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Share of Search in 2025: How to Measure Visibility in SERPs and LLMs

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by Emily Gertenbach
Last Updated: July 18, 2025

The world of organic search marketing feels topsy-turvy right now. People are searching for information using tools that didn’t exist for consumers just a few years ago—ChatGPT and Perplexity among them. Traditional search engines like Google have even gotten in the game, rolling out AI responses to standard queries.

As you work on adjusting your marketing strategy to meet consumers where and how you’re searching, you need to keep a few key metrics in mind. One of the most important is share of search.

Share of search is the percentage of search queries made for a specific brand compared to all searches for competing companies in the same industry.

For example, if I wanted to find Exploding Topics’ share of search, I’d compare the number of searches for our brand to searches for other trend-spotting tools like Treendly, Trend Watching, and Trend Hunter.

Share of search is different from search volume or brand awareness. This table illustrates how share of search isn’t the same as other digital marketing metrics you may already use:

MetricDefinition
Share of SearchThe percentage of search queries for your brand vs. competitors.
Search VolumeThe total number of searches for a given keyword, which may or may not be branded.
Share of VoiceThe percentage of the market conversation (not just search traffic) held by your brand vs. competitors. This can relate to your brand’s media spend, too.
Brand AwarenessThe measure of how familiar your target audience is with your brand.
Share of Market (Market Share)The total percentage of sales earned by your brand versus competitors in the same market.

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Why Share of Search Metrics Are Important

Share of search is a useful metric for several reasons.

First off, search metrics are easy to find using a tool like Semrush. Even if you can’t pin down every competing brand's market share, you can use share of search to get an idea as to how competitive you are.

Second, if you market your business across different channels, you can track whether share of search goes up in conjunction with other marketing campaigns for which brand visibility metrics may be hard to track—like running real-world bus stop ads.

The increasing popularity of LLM search is leading to a decline in shares of branded keywords and non-branded searches alike. If you’re seeing this trend yourself, know that you aren’t alone: this is happening to a lot of companies.

Traditional methods of calculating share of search focus on standard Google search engine results pages (SERPs)—not chat-style outputs delivered by tools like ChatGPT and Google’s own AI Mode.

A Google AI Mode result says "SEO trends for 2025" and lists several examples with links.

That said, share of search is still important. By itself, it can give you an idea of how well you’re performing in traditional SERPs—even as the AI Overview creates a growing number of zero-click searches.

And if you combine your traditional share of search data with both traditional and AI share of voice data, you can begin to build a clear picture of:

  • How well your brand performs across multiple search channels
  • Whether LLM tools are citing your brand in relevant AI chats
  • What kind of search tools your customers use
  • Overall interest in your brand versus competitors across channels

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Let’s take a closer look at how you can calculate the share of search for your brand across both traditional and AI-powered search.

Tip: While it’s not hard to calculate traditional SERP share of voice manually, I recommend using an SEO tool like Semrush to evaluate your reach across LLM search engines. There are so many different AI platforms and possible search prompts to consider that attempting to find this information manually can amount to a herculean task.

How to measure share of search

The formula for calculating share of search is simple:

  1. Divide the total number of search queries for your brand by the total queries for all brands in your category
  2. Multiply your result by 100 to get a percentage

You can find this information quickly using the Semrush Keyword Overview tool. Simply type in your brand name along with your top competitors, then look at the search volume for each company.

Semrush search volume for Exploding Topics and three competitors.

As you can see in the above screenshot, Exploding Topics has a search volume of 4,400 and the total search volume for all queries is 6,610. I can then plug these values into the share of search formula to find our number.

4400 / 6610 = 0.6656

0.6656 * 100 = 66.56%

In this example, Exploding Topics holds a 66.56% share of search.

If you don’t have access to an SEO tool, you can use Google Trends to get a top-level overview of how your brand compares to others in traditional SERPs.

A Google Trends page comparing Exploding Topics and competitors over five years; results are in a multicolored line graph.

As you can see, Google Trends doesn’t show me quite the same level of search volume data as Semrush, but I’m still able to ascertain that more people have searched for Exploding Topics than for our competitors over the past five years.

(You can also take our free keyword research tool for a spin!)

Tip: If your brand relies heavily on a specific marketing channel, such as YouTube or TikTok, you can estimate your share of search on those platforms, too. You may need to use a dedicated tool or service like TikTok’s own search analytics, but the same formula applies.

