"Share of voice" used to mean advertising spend relative to competitors, or mentions across media coverage and social platforms. A newer version of the same question is now emerging inside AI chat tools: when a buyer asks an AI assistant to name vendors in your category, how often does your brand come up, and how is it described relative to competitors? For Indian B2B companies with limited marketing budgets competing against better-funded rivals, this is turning into a genuinely levelling metric, because it rewards content quality and specificity more than raw spend.
Marketing leaders are increasingly asked to report on channels beyond the traditional funnel, and "are we visible in AI search" is starting to appear in board and leadership reviews at Indian B2B companies, particularly in categories like fintech, SaaS, and business services where buyers are demonstrably comfortable using AI tools for early research. A marketing leader who cannot answer this question with more than an anecdote is at a disadvantage in that conversation.
Until dedicated tooling matures, the practical method is a structured manual audit:
The levers are the same ones that drive GEO and AEO performance generally: specific, sourced content; named, verifiable expertise; consistent entity information across your site and public profiles; and original data a model cannot get from a competitor's page. What does not move this number, based on early observation across Indian B2B categories, is paid advertising, social media follower counts, or generic "thought leadership" content that restates widely available information without adding anything specific.
Meaningful movement in AI citation and description quality typically takes two to four months of consistent content and structural work to show up, roughly comparable to a traditional SEO timeline, though it can move faster for smaller, more specific B2B categories with few well-optimised competitors than for broad, contested consumer categories.
A caution on over-indexing: AI citation visibility is a leading indicator worth tracking, but for most Indian B2B companies today it should still be a secondary metric behind organic traffic, qualified leads, and pipeline influence, which remain far larger and better-attributed revenue drivers.