Semrush AI SEO: How to Audit Your AI Search Visibility

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 SEO 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 SEO Toolkit:

What it does:

• Tracks how your brand appears across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity — showing which prompts include you and where you’re missing
• Provides prompt tracking, content audits, and competitor comparisons

What it costs:

• $99/month per domain (no trial)

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, browsed the ecommerce category, and picked Petlibro — a trending startup that sells smart pet feeders and water fountains.

I have zero affiliation with Petlibro. This isn’t sponsored. I just wanted a brand that’s growing fast and has enough search demand to make this example interesting.

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.

And they rank well in traditional SERPs for a bunch of highly relevant category and product keywords.

So they’re a real brand that’s already doing a good job with SEO. And good search engine optimization often correlates with good AI optimization.

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

Now for the fun part.

Back in the Semrush dashboard, look for AI SEO 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.

That’s because ChatGPT 5 without search enabled has a training data cutoff of September 30, 2024.

And as we saw in traditional search, Petlibro has been growing a LOT in the last year.

Fortunately, they’re performing much better in SearchGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity. All three of which use live search to generate their answers. For example, Petlibro’s Share of Voice in Google AI Mode is 27.8%:

This tab gives you a broad overview of your brand’s visibility. The next step will help you get more granular.

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:

• Your top-performing topics
• Opportunities to improve your brand’s visibility
• Popular sources for prompts relevant to your industry
• Where your competitors are being cited that you’re not
• Where you are being cited as a source

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. First, you’ll see your brand’s Share of Voice by platform.

This gives you an overview of where your rivals are winning on each AI platform. But we want to scroll down to Share of Voice and switch to the Average Position view.

You can then toggle each competitor individually to get a better idea of how you perform against key rivals over time.

This view essentially gives you a snapshot of your brand’s visibility for key prompts.

To understand which prompts you are and are not appearing for compared to your rivals, you want to scroll down to the Breakdown by Question section.

You’ll see your position, which is where you show up in the answer snippet compared to your competitors.

You can see which ones your rivals appear for that you don’t by using the filters:

For example, Petlibro isn’t appearing for a few prompts that multiple competitors are mentioned in:

Identify the most relevant queries you want to start appearing for, and do this for each AI tool (using the toggle at the top left).

Note these down somewhere, as these will help frame your AI optimization strategy. Think of this part like the keyword research stage in a traditional SEO campaign.

Step 4. Review Your Brand’s Trust Factors

Next, you want to understand where your brand is doing a good job of appearing trustworthy to both your users and the LLMs themselves.

To do this, head back to the Brand Performance tab and scroll down to Key Business Drivers.

This essentially shows where your brand is strong compared to your competitors in various areas that help convey trust to users.

It might look overwhelming at first.

But basically:

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.

(Look for the trophy icon to see where you’re currently ahead of your competitors.)

For example:

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

When AI tools mention PetSafe, they also sometimes mention the fact it has these features.

This makes the brand more likely to appear in AI search responses when a user is looking for smart pet feeders with features like smart home integrations.

If Petlibro offers this, the brand needs to do a better job of conveying that in their content, or they’re going to struggle to appear in AI responses for relevant prompts.

Meanwhile, PetSafe is being mentioned for this kind of user prompt:

Go through this tab and identify trust factors you want to appear for.

If you spot areas competitors are strong but you’re not being picked up, make sure you:

• Include trust factors and unique selling points on your website homepage
• Add mentions of relevant features to product pages
• Write helpful FAQ questions on product pages and blog posts that cater to these trust factors

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.

This will show you Brand Strength Factors and Areas for Improvement.

This is a great snapshot to see where you’re already doing well. And where you might need to focus new efforts on improving your brand’s perception in AI responses.

Brand strength factors are essentially areas where the AI tools talk positively about your brand.

In Petlibro’s case, these are factors like app connectivity, mechanical jams, and customer support.

The areas for improvement are areas where you might want to:

• Create optimized content to make it clear to customers what you offer
• Optimize your existing product pages to better reflect their strengths
• Improve your products or services to better meet your customers’ needs

That final point is worth emphasizing. Semrush’s AI SEO tools don’t just give you content ideas.

You can use the insights you gain here and the prompts real users are inputting into AI tools to understand where you can improve and expand your products/services.

The future of marketing is truly collaborative across departments. And these kinds of insights can help align both your SEO/content teams and your product and marketing divisions.

This can lead to a better user experience on your site, a better product for your customers, and increased business growth.

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.

Answer these questions with new content or in your existing content.

For example, Petlibro could create a blog post titled “How to Stop Your Cat Shaking Food Out of Its Feeder.”

They could also update their product pages to highlight that their feeders support different portion sizes for morning and evening meals, and add an FAQ section answering common branded questions.

To understand what content you might want to create (and which prompts are actually worth optimizing for), enter the relevant ones into tools like ChatGPT. (Make sure you enable web search.)

The example below returns a lot of scientific papers, so it would likely be a tough one for Petlibro to appear for.

But there is a Reddit thread in there too. Which means a Reddit marketing strategy could be worth exploring to boost visibility for these kinds of prompts.

This next one is a more likely candidate, and we can see PetSafe (a competitor) gets cited as a source. (And Reddit appears again too.)

There is also a product carousel with links further down — none of which are from Petlibro.

So this would definitely be worth digging into to see why PetSafe (and the other products) are being recommended:

• Do the product pages do a better job of conveying trust signals?
• Are they more descriptive?
• Do they have FAQ sections that answer the prompt’s question?

Bottom line:

You need to look closer than simply the prompts themselves to understand why other brands are being recommended ahead of yours.

But once again, if you scroll to the bottom, you’ll find AI-powered insights that can give you a head start.

Turn Your AI SEO Audit Insights Into Action

An AI SEO audit is a vital first step to make your brand AI ready. And Semrush’s AI SEO Toolkit gives you everything you need to get started.

But the audit is just the first step. Use these resources to turn what you learn from the tool into action for your brand:

• AI Search Strategy: The Seen & Trusted Brand Framework
• 5 LLM Visibility Tools to Track Your Brand in AI Search (2025)
• LLM Seeding: A New Strategy to Get Mentioned and Cited by LLMs