The new reality of search visibility is more complex than ranking in Google. Brands are now being discovered through AI chatbot responses.
If your business is showing up in those answers, you stand to have an even greater influence.
In this guide, I’ll unpack what AI visibility is, how it differs from SEO, and exactly how to measure and boost it.
What Is AI Visibility?
AI visibility is how often your brand is mentioned, cited, or recommended in AI-generated responses—from LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, to features like Google’s AI Overviews.
For example, when I asked Claude about the best project management tools for remote companies, the response included tools like Asana, Monday, Notion, and ClickUp.
That tells me that Clause recognizes those brands and sees them as relevant.
Why Is AI Visibility Important?
AI visibility is important because it lets people discover and learn about your brand.
With 71.5% of U.S. consumers using AI tools for at least some searches, showing up in those tools means you appear during more key moments.
Visibility in AI answers can also drive qualified traffic.
Our recent research shows that AI search visitors convert 4.4x better than traditional organic search visitors. Likely because they arrive more informed.
And that value is only expected to grow.
By 2027, LLM channels are projected to drive as much business value as traditional search. And surpass it soon after.
How Does AI Visibility Optimization Differ from Traditional SEO?
AI visibility optimization (also called generative engine optimization and AI optimization) is more complex than traditional SEO, but some traditional search ranking factors still matter.
For example, ChatGPT can use Bing’s index.
And Google’s AI features are connected to Google’s search results. Our study shows that AI Overviews often include links from the top 10 organic results, with the #1 result appearing in 46% of desktop and 34% of mobile cases.
That said, traditional SEO ranking factors don’t always apply.
A recent study from Kevin Indig found that “the top 10% of most cited pages across [AI platforms] have much less traffic, rank for fewer keywords and get fewer total backlinks” than typical SEO winners.
Let’s explore what actually affects AI visibility in detail.
What Influences AI Visibility?
While researchers and marketers are just beginning to understand what drives appearances in AI responses, studies and anecdotal evidence suggest several ranking factors worth considering.
Here’s the list we put together with Emilia Möller for our recent AI-led search webinar:
- Brand mentions:Brand mentions across the web impact how often AI tools mention and recommend your company. A recent study from Seer Interactive shows that brand search volume had the second strongest correlation with AI mentions.
- Content quality and originality:Content that shows real experience and expertise is far more likely to be cited. AI tools prioritize sources they perceive as trustworthy and authoritative.
- Citations, quotes, and statistics:Adding well-sourced quotes, stats, or citations individually can boost visibility in AI results, sometimes by up to 40%
- Structured data:Using schema can help AI tools cite content accurately. It gives LLMs more context to pull from. For example, Microsoft confirmed using schema markup to help its LLMs better understand content.
- Content freshness: Recent content updates tend to get prioritized, especially for time-sensitive or trending queries. This is especially true for LLMs using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)—like GPT-4 and Claude—that can pull in the most up-to-date information at query time.
How to Measure Your AI Visibility
Before you can improve your AI visibility, you need to know where you stand.
Here’s how to evaluate it.
Tip: Download Emilia’s AI Visibility Playbook for in-depth information about measuring your AI visibility, what you can do to improve it, and more.
Conduct a Manual AI Visibility Analysis
Start with a quick test Emilia shared during our webinar—a simple way to check your brand’s presence by directly prompting AI platforms.
It doesn’t take long and gives you a quick pulse on how visible (or invisible) your brand is across AI platforms.
Here’s how to run it:
- Launch ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity (you could include more if you wish)
- Type in questions your target audience would realistically ask. For instance, “What are the best tools for keyword clustering in 2025?” Or “Top SEO platforms for startups.”
- Look at the answers closely and ask:
- Are we mentioned by name?
- Are we directly linked or cited?
- Are the references to us positive, neutral, or negative?
For example, the Semrush AI Toolkit came up first when I asked ChatGPT, “What are the best AI SEO tools for SMBs?”
You can run this test monthly to see whether there’s a positive or negative trend.
Use Semrush’s AI Toolkit
To see the full impact of your AI visibility without the manual work, track it dynamically across multiple platforms with Semrush’s AI Toolkit.
