Semrush AI Visibility: How to Audit Your AI Search Presence

6 Steps to Get AI to Recommend Your Brand

AI answers are taking over search. More people are turning to Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity for recommendations.

And if your brand isn’t showing up in those AI answers? You’re missing out on a huge (and growing) slice of your market.

That’s why Semrush built the AI Visibility Toolkit. It’s a major unlock for marketers trying to understand how AI is impacting their business.

Today, I’m going to show you how to use it — step by step — with a real example.

TL;DR: Measure Your AI Search Visibility

Here’s what you need to know about Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit:

What it does:

What it costs:

Step 0: Start With a Brand

Before we analyze anything, let’s pick a brand to make this walkthrough concrete.

I went to Exploding Topics and picked Petlibro — a trending startup that sells smart pet feeders and water fountains.

Step 1: Get Your Search Baseline

Before we look at AI, we want to know how Petlibro is doing in traditional search. It’s super valuable context that will help us understand how they’re performing in LLMs.

To understand their current search baseline, head to Semrush’s Domain Overview.

Enter the brand’s domain name and look at the last 18 months. Looking at petlibro.com, they’ve been growing a TON.

They get most of their traffic from the U.S., rank for more than 25,000 keywords, and have a domain Authority Score of 43 with backlinks from 2.8K referring domains.

If your brand has so far neglected SEO, now is the ideal time to tackle that with a solid AI SEO strategy (which this audit will help you form).

Step 2: Check Your AI Visibility

Back in the Semrush dashboard, look for AI in the sidebar.

Enter petlibro.com, and a few minutes later, your Brand Performance dashboard will be ready for review.

On the right side, you can see the Share of Voice versus Sentiment Score.

The most interesting thing I noticed right away is that Petlibro has relatively low Share of Voice (6%) in regular ChatGPT without Search.

Fortunately, they’re performing much better in SearchGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity. For example, Petlibro’s Share of Voice in Google AI Mode is 27.8%:

Step 3. Gauge Visibility at the Prompt Level

You can get prompt-level details by heading to the Visibility Overview tab.

Scroll down and you’ll be able to quickly understand:

Click on any of the topics (or select Prompts) to see exact prompts and the AI response that you appear as part of.

To get more data on the prompts your rivals are appearing for that you’re not, head to the Narrative Drivers tab. This gives you an overview of where your rivals are winning on each AI platform.

Step 4. Review Your Brand’s Trust Factors

Head back to the Brand Performance tab and scroll down to Key Business Drivers.

The numbers illustrate how often key business drivers (i.e., trust factors) appear in answers where your brand is also mentioned. The bigger the number, the better.

For example:

Searchers may value smart home integration when selecting a smart pet feeder.

When AI tools mention PetSafe, they also sometimes mention features like smart home integrations.

Step 5. Audit Brand Sentiment in AI Tools

The next step involves diving deeper into how AI tools (and by proxy your users) perceive your brand.

To do this, we’ll head to the Perception report and scroll to the Key Sentiment Drivers section.

Brand strength factors are essentially areas where the AI tools talk positively about your brand, such as app connectivity.

Step 6. Identify More Content Ideas

Step 6 is to find more ideas for creating new content and optimizing your existing pages. First, head to the Questions tab and scroll down to the Query Topics section.

With the insights from the AI Visibility Toolkit, create a plan to improve your brand’s presence in AI search results.