WCS (Word Count Share)
The L2 volume metric — share of words in brand-mentioning sentences.
What is WCS?
Word Count Share (WCS) is the L2 volume metric. It is computed at the sentence level: the words of every sentence containing a brand or product mention, divided by total words — not a character "proximity window".
WCS measures how much of an answer your brand actually occupies, not merely whether it appears.
WCS takes every sentence in a response that contains a brand or product mention, sums those sentences’ word counts, and divides by the total words in the response. The result is the share of the answer that talks about you. It sits at L2 Volume of the SOV pyramid, one step up from the binary L1 mention rate.
The sentence-level definition is deliberate. WCS is not a character "proximity window" around the brand token — a window that would arbitrarily clip or include text by character distance. Counting whole brand-mentioning sentences matches how a reader (and an engine) actually attributes discussion to a brand, and keeps the metric robust across languages and sentence lengths.
WCS complements mention rate and PWC. Mention rate asks whether you appear; WCS asks how much room you take; PWC asks how prominently. A brand can have high presence yet low WCS — named once in passing — which is a precise signal that the next lift should earn deeper, not just broader, coverage.