Once you enter your brand and your top competitors, the tool then generates key insights:
- AI visibility: Understand how AI search engines mention your brand and your competitors
- Brand sentiment: See how AI tools frame your brand in AI-generated answers
- Strategic recommendations: Get tips on how to become more visible in AI search and improve your overall business strategy
How to Enhance Your AI Visibility
Now, let’s explore the key strategies for making your brand more visible in AI conversations.
1. Grow Your Authority
As we’ve seen, brands with stronger authority tend to appear more often in AI-generated answers.
The more people recognize and search for your brand, the more likely it is to surface across AI platforms.
To build this authority:
- Get brand mentions from authoritative sources: Pitch your brand story, data, or insights to trusted publications in your niche and high-authority sites. For example, ChatGPT pulls nearly 48% of citations from Wikipedia, according to another study.
- Be active on Reddit: Reddit is the top citation source for Perplexity (46.7%) and Google AI Overviews (21%), according to research from Profound. That means answering questions and participating in discussions on Reddit can drive more visibility.
- Empower your internal subject matter experts (SMEs): Encourage SMEs to post on LinkedIn, speak at events, contribute to industry publications, and participate in podcast interviews to grow your presence both online and offline. Make it easier by supporting them with content writing, visual design, and outreach for speaking or publishing opportunities.
- Repurpose content across channels: Transform your best insights into multiple formats (e.g., turn research reports into blog series, videos, infographics, and social posts). It allows you to create more content without much additional work and can vastly extend your reach.
2. Identify High-Intent User Queries
Our research on how people interact with ChatGPT shows that 70% of ChatGPT queries don’t match traditional search patterns.
This is likely because queries in AI platforms are more complex than those in traditional search engines, highlighting the need for new search intent categories.
To get a sense of the intent behind the queries your audience enters into AI platforms, open the “Audience & Content” report in the AI Toolkit and scroll down to Query Topics.
You’ll see specific questions users ask AI about your product, industry, and niche.
Then, create content that directly answers your audience’s questions with clarity and depth. That can include help center articles, product guides, landing pages, etc.
For example, Clay frequently publishes product-led blog content that walks through highly specific workflows.
Like the article below on using Clay with Google Slides to auto-generate personalized sales decks.
3. Create Original Content
Publishing high-quality, credible content is key to increasing your AI visibility.
AI tools tend to surface content that is authoritative, insightful, and uniquely valuable. Plus, original content can earn you brand mentions and boost your overall authority.
Here are some of the tactics you can use to produce such content:
- Encourage your SMEs to share bold takes or contrarian opinions backed by clear reasoning, real-world examples, and/or internal results
- Turn internal experiments (even failed ones) into case studies if they offer insight others can learn from
- Aggregate and synthesize information to add fresh interpretations instead of just summarizing existing content
- Run original studies using whatever data you have access to—customer feedback, survey responses, market trends—to answer debated questions in your industry
For example, we recently published a study analyzing 20,000 URLs to answer a timely question: Can AI content rank on Google?
And it appeared as the first result, even above Google, when I searched “can AI content rank on Google?” using Perplexity.
4. Structure Your Content for AI Discoverability
LLMs don’t read like humans—they scan for clear answers and pull information from well-structured content.
To optimize your content structure for AI discoverability:
- Create question-based headers that mirror real user prompts (e.g., “How can I improve Core Web Vitals?”)
- Answer each question clearly in the first sentence,then expand with supporting details
- Implement schema markup (FAQPage, HowTo, Product) to signal content structure
- Include trust signals when they strengthen your point,like statistics, expert quotes, and relevant named entities (brands, tools, organizations, etc.)
This can all potentially improve AI visibility.
For example, Semrush’s guide to the Core Web Vitals was featured by Perplexity when I searched “How can I improve Core Web Vitals?”
The article uses question-based headers that match common user prompts and opens each section with a clear, direct answer—two key structuring tactics we mentioned above.
Track and Improve Your AI Visibility Over Time
Measuring your brand’s presence in AI responses is getting as essential as tracking search rankings.
It might not show up as a spike in your website traffic. But it can absolutely put your brand in front of the right audience.
That’s why you should treat AI visibility like any other key metric you track.
Get started with the AI Toolkit.
