Who Led Share of Voice Among AI Code Builders, June to August 2026

Across seven AI code-building tools tracked in Delve (delve.news) from June through August 2026, Cursor held the largest share of voice for the period. Lovable moved the most, and by August it was ahead.

Share of voice here means one thing: of the qualifying coverage about this set, what share named each brand. It is a volume measure. For the definition and the formula, see what share of voice in PR measures. For presence in an article versus how much of the article a brand actually occupies, see share of voice versus share of mentions.

What you need to know — TL;DR

Who led the period?

Cursor, with 30.5% of the set across June through August (173 of 567 tracked items).

Who led at the end?

Lovable, at 48.4% in August. Its share rose from 22.3% in June to 30.5% in July to 48.4% in August, passing Cursor in July and widening the gap after.

How share of voice is calculated?

Seven brands. Each brand gets one point for each article that names it. Many articles name more than one brand, so one story can add a point to several brands. Share of voice is each brand’s points divided by the set total for that window. The 567 figure is that point total for the full period, not 567 separate articles.

Where the coverage came from?

The 567 items sit inside a curated publication list built for top outlets in this space, then tracked in Delve across the seven brands. The ranking is share of coverage inside that list and set, not “all media everywhere.”

Share can rise while a brand’s own count falls?

Lovable’s share rose while its item count fell from 59 in June to 45 in August. A rising percentage is not the same as adding clips.

The ranking

Share of voice by month across the seven tools, then the three-month total. Percentages are each brand’s qualifying items divided by the seven-brand total for that column.

Cursor wins the quarter, but Lovable hitting escape velocity.

Cursor opened June at 36.4% and gave up nearly twelve points by August, settling near a quarter of the set. Lovable passed it in July and widened the gap in August. That gain did not come from one rival: Cursor and Replit both lost share across the summer, Base44 spiked in July then fell below its June level, and Bolt and v0 declined, with v0 recording no items in August. Windsurf recorded none in July and four in August.

Worth noting alongside the percentages: Lovable’s own item count fell from 59 in June to 45 in August. Its share rose because it held coverage better than the rest of the set.

How to read this

A brand can lead the three-month total and be losing the last month. Cursor does that here, and it is the reason to read the monthly cut rather than the average. A summer average hides a shift already underway.

This is presence in published coverage. It sits at the output stage of an evaluation program. It tells you who the press wrote about, not what buyers concluded. How to measure PR ROI in 2026 covers where that line falls. If you want the same math inside a theme, such as trust, pricing, or agents, rather than across all coverage, that is share of voice by custom theme.

Our read: why the ranking moved

The numbers alone show Cursor leading the period and Lovable leading August. Here is how we read the shift.

Cursor’s period lead was an acquisition-weighted summer

On 16 June 2026, SpaceX announced a roughly $60 billion all-stock deal for Cursor’s parent, Anysphere; the deal closed 14 August. That arc produced the heaviest single-company news volume in the set early, which is why Cursor opened June at 36.4%. Mid-summer product news under the SpaceXAI / Grok umbrella (including the July Grok model launch tied to the Cursor orbit) kept the story in market headlines, but much of that coverage framed SpaceX, Anysphere, or the model rather than the tool name. Under this ranking’s rule, parent coverage that does not name the tool does not count for Cursor. So the brand that “won” June on deal volume also had a built-in reason to fade in the monthly cut as the narrative moved up the corporate tree.

Lovable nearly closed the gap without a mega-deal

Lovable’s rise looks like distributed momentum: a large Series C and valuation step-up, a Google Cloud enterprise partnership, recurring placement in vibe-coding roundups and beginner guides, and ARR growth that gave outlets a quantitative hook. No single event matched SpaceX buying Cursor. The pattern still produced the strongest August share in the set (48.4%), and it did so while Lovable’s own item count fell. That is the useful lesson: share can move on relative endurance inside a curated outlet list, not only on the loudest one-day story.

Everyone else had a moment or faded

Replit stayed in the conversation as the enterprise-adjacent comparator whenever Cursor or Lovable was discussed. Base44 spiked in July (acquisition and security/recruiting placement) then dropped in August. Bolt and v0 faded; Windsurf stayed thin after the Cognition deal absorbed much of its independent narrative. A cross-set security and agent-safety thread (shadow IT, vibe-coded apps without controls, production incidents) ran through the summer and applied roughly evenly to the leaders, which is another reason not to read SoV as “who had the best summer.”

How we counted

Delve tracked coverage for seven AI code-building tools from 1 June to 31 August 2026: Cursor, Lovable, Replit, Base44, Bolt, v0, and Windsurf. The set did not change during the period. Coverage was limited to a curated publication list of top outlets for this category, assembled for the project by Delve, so the denominator reflects that barometer rather than the entire open web.

Each article counts once for every tracked brand it names, so a piece covering both Cursor and Lovable counts for each. The 567 figure is therefore a count of brand-article pairs, not unique articles. Share of voice is each brand’s count divided by the set total for that column. That is the standard share-of-voice calculation rather than share of mentions, which would count every time a brand appears inside an article rather than once per article. Outlet mix beyond the curated list, sentiment, and message pull-through are not in this ranking.

The set is fixed for the series so quarter-to-quarter comparison holds. Coverage of a parent company that does not name the tool is not counted. Cognition acquired Windsurf in 2025; it stays in the set because thin named coverage is itself a finding. Later cuts will look at other categories, starting with cybersecurity.