Share of model is the percentage of times an AI system — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews — names your brand when someone asks a question your business could answer. It works like share of voice did for traditional SEO, except the audience isn’t a search results page. It’s a language model deciding, in real time, which businesses deserve a mention. At Peak Marketing, we track this metric for clients the same way we’ve tracked keyword rankings for the past decade, because it’s quickly becoming just as important.
Here’s the shift that makes this necessary. When someone asks Google “best personal injury lawyer in Boise,” they get ten blue links and decide for themselves. When someone asks ChatGPT the same question, they get three or four names, maybe with a sentence of reasoning, and that’s often the end of the research. The model already did the comparing. If your firm isn’t one of the names, you didn’t lose a ranking spot. You disappeared from the conversation entirely.
Why Share of Model Isn’t Just a Rebrand of SEO
Traditional rankings measure position on a page. Share of model measures inclusion in an answer. Those are different games with different rules.
A page can rank #1 for a keyword and still never get cited by an AI model, because the model isn’t crawling live search results when it answers — it’s drawing on patterns learned from training data, plus whatever it retrieves through search-augmented tools like AI Overviews or Perplexity’s live lookups. A site can also show up in an AI answer with no organic ranking to speak of, if the underlying content is structured in a way models can lift and cite easily.
This means two businesses with identical domain authority and similar keyword rankings can have wildly different share of model. One gets quoted constantly. The other never comes up. The difference usually comes down to a few things:
- How clearly the content states facts, without burying them in narrative or marketing copy
- Whether the content answers a specific question in the first few sentences, rather than building up to it
- Whether other sources — reviews, directories, news coverage, forums — corroborate the same claims about the business
- How recently and consistently the content has been published on the topic
How to Actually Measure It
You can’t check share of model in Google Search Console. It takes a more manual, and frankly more tedious, process right now.
The most direct method is running a batch of realistic prompts through the major AI tools and logging which brands get named. If you’re a dental practice in Boise, you’d ask variations like “who’s a good dentist for kids in Boise” or “which dental office in Boise takes new patients same week” across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overview, then tally mentions across dozens of runs. Some tools now offer this as a paid service, but a spreadsheet and twenty minutes gets you a real baseline.
What you’re looking for isn’t just whether you’re named. It’s the pattern behind who gets named. If three competitors keep showing up and you don’t, pull their content and compare structure, not just topic. Nine times out of ten, the winning pages open with a direct answer instead of an introduction, and they get cited elsewhere on the web in language close to what they publish themselves.
What Actually Moves the Number
Improving share of model isn’t about tricking a model into liking you. It’s about giving it clean, quotable material and enough external confirmation that the model treats your version of the facts as reliable.
Start with the content itself. Answer engines favor pages that state a conclusion in the opening lines, then support it. A page that opens with “Choosing the right roofing contractor depends on several factors” gives a model nothing to quote. A page that opens with “A standing-seam metal roof in Idaho typically runs $9 to $14 per square foot installed” gives it something to lift directly into an answer.
Next, look outside your own site. Models weigh corroboration heavily. A single confident claim on your homepage carries less signal than the same claim showing up on your site, in a local news mention, in a directory listing, and in a handful of reviews that use similar language. This is part of why digital PR and citation-building work, once considered mostly a link-building tactic, has taken on new relevance for AI visibility.
Finally, keep the information current and specific to where you operate. Generic, evergreen claims with no local or temporal grounding are easy for a model to treat as filler. Specific numbers, named neighborhoods, named services, and named credentials give it something concrete to anchor an answer to.
A Simple Way to Think About Priorities
If you’re deciding where to spend time first, work through it in this order:
- Fix the content structure on your highest-intent pages so answers come first, explanation comes second.
- Confirm your core claims — pricing ranges, service areas, credentials — are consistent across your site, Google Business Profile, and major directories.
- Build a handful of legitimate mentions on outside sites that repeat your key facts in similar language.
- Re-test your prompt list every month or two and track whether your mention rate is climbing.
None of this replaces traditional SEO. Rankings still drive the traffic that lets a model find you in the first place. Think of share of model as a second, parallel scoreboard running alongside the one you already know how to read.
Where This Is Headed
Answer engines are only going to handle a larger share of everyday research, from picking a contractor to comparing law firms to finding a dentist that takes a new patient this week. Businesses that show up consistently in those answers get a kind of pre-qualification that a search ranking alone doesn’t provide — the model has effectively vouched for them before the customer ever visits a website.
Getting there takes the same discipline that good SEO always has: clear writing, verifiable facts, and consistency across the web. What’s changed is the audience reading that content first. If you want a hand building a content and citation strategy built around this, Peak Marketing works through exactly this kind of AEO strategy with clients across law, healthcare, and local service industries every day.
