Share of Model: The New Visibility Metric That Replaces Rankings

Share of Model is the percentage of AI answers in your category that mention or recommend your brand, measured across engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Coined by Jack Smyth and Tom Roach, it is the AI-era successor to share of voice and brand recall, and it captures influence that rankings and clicks no longer see.

Your rankings report says you are winning. Your pipeline says something is off. The gap is the layer your analytics cannot see: what AI engines say about you when a buyer asks. As clicks vanish into AI answers, the question that matters is no longer "where do I rank" but "how often does the model name me." That metric has a name, Share of Model, and it is the scoreboard for winning the traffic collapse.

What is Share of Model?

Share of Model is the proportion of AI answer mentions in your category that go to your brand. Strategist Tom Roach, writing in Marketing Week, defines it as "the number of mentions of a brand by one or multiple LLMs, as a proportion of total mentions of brands in the same category." His collaborator Jack Smyth pioneered the concept and built the first measurement platform in 2023. It is the AI-era analogue of share of search and share of voice, but its unit of measure is what the model says, not what you spend on media.

The cleaner way to think about it, as GrowthOS puts it, is that Share of Model is the AI-era equivalent of brand recall, except the mind doing the recalling belongs to a large language model rather than a human. When a buyer asks an AI assistant "what is the best CRM for a small sales team," the model returns a shortlist. Your Share of Model is how often you are on it. That is now the moment of competition, and it happens before any click, which is the heart of answer engine optimization.

Why do rankings and clicks no longer measure visibility?

Because the click is disappearing. SparkToro found that 68% of Google searches ended without a click in 2026, and Pew found that when an AI summary appears, users click a traditional result in only 8% of visits versus 15% without. A brand can be discussed, compared, and ruled in or out entirely inside an AI answer, often inside Google AI Overviews, while generating no session in Google Analytics. Rankings still exist, but a strong ranking with no AI mention now yields little, and traditional dashboards are blind to the persuasion happening in the answer.

This is the decoupling at the centre of whether AI is eating your traffic: influence has separated from clicks. Share of Model exists to measure that influence directly. Instead of asking how many people visited, it asks how often the models that now mediate discovery actually name you. For a metric you can act on, that is a far better question than impressions or CTR, and it is why measuring zero-click visibility has become essential.

Key Takeaway

Rankings measure where your page sits. Share of Model measures whether the AI names you at all. In a world where two thirds of searches never produce a click, the second number predicts pipeline far better than the first.

How do you measure Share of Model?

You define the questions your buyers actually ask, run them across the engines, and count. The method, as GrowthOS describes it, is to assemble a set of category-relevant prompts spanning discovery, comparison, and evaluation, query each major AI platform, and record which brands are named and how. Share of Model is then the simple ratio: as LLM Pulse illustrates, if models mention brands 100 times across your prompt set and you account for 25 of them, your share is 25%.

Three levels of mention matter, and they are not equal. A plain mention signals awareness. A citation, where the model links to your page, signals authority and can still send a click. A recommendation, where the model actively endorses you for a use case, is the one that shapes a decision. A serious programme tracks all three plus sentiment, because being named as "outdated" or "expensive" is worse than not being named at all. It is also worth separating two related terms: Share of Model and AI share of voice measure presence, while Share of Answer measures whether you own the answer.

Metric	What it measures	The question it answers
Share of Voice	Traditional visibility across media and search	How present is my brand overall?
Share of Model	Your share of brand mentions in AI answers	How often does the AI name me in my category?
Share of Answer	Ownership of the canonical AI answer	How often am I the chosen recommendation?

Sources: Marketing Week, 2024; LSEO, 2026.

Tools now automate this. Ahrefs Brand Radar models over 350 million prompts across six AI platforms; DemandSphere, Profound, Semrush, the Share of Model platform, and Jellyfish all track brand mentions across engines. You can start manually by querying ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini with your ten most important buyer questions and noting where you appear and where a competitor does instead. That hour will tell you more about your AI visibility than a month of rankings.

Want the value of your Share of Model quantified, not just the number?

Get your AI Visibility Value Report

What drives a high Share of Model?

Brand presence across the wider web, more than narrow SEO. Ahrefs analysed 75,000 brands and found that branded web mentions had the strongest correlation with AI Overview visibility, at 0.664, far ahead of backlinks at 0.218. Brands in the top quartile of web mentions received up to ten times more AI Overview mentions than the next quartile, and those in the bottom half were, in Ahrefs' words, "essentially invisible." The signal is unambiguous: how widely and consistently your brand is discussed across the web is the dominant driver of whether AI names you.

