Measuring Success: Share of Model (SOM)
Success in the AI era is measured by Share of Model (SOM) — the percentage of time an AI engine cites your brand compared to competitors for a specific category. Unlike traditional rankings, SOM tracks brand sentiment, citation frequency, and the accuracy of the AI’s “grounding” in your official data.
Kylo Interactive provides advanced conversational analytics to audit how AI models perceive your brand, identifying “citation gaps” where your competitors are currently being favored.
3 Pillars of Managing Your “Share of Model”
- Audit Your “Citation Gap”: In traditional search, you look at who is outranking you on page one. In the AI era, you must identify your “Citation Gap”—the specific instances where an AI model provides an answer in your category but fails to credit your brand. Closing this gap requires ensuring your “Power Nodes” (high-authority content) are properly indexed and structured for AI retrieval.
- Monitor “Brand Grounding” Accuracy: AI models don’t just need to mention you; they need to get the facts right. “Grounding” is the process of ensuring AI models use your official, verified data rather than outdated or hallucinated information found elsewhere on the web. Regularly auditing how AI describes your services is the 2026 version of reputation management.
- Optimize for Sentiment and Context: Unlike a static blue link, AI responses often include sentiment and qualitative comparisons. It isn’t enough to be cited; you want to be cited as the preferred or recommended solution. This requires feeding the “Knowledge Graph” with case studies, testimonials, and third-party validations that signal high trust and positive sentiment to the model.
