Eight Percent
The Tool I Had to Build Twice
The first time I saw the number, I believed it. The grader said my photography business held about eight percent share of voice in the Tucson market, and eight percent felt plausible, the way a stranger’s confident guess about your own life can feel plausible for a second before you check it against anything.
I checked it against something. The same grader gave a friend’s business eight percent too. And another. The number wasn’t a measurement. It was a default.
This is the story of what I found when I went looking for where that eight percent came from, and what it took to build a tool that would stop handing me numbers like it. I rebuilt the thing twice. The first rebuild lied to me in exactly the way the original had, which turned out to be the most useful thing it could have done. The second one stopped lying, and the price of that was watching most of my scores fall.
The grader that started the journey
The tool I started with came out of HubSpot, demonstrated on a podcast, the kind of free instrument a company builds to show you a problem it would like to sell you the solution to. You gave it a brand and it gave you back a composite score out of a hundred, built from five dimensions: brand recognition, market position, presence, sentiment, and share of voice. It ran across three AI engines and averaged them.
It looked like measurement. It had the furniture of measurement, the weighted dimensions and the provider columns and the tidy final number. What it didn’t have, in the one dimension I went looking inside, was data. The share-of-voice figure was an estimate the language model was asked to produce, a guess at what percentage of the market each competitor held, and when the model couldn’t produce one for the subject brand, the code filled the hole with a literal fallback value. Eight percent. Written into the source as a default for when the real answer was absent.
That is worth sitting with, because it is the whole problem in one line of code. When the tool had nothing, it did not say it had nothing. It said eight percent.