That reframes the work. PR, thought leadership, podcast and YouTube presence, reviews on G2 and Capterra, and participation in the communities AI engines cite are no longer "brand" nice-to-haves; they are the levers of AI visibility. It also depends on the structured, answer-first content the models can extract and trust, which is why understanding how LLMs decide what to cite sits underneath any Share of Model programme. You raise your share by being widely mentioned and cleanly citable, not by chasing one keyword.

Why does Share of Model matter for B2B pipeline?

Because the AI shortlist now shapes the buying decision, and being absent from it is expensive. Semrush found that a visit from AI search converts 4.4 times better than an average organic visit, because the AI has already done the comparison work and the buyer arrives further down the funnel. The flip side is the risk: when an assistant recommends a competitor for a category question, you can lose the deal before you even know you were competing. A low Share of Model is a leak that never appears in your analytics.

This is why Share of Model belongs on the executive dashboard, not just the SEO report. It is a leading indicator of whether your brand is being considered at all in AI-mediated buying. For a SaaS team, that maps directly to pipeline and CAC, which is the throughline of AI visibility for B2B SaaS. Measured over time and benchmarked against named competitors, it tells you whether you are gaining or losing the only shelf space that matters in the AI era.

Watch Out

Do not mistake a single high reading for a strong position. AI outputs vary by phrasing, history, and model updates, so Share of Model is a trend to track, not a one-time score. Measure it on a fixed prompt set, on a regular cadence, against the same competitors, or the number is noise.

How do you improve your Share of Model?

You treat it as a managed metric: baseline it, find the gaps, close them, and track the trend.

Set a baseline on a fixed prompt set

Define the buyer questions that matter, run them across the major engines, and record your share of mentions versus competitors. This is your starting line.

Find where you are absent or misframed

Segment by use case and feature. Note the prompts where a competitor is named and you are not, and where the model describes you inaccurately or unfavourably.

Build web-wide brand mentions

Branded mentions are the strongest driver of AI visibility. Invest in PR, thought leadership, video, and presence on the review and community sites AI engines trust.

Publish answer-first, citable content

Give the models clean, structured passages that state your positioning and capabilities clearly, so you are easy to name correctly for the queries you want to win.

Track the trend and tie it to revenue

Re-measure on a regular cadence, benchmark against competitors, and connect movements in Share of Model to pipeline so the metric earns its place on the dashboard.

Run as a system rather than a one-off audit, this compounds, which is the logic behind moving from SEO to AEO. The goal is not a vanity percentage but a defensible position in the answers your buyers trust, measured in a way that connects to revenue.

See what your Share of Model is worth

A percentage is a start. The AI Visibility Value Report measures your Share of Model across the prompts your buyers ask, then puts a number on the prize: the pipeline you are winning, the pipeline competitors are taking, and the value of closing the gap.

Get your AI Visibility Value Report

Frequently asked questions about Share of Model

What is Share of Model?
Share of Model is the proportion of AI answer mentions in your category that go to your brand, measured across engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Coined by Jack Smyth and Tom Roach, it is the AI-era successor to share of voice and brand recall, capturing how often AI systems name you when buyers ask category questions.

How do you measure Share of Model?
Define a set of representative buyer prompts, run them across the major AI engines, and count how often your brand is mentioned as a percentage of all brand mentions. If models name brands 100 times across your prompts and you appear 25 times, your Share of Model is 25%. Track mentions, citations, recommendations, and sentiment.

Is Share of Model the same as share of voice?
It is the AI-native version of it. Traditional share of voice measures presence across media and search; Share of Model measures your share of brand mentions inside AI-generated answers. A related metric, Share of Answer, goes further and measures how often you are the single chosen recommendation, not just present.

Why is Share of Model replacing rankings?
Because rankings no longer predict traffic or influence. With 68% of searches ending in zero clicks and users clicking a result only 8% of the time when an AI summary appears, buyers form opinions inside AI answers that analytics never see. Share of Model measures that hidden influence directly.

What improves your Share of Model?
Mostly web-wide brand mentions. Ahrefs found branded mentions correlate with AI visibility at 0.664, far above backlinks at 0.218, and top-quartile brands get up to ten times more AI mentions. Invest in PR, thought leadership, video, review-site presence, and answer-first content the models can cite.

How is Share of Model different from clicks or impressions?
Clicks and impressions measure interactions with your site; Share of Model measures what AI says about your brand, regardless of whether anyone clicks. In a zero-click world, much of the buying journey happens inside the AI answer, so Share of Model captures influence that traffic-based metrics miss entirely. Quantify yours with the AI Visibility Value Report.