AI Share of Voice Benchmarks 2026: What Good Looks Like

Across six B2B software categories measured in August 2026, the category leader took a median 31.0% of all brand mentions in AI answers, according to Klarivo's benchmark of 16,134 answers from ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. No leader went above 35.7%. That is the most useful reference point available for AI share of voice today: even dominant brands own about a third of the conversation, and a score that looks low in isolation can be a solid mid-table position.

Share of voice and mention rate are two different benchmarks

Most confusion around "good" scores comes from comparing two different numbers. Share of voice is your share of all brand mentions in a set of answers, so it depends on how many competitors you count. Mention rate is the share of answers in which your brand appears at all, so it can be high for several brands at once. Our guide on how to measure AI share of voice explains both calculations.

The prompt type changes the number as much as the metric does. In MaxAEO's aggregate monitoring across eight engines, the median brand appeared in about 31% of relevant non-branded answers, around 64% of branded answers and around 18% of comparison answers. A benchmark that does not say which prompts it covers cannot be compared with your own score, a point developed in our analysis of branded vs non-branded AI share of voice.

What category leaders actually hold

In the Klarivo data, each category was scored on a fixed set of six brands, which makes the numbers comparable. Leaders held between 25.7% (Asana in project management) and 35.7% (QuickBooks in accounting software). The top two brands together took between 46.1% and 65.2% of mentions, and even the sixth brand in each category held between 1.5% and 7.6%.

In AI answers, a category leader typically holds about a third of brand mentions. A score around 12% is mid-table, not failure, and a single-digit score still means engines know you exist.

Concentration is the variable to check before judging your score. In CRM, Salesforce and HubSpot together took 65.2% of mentions, so a 15% share means a distant third place. In project management, four brands sat within eight points of each other, so the same 15% puts you in the pack contending for first place.

Scores move from one engine to another

The same brand does not score the same everywhere. In Klarivo's sample, the median brand's share moved 4.2 points across the six engines, with a maximum spread of 12.5 points: Hostinger held 39.3% of web hosting mentions in Google AI Overviews but 26.9% in Copilot. In two of the six categories, the leader changed depending on the engine, with HubSpot ahead of Salesforce on three engines and behind on the other three.

A benchmark therefore needs an engine dimension, and so does your own reading. Our comparison of how AI engines rank the same brands differently covers why those gaps appear.

Many brands sit at zero

The benchmarks above only cover brands that engines already name. The wider picture is harsher: in Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands, 26% had no mentions at all in Google AI Overviews, and brands in the bottom half for web mentions averaged between 0 and 3 AI Overview mentions. For a brand starting from zero, the first benchmark to reach is simply appearing on a meaningful share of non-branded prompts.

Domain authority does not predict where you land

All 36 brands in the Klarivo sample had a Domain Rating between 81 and 93, yet their share of voice ranged from 1.5% to 35.7%. Share of voice moved more closely with how often a brand's own domain was cited inside its category's answers (rank correlation of +0.72) than with Domain Rating (+0.47), although the authors note that citations and mentions are not independent. The gap between classic authority metrics and AI visibility is the subject of our analysis of LLM brand visibility vs domain authority.

The benchmark behind the benchmark: how you are described

Klarivo also scored how ChatGPT framed 167 brand mentions. 79.6% assigned the brand to a customer segment ("best for freelancers"), 9.0% recommended it outright and only 1.8% framed it by a limitation. Being mentioned is common among established brands; being the single recommendation is rare. That is why sentiment and framing belong next to the share of voice figure, as covered in our guide to monitoring AI brand sentiment.

How to set your own benchmark

Published benchmarks give orders of magnitude. The benchmark that drives decisions is your own, built on a fixed competitor set, the same prompts and every engine you care about, re-measured on the same basis each month. Fix the list of competitors first, since it defines the denominator of every share, then compare yourself with the leader and with the brand just above you. Our competitive AI share of voice analysis shows how to set that up.

Once the gap is known, the work is the same in every category: technical access, third-party mentions, content that answers the exact prompts and a consistent brand description, in the order laid out in how to improve AI share of voice. Klarivo's own limits are worth keeping in mind when reading any benchmark: its prompts are modelled from Google questions rather than real chatbot conversations, and four categories were dropped because they produced fewer than 900 answers.