Semrush helps you find gaps in your AI visibility by identifying topics, sources, and narrative themes where competitors get mentioned in AI answers but your brand doesn’t.
The process is similar to SEO competitor analysis. You find where competitors are winning and close the gap.
The Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit (available with Semrush One) helps you do just that.
Here’s how to get started.
1. Find Topics Where Your Brand is Missing with the Competitor Research Report
The Competitor Research report identifies topics and prompts where your competitors appear in AI-generated answers but your brand doesn’t.
Start by launching “Competitor Research” inside Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit.
Enter your site’s URL with up to four competitors. If you’re unsure who to track, Semrush will suggest top rivals based on your domain.
Then, click “Run competitor analysis.”
You’ll see a benchmark overview comparing your brand’s AI visibility against competitors’ across several AI platforms.
This includes:
- AI Visibility: A benchmark score (0–100) that measures how prominently and reliably a brand is featured in relevant AI-generated answers.
- Audience: An estimate of the brand’s total AI reach/exposure based on the volume of all the prompts and topics where the brand is mentioned.
- Mentions: The raw total count of unique prompts where your brand name appears in the text of the AI response.
Use the dropdown at the top to filter by a specific AI platform:
- ChatGPT
- Gemini
- Google AI Overviews
- Google AI Mode
To find specific topic gaps, scroll down to the “Topics & Prompts” section.
You’ll see a list of thematic clusters that you can sort based on each brand’s mentions. You’ll also be able to check the estimated AI Volume for each topic.
Use this metric as a guide to prioritize which topics represent the biggest opportunities.
To explore specific prompts, click any topic in the table.
Use the “Missing” filter for topics where AI platforms mention competitors but not your brand.
Sort the column for one of your competitors from high to low to sort the table by their highest number of mentions.
This will give you the topics where a specific competitor has a high number of mentions, while your brand is missing completely.
Review this list to prioritize the topics most relevant to your business, then expand them to see the specific prompts driving those gaps.
For a more granular view, switch to the “Prompt” view at the top of the table and apply the same “Missing” filter.
Here you’ll find the exact questions and instructions users are giving to AI where competitors appear but your brand doesn’t.
If these prompts are relevant to your business, it means you have an AI visibility gap.
Plan to close the gap by creating and optimizing content specifically for this topic so that AI platforms can cite your domain as a source and mention your brand when prompted.
2. Find the Citation Sources that Influence Your Competitors Mentions
An AI citation gap is when an AI model cites a specific source (like a third-party review site, a news outlet, or a niche blog) in responses that mention a competitor, but not your brand.
For example, consider Monday and Asana as two competing project management softwares.
If ChatGPT recommends Asana but not Monday in an answer that cites a niche tech blog to validate that choice, that blog would be a citation gap forMonday.
Identifying these gaps lets you reverse-engineer the sources of influence behind your competitors’ AI mentions on the prompts that matter most.
Much like link building outreach, you can plan outreach to pitch partnerships and mentions of your brand on these relevant sources of influence.
To find your AI citation gaps, stay in the “Competitor Research” report and click the “Sources” tab.
You’ll see a list of domains referencing you and your competitors.
Apply the “Missing” filter to see which domains cite competitors but haven’t mentioned your brand, and again sort by a competitor’s mentions.
Prioritize sources by looking at three signals:
- The number of prompts they appear in
- Their organic traffic
- The number of URLs cited from that domain
Together, these tell you how influential a source is in your category.
Click any domain to expand it and see the exact pages citing your competitors.
Then group them by type to decide how to act:
- Industry publications and niche blogs: Review the specific pages citing competitors to understand the angle (a roundup, a comparison, a best-of list), then pitch editors for inclusion on those pages.
- Review and comparison sites: Find the specific listing or comparison pages referencing competitors and plan outreach to get your brand added directly to them.
- Community platforms like Reddit and Quora: Contribute directly to the specific threads AI is already pulling from.
3. Spot Narrative and Sentiment Gaps with the Brand Performance Reports
Narrative and sentiment gaps occur when AI models associate competitors with beneficial traits (like reliability, security, or ease of use) more often than your brand.
To find these gaps, use the Brand Performance reports.
To get started, launch the “Brand Performance” report inside the AI Visibility Toolkit.
Enter your domain, select a target location, and choose a target language.
This includes ChatGPT, SearchGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, or Gemini.
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Note: The Brand Performance reports are tied to the specific combination of domain, location, and language you select during setup, and each combination uses one Brand Performance analysis limit. |
Identify Key Business Drivers Influencing Your AI Narrative
The Key Business Drivers heatmap inside the Brand Performance report shows which of these attributes (like pricing, fulfillment speed, or product assortment) AI mentions most often for each brand in your category.
These are the decision-making factors AI models use to differentiate you from competitors. When users ask for recommendations (like “What’s the best project management tool for small businesses?”), LLMs determine which brands “own” specific attributes—pricing, fulfillment speed, features, product assortment, or value.
Notice the trophy icon marking the leader for each driver.
Scan for topics where competitors have the trophy and your brand ranks low. These are your narrative gaps.
Identify Sentiment Gaps by Question
Next, you can dive deeper by analyzing your sentiment gaps by specific questions.
The Narrative Drivers report shows your brand sentiment (positive or neutral) in AI responses to a set of specific prompts and questions.
Scroll down to the “Breakdown by Question” section to see your brand’s position and sentiment score for specific buyer prompts alongside each competitor.
At the top, use the following preset filters to focus on gaps—these two are most relevant for competitive analysis:
- Answers | Non-branded: question-style prompts where you can see you and your competitors’ position of being cited and the overall sentiment
- Citations | Non-branded: sources that AI cites for non-branded queries in your category where your brand isn’t represented.
In the “Answers | Non Branded” view, you’ll see your brand’s position, sentiment score, and how both have changed over time; alongside the same data for every competitor.
You can also filter by position changes, sentiment shifts, and specific competitors to narrow the table further.
For instance, filtering for prompts where Asana doesn’t appear but competitors rank #2-5 reveals questions like:
- What is the best way to manage risk registers in a project tool?
- How do engineering teams manage cross-team initiatives outside issue tracking?
- What are effective ways to manage quarterly planning and resourcing?
These are your competitive gaps.
In the “Citations | Non-branded” view, you can see the average sentiment of each brand across the prompts where a specific domain is cited.
For example, in this first row, Asana has a 92% positive sentiment and Monday has a 67% positive sentiment across AI answers that cite atlassian.com.
For Monday, that would be another citation gap to explore and try to improve its brand sentiment when mentioned on Atlassian’s site.
Note: Unlike the Competitor Research report, which pulls from Semrush’s database of 239M+ prompts, the Brand Performance reports use a different methodology. These generate around 200 synthetic prompts designed to replicate real buyer evaluation conversations, giving you a controlled view of how AI perceives your brand when prospects are actively comparing options.
Improve Your AI Visibility Today with Semrush One
Most brands still have no clear picture of where they stand in AI-generated answers, much less where competitors are pulling ahead.
Measuring AI visibility is still new territory, and most teams are still figuring out where to start.
But don’t overcomplicate it. Treat finding AI visibility gaps as simply an additional layer to your existing competitor analysis.
With Semrush One, you get a clear view of competitors and gaps on both AI Visibility and SEO. Use it to start finding gaps today so you can take action and catch up to the competition.