How to measure LLM share of search

When it comes to LLM share of search, you’ll want to look at share of voice. This is because people are more likely to type long, even meandering, prompts into an AI—not a few words like they use for a Google search.

This shift in search language, and mode, makes it hard to track share of search across AI tools like we do SERPs. But share of voice can be calculated based on how frequently your brand is cited in LLM search results.

To do this, you’ll need to use a dedicated app like the Semrush AI Toolkit. When you use the toolkit, it analyzes your AI share of voice across major LLM search engines.

A horizontal bar graph displays share of voice for five eyewear brands and other competitors.

How to Improve Share of Search and AI Share of Voice

Even though AI search is growing in popularity, AI search engine traffic isn’t expected to surpass traditional search engines' organic traffic until 2028.

A line graph shows the changing rate of traditional and LLM search between 2025 and 2029

This means that for now, you need to watch your share of search as well as AI share of voice metrics. You can take steps to actively improve both values, too.

Audit Your Competitors

The first step in improving your share of search and AI share of voice is to understand who dominates current results. To find out this information, you should:

  1. Examine your domain using an SEO tool like the Semrush Domain Overview and note any listed SERP competitors.
  2. Run a share of search analysis, following the steps in this guide, using the SERP competitors in your Domain Overview report—along with any others you’re already monitoring.
  3. Use the Semrush AI Toolkit to identify any competitors holding a larger share of voice in AI search.

Create Unique, Original Content

Once you’ve established which competitors hold a larger share of search and AI share of voice than you, it’s time to begin strategically ramping up your content production.

Here’s the process I like to use:

  1. Conduct a keyword gap analysis to figure out what opportunities competitors are missing in traditional and AI search results.
  2. Put these search terms into the Semrush Domain Overview tool to begin compiling a list of seed keywords.
  3. Cluster my list of seed keywords by topic using the Semrush Keyword Strategy Builder tool.
  4. Begin outlining and writing using suggestions from the Semrush SEO Writing Assistant.
  5. Publish this content on a regular cadence to improve overall search ranking and bring up my brand’s total share of search and AI share of voice.

Tip: If you notice that one competitor holds a disproportionately large AI share of voice on a specific LLM platform, you can also run several test chats with that tool to figure out what kinds of terms are bringing up competitor mentions.

Remember to do the following as you write your content to optimize it for both traditional and LLM search:

  • Target specific keywords
  • Create content for natural language searches
  • Provide complete answers for questions
  • Use clear definitions whenever possible
  • Place the most valuable part of each section close to a relevant H2 or H3
  • Pay close attention to search intent for both traditional and LLM searches

Run Digital PR Campaigns

As you build up your library of valuable content, work on getting backlinks and brand mentions around the web. Whether you’re able to get your company mentioned in an industry publication or receive a direct backlink to one of your blog posts, dedicated digital PR efforts help to bring up your content in more LLM search results.

As you grow your backlink profile and get your brand name mentioned in more places online, you can increase the likelihood that you’re picked up and cited in AI search results.

Tip: Not all backlinks are created equal. You can evaluate your backlink profile—and its health—using the Semrush Backlink Analytics tool.

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Future-Proof Your Strategy with Exploding Topics

If you’re serious about improving your traditional share of search and appearing in more LLM search results, you’ll also want to be thinking ahead—what are the next big search trends in your industry? How can you capture the biggest share of search, voice, and market for each?

You don’t have to guess at what your audience is going to be talking about next. I use Exploding Topics to evaluate this very data for myself and my clients, and it’s a useful part of my SEO and AI search marketing efforts.

Conducting research for this purpose is simple with Exploding Topics—I browse the topic database or type in a term of interest, then evaluate:

  • Historical search interest in this topic
  • The popularity forecast
  • Where people are talking about this topic the most

With this information, I know:

  • What topics I need to conduct keyword research for
  • How I can best update a content calendar
  • Where I need to concentrate my marketing activities—be it traditional search, LLM search answers, or on a social media platform

You don't have to take my word for it, though—try Exploding Topics Pro for seven days at no cost and see for yourself exactly how it enhances your share of search work and broader SEO strategy.

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Exploding Topics is owned by Semrush. Our mission is to provide accurate data and expert insights on emerging trends. Unless otherwise noted, this page’s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.

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Written By

Emily Gertenbach

Writer

Emily is a freelance content writer at Exploding Topics. A former news correspondent, she has over 15 years' experience creati... Read more