An AI visibility audit reveals whether or not your brand is recommended in relevant AI-generated answers about your category.
It answers questions like:
- When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI about our category, does our brand show up?
- What topics is our brand getting recommended on, and where are we missing?
- Is our current website health and content strategy set up to help us succeed in AI search?
This guide shows you how to use Semrush to answer these questions with an AI visibility audit. You’ll measure where the brand appears across AI platforms, which content gets cited, and where topical gaps exist.
Don’t have Semrush yet? Try our free AI visibility checker to get started without a commitment.
What to Include in an AI Visibility Audit
Focus your audit on these six signals:
- Overall Visibility & Share of Voice – How often your brand appears vs. competitors across AI platforms
- Brand Mentions – Frequency your brand name shows up in AI-generated answers
- Website Citations – Which specific pages AI pulls from when forming responses
- Topical & Sentiment Gaps – Topics where competitors are framed more favorably or clearly
- Content Opportunities – Questions AI already answers, but without mentioning your brand
- Technical Readiness – Whether AI crawlers can access and interpret your content
These metrics establish clear benchmarks and point toward high-priority next steps
Step 1: Establish Your Baseline for AI Visibility
Start by measuring how your brand currently appears in AI-generated answers using Visibility Overview in the Semrush AI Visibility toolkit.
This dashboard shows mention counts, cited pages, and distribution across AI platforms (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini).
Take note: Write down your brand’s AI Visibility score, mentions, and cited pages. These high-level metrics can be used to benchmark against competitors to see if AI systems reference your brand name or cite your content as a source more than competitors.
For Allbirds, we see 7.4K mentions and 581 cited pages.
This baseline now can be compared against other competing brands to see if you have a visibility problem worth solving.
Step 2: Identify Your Citation-Worthy Content
Next, check which pages AI systems actually cite when generating answers. Navigate to the “Cited Pages” section in Visibility Overview.
This shows which URLs from the domain are referenced in AI responses and how many prompts from the Semrush database each page currently gets cited for.
Educational and comparison pages earn more citations than product or category pages.
For Allbirds, their homepage is cited most (90 prompts), but specific how-to content (like travel shoe guides, walking vs. running common questions, and shoe care) also get cited often.
Expand a page to see the prompts and whether the brand name is “Mentioned” or “Missed” within those answers that cite the page.
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Cited and mentioned: this is a visibility win
- Cited but not mentioned: this could be an opportunity to update the page and get mentioned for this prompt (as long as other brands are getting mentioned)
Compare AI Cited Pages to SEO Top Pages
You can use the Top Pages report to compare this to the pages that attract the most SEO traffic. Notice in the case of Allbirds, the organic traffic is mostly driven by collection and category pages.
These pages already rank well in traditional search. Now optimize them for AI retrieval—add clear structure, use question-and-answer formats, and concise summaries that AI systems can extract and cite.
Step 3: Find Topics and Prompts Where Your Brand Is Missing
Topic gaps reveal where AI recommends your competitors and omits your brand in a response.
In Visibility Overview, scroll to “Topics & Sources” and select “Topic Opportunities.”
Each topic shows where AI-generated answers exist and attract demand. Expanding a topic reveals the specific prompts producing those answers.
For Allbirds, high-volume topics like “Running Shoes” and “Diabetic and Neuropathy Shoes” show 3 competitors mentioned—but not Allbirds. Each topic can be expanded to reveal the specific prompts generating those answers.
Action: Take note of the missed prompts to identify questions that your existing content doesn’t answer, then create content that addresses those questions clearly and directly.
Step 4. Analyze Brand Sentiment and the AI Narrative
Unlike search results, AI doesn’t rank brands by their URL. It can, however, describe a brand as an option with pros and cons alongside other options.
Use the Brand Performance reports to review sentiment across prompts and see which brands are framed positively, neutrally, or negatively.
In this snapshot, Allbirds is usually framed favorably (88%) and holds the largest share of voice (14%) in AI answers compared to the competition.
You can navigate to the Key Sentiment Drivers table in the Perception Report to review the brand strength factors and areas for improvement—perfect for including in your audit.
The rest of the widgets in the Brand Performance section go deeper into exploring the factors behind a brand’s positive sentiment and areas for improvement in AI answers.
So be sure to explore the rest of those reports, or generate a PDF from this tool in one click.
Step 5. Identify Influential Off-Site Sources Shaping AI Answers
AI-generated answers often cite third-party UGC platforms like Reddit, YouTube, Quora, LinkedIn, and Medium. Back in the Visibility Overview, check “Cited Sources” to see which external domains are most frequently cited across your core topics.
The goal is to assess how much influence these platforms have in your niche. If domains like YouTube and Reddit appear repeatedly, they’re shaping how AI systems explain the category and which brands are referenced.
You can use this data to determine if its worthwhile to invest it growing your brand on YouTube or managing your reputation on Reddit.
Step 6: Check Site-Level Issues That Affect AI Access
Use Site Audit to identify technical problems that make pages harder for AI systems to interpret and cite.
Common issues affecting AI visibility:
- Weak internal context: Links without descriptive anchor text reduce how clearly pages are framed for AI systems
- Structurally isolated pages: Pages with only one incoming internal link are less likely to be referenced consistently
- Missing AI guidance file: No llms.txt doesn’t block access, but removes a clear signal about how AI should interpret site content
These issues don’t prevent AI crawling, but they explain why citations come from a smaller set of clearer pages. Fixing them makes more pages easier for AI systems to use as sources.
How to Deliver Your AI Visibility Audit
Focus on presenting findings that are measurable and actionable.
The most useful audits reveal patterns: where AI consistently includes or excludes a brand, which content types AI relies on, and how similar prompts are handled across the category.
Here are three options for delivery:
- Document Illustrated with Screenshots: Combine key Semrush screenshots with brief comments of what each report shows and what it implies. Quick to generate and easy to share by email.
- Standardized PDFs with Semrush My Reports: Use Semrush’s My Reports templates to consolidate metrics in one branded format. With connecting Google Analytics, this can include widgets for analyzing AI referral traffic. These are ideal for recurring client reports.
- A Video Walkthrough: Pair a written audit with a Loom recording or live presentation to explain how findings connect, highlight priorities, and clarify tradeoffs. Best when alignment is needed before action.
Choose the format based on how much context your recipient needs to decide what to do next.
What to Do After Your AI Visibility Audit
Once you have an audit, you can decide on what to do next. The roadmap for improving AI visibility should be unique for each business and situation, but here’s a suggested starting point.
Immediate (Week 1): Fix Technical Issues That Limit AI Access
Resolve problems affecting whether AI systems can access, interpret, or attribute your content. These fixes have site-wide impact and set the foundation for everything that follows.
Near Term (Weeks 2–4): Improve Citation Readiness
Focus on improving content that’s not already cited. Make existing pages clearer, more complete, and easier for AI systems to reuse. After a month, you can re-run your audit to see how much progress has been made.
Mid Term (Months 2–3): Expand Topic Coverage
Address the topical gaps by building new content in those areas where your brand is missing.
Turn AI Visibility Audit Findings Into Clear Priorities
As AI systems increasingly shape how options are compared and recommended, many brands still lack visibility into why their brand appears in some answers and not others.
With Semrush, AI search patterns become observable signals you can review, prioritize, and revisit over time. Start with Semrush AI Visibility audit before your competitors do and stay ahead in your market.
Banner: Run Your AI Visibility Audit with Semrush
