly longer overviews, but this could also be due to the complexity of the topic rather than the funnel stage itself.

In other words, AIO length is not driven exclusively by these factors—they’re just part of the picture. Content complexity and Google’s available data likely play a bigger role in shaping final word counts.

7. Nearly All AIOs Cite the Top 10 Organic Results

If you’re wondering whether organic rankings still matter when an AI is rewriting the SERP, the answer is a resounding yes. We found:

• 97.3% of AIOs cited at least one result from the top 10 organic listings.
• Only 2.7% didn’t cite any top 10 result.

8. The Two-Tier Citation Pattern: Positions 1–7 vs. 8–10

Digging deeper, we discovered a sharp divide in citation rates:

• Positions 1–7: ~83–85% citation rate
• Positions 8–10: ~56% citation rate

Our statistical tests show no meaningful difference between the top 3 positions and positions 4-7.

However, there’s a highly significant drop from positions 1–7 to positions 8–10. If you want to influence the AI Overview, aim to be within the top 7. After that point, citation rates plummet.

9. Number of Citations: More About Availability than Keyword Type

We also measured how many sources are typically cited in an AIO.

While the averages for awareness, consideration, conversion, and different keyword lengths varied (e.g., ~5–6 citations), the data suggests these slight differences don’t strongly correlate with the funnel stage or keyword type.

Instead, the number of citations appears to be driven by how much topically relevant content Google deems credible and already ranks highly. In other words, Google’s AI pulls from however many high-ranking pages it believes best serve the user query—so the richer the existing pool of quality and relevant content, the more citations you’ll see.

10 . Why Top Organic Results Are the Bedrock of AIO

One of our most compelling discoveries is also the most logical: AI Overviews essentially stand on the shoulders of Google’s ranking algorithms. Consider the following:

1. World-Class Relevance: Google has spent decades perfecting how to rank content. It’s far more efficient for them to build AI Overviews using the top-ranked pages than to re-invent the relevance engine from scratch.
2. Consistency vs. Contradiction: The AI Overview typically aligns with the consensus of top results. If an AIO were to contradict the highest-ranked sources, it would raise questions about whether the AI is incorrect or Google’s rankings are flawed. Either scenario undermines user trust.

For brands, this means SEO fundamentals still matter—perhaps more than ever. If you can get into (and stay in) the top 7 organic positions, you stand a much higher chance of:

• Being front and centre when an AI Overview appears.
• Shaping the narrative around a topic

Conclusions & Next Steps

The bottom line is that AI Overviews rely on the top organic results for both content and credibility. While AIOs may feel like a shortcut for users, relevance and authority remain rooted in Google’s ranking algorithms. With nearly half of all queries we examined triggering an AIO, your best strategy is to:

• Continue optimizing for Page 1, especially the top 7 positions.
• Craft comprehensive, relevant content that serves user intent (particularly for question-based queries)
• Monitor funnel-stage performance and adapt content strategy for awareness vs. consideration vs. conversion.

Generative AI may shift how users consume information on the SERP, but it doesn’t replace the fundamental importance of ranking highly for competitive keywords.

Detailed Methodology & Stats

1. Data Collection & Sample
   • 4,000 queries total: 2,000 each in the US and UK. Selected as indicative of client behaviour modelled over buying funnel.
   • Queries were classified by funnel stage, keyword length, and question vs. non-question.
2. AIO Incidence & Word Count
   • We recorded whether an AIO appeared and measured its word count if it did.
   • Sub-analyses split results by region, funnel stage, question format, and keyword length.
3. Citations
   • For each AIO, we noted whether it cited organic positions 1–10, and how many total sources it included.
4. Statistical Tests
   • We employed Kruskal-Wallis for comparing median word counts across multiple groups.
   • We used Z-statistics and McNemar’s tests to compare proportions (e.g., top 3 vs. positions 4–7, 1–7 vs. 8–10).
   • Significant differences suggest we can be confident the patterns (e.g., citation rates) are not due to random chance.

The post 10 Essential Insights From Our Google AI Overviews Study appeared first on Cressive DX.