Most marketers know where they rank in Google. Far fewer know whether ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews recommend their brand at all. That blind spot usually stays hidden until a customer mentions it.
Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit turns that gap into a repeatable audit. It measures how often AI systems mention a brand, which pages they cite and which topic conversations competitors are winning. The process works for teams of one and scales down for smaller businesses, so you don’t need an agency to get a useful baseline.
Start with the baseline
An AI visibility audit first asks a different question than ranking: not whether you rank, but whether AI systems trust your brand enough to name it. Open the AI Visibility Overview and record your AI Visibility score, mentions and cited pages across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini.
Then compare those numbers with competitors. In Semrush’s Allbirds example, the brand had 4.9K mentions and 1.9K cited pages. That benchmark tells you if you are in the conversation or missing from it.
Follow the six-step audit loop
- Measure baseline mentions, cited pages and platform spread
- Find pages already earning AI citations
- Spot topics and prompts where competitors get mentioned instead
- Analyze brand sentiment and share of voice
- Identify off-site sources shaping AI answers
- Check technical issues that block AI access
For Allbirds, educational and comparison pages earn more AI citations than product or category pages. That is a content strategy signal: double down on formats AI can extract, then compare those pages with your SEO Top Pages. High-traffic organic pages that never appear in AI answers are a clear list of optimization targets.
Find the gaps, not just the wins
Topic Opportunities in Semrush exposes prompts where AI answers exist but your brand is missing. In the Allbirds example, topics such as Running Shoes and Diabetic and Neuropathy Shoes showed competitors being recommended instead. Expand each topic to see the exact prompts and build content that answers those questions directly.
Sentiment matters too. Allbirds was framed favorably in 88% of AI answers and held a 14% share of voice in its competitive set. Track both metrics because AI does not simply rank URLs; it describes options with pros and cons.
Off-site sources also shape the narrative. AI answers frequently cite Reddit, YouTube, Quora, LinkedIn and Medium. The external domains that appear most often across your core topics are the places your brand needs to show up.
Fix the technical layer
Weak internal context, pages with only one incoming internal link and a missing llms.txt will not stop AI crawlers. But they make most pages harder for AI systems to use as sources, so only a handful get cited. Run Site Audit’s AI Search Health check to find these issues and make more pages extractable.
Turn the findings into a sequence. Fix technical issues in week one, improve citation readiness in weeks two to four and set up Prompt Tracking on priority prompts. In months two and three, expand content for the topics where your brand is missing.
AI-generated answers increasingly shape how brands are compared. Running an AI visibility audit now gives you a benchmark and a prioritized fix list before the gap gets wider.
Source: Semrush Blog
