Clients are asking questions agencies couldn’t answer a year ago: Are we showing up in ChatGPT? Did AI Overviews kill our traffic? Are your marketing strategies still working?
How do you keep delivering results and prove your impact when the landscape changes weekly?
As an agency, it’s a big challenge. How do you keep delivering results and prove your impact when the landscape changes weekly?
Below, four agencies share how they’re using Semrush to track AI visibility, prove ROI to clients, and turn AI search into a real growth channel.
The agencies doing this well aren’t building a separate AI practice. They’re extending what they already know about SEO into a new layer of search.
Earned Media Australia: Putting together the “AI Funnel” from Visibility to Leads
- Agency: Earned Media Australia
- Clients include: Global SaaS, universities, health supplements, ecommerce sellers
- Focus: Evolution of reporting and revealing the AI funnel
- Tools used: Position Tracking, Organic Rankings, My Reports
The absolute best thing that really helps my clients out of Semrush right now, is our ability to use the Position Tracking tool to get an understanding of AI overview percentage across queries, and then percentage of times that the client actually appears in those AI overviews.
Educating and Reporting the AI Funnel
Earned Media Australia reports on the full AI funnel, from high-level visibility metrics to AI referral traffic and conversions, using Semrush’s Position Tracking and My Reports.
David maintains client communication with a monthly AI digest covering recent industry news and changes. This keeps his clients informed and builds trust in the agency.
To track the AI funnel with Semrush, the team breaks it down into three levels:
Top of the Funnel
Showing high-level metrics like AI Visibility, Mentions and Citations prove the brand is in the general “consideration set” and has the ability to get cited and recommended by AI.
Visual Proof to Paint the Picture
Tracking a targeted set of prompts for each client, and showing screenshots of LLM responses where the brand is recommended right in the response.
This connects the dots for the client. Instead of seeing AI visibility as an abstract metric, they see their brand recommended in a real AI response.
Bottom of the Funnel
To tie it all together they use AI Referral Traffic data to show actual clicks and conversions from platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
With Semrush’s My Reports tool, it’s as easy as connecting Google Analytics and dragging the right widget into the PDF builder.
Call it the “AI Funnel.” You’re visible in AI, and now you’re getting the clicks.
Further reading: Create an SEO + AI Search Marketing Report
Sure Oak: Gaining Agency Leads Through AI Visibility
- Agency: Sure Oak
- Clients include: SaaS, financial services, B2B technology, education
- Focus: Building agency authority to sell AI services.
- Tools used: Organic Rankings, AI Visibility Toolkit, Looker Studio (for custom reporting)
Sure Oak became their own proof of concept by boosting their appearance in AI Overviews (+286%) and ChatGPT referral visits (41%). After this, 40% of all new leads for the agency come from their AI visibility.
Throughout 2025, as they appeared in more AI-powered searches, the leads started to come in. Ultimately, her team sees optimizing for AI search as an integrated addition to SEO, and not a separate service.
AI search optimization is a part of every SEO engagement we deliver. We perform auditing, reporting, consulting, content optimization, and citation building for our monthly retainer clients, but also offer one-off projects, such as an AISO (AI search optimization) audit if needed. We feel [SEO and AI Visibility] need to be integrated to be successful.
Note: AI search optimization goes by several names in the industry—AEO, GEO, AISO—and there’s no consensus yet on which sticks. We’re using them interchangeably here to reflect how practitioners actually talk about this work.
Starting with Growing the Agency’s Visibility in AI Overviews
Before selling AEO (answer engine optimization) or GEO to clients, Andrea Schultz from Sure Oak optimized her own agency’s presence in AI results.
For key search terms like “winning saas seo,” Sure Oak appeared as a top source. Once they had their proof of concept, it was easy to replicate the success for clients.
Andrea’s strategy was grounded in SEO fundamentals, but with an emphasis on making content easily parseable by AI systems.
- Creating high-quality, topic-cluster content that solves entire user questions
- Adding TOCs (table of contents) and key takeaways for AI-friendly readability
- Implementing schema wherever possible
- Ensuring proper HTML tagging and heading architecture
To showcase results to their clients, Andrea likes to use the AI Share of Voice line graph from the Brand Performance reports:
With Semrush Organic Rankings, we can pull the prompts and number of appearances for a client’s website within Google’s AI Overviews. Over time, we then analyze where new visibility has been gained, along with the trend of overall exposure within Google’s AI Overviews.
Within the AI Visibility Toolkit, we dive deeper into share of voice on LLMs, sentiment, and opportunities to see where we stand against competitors. We find where they’re cited, and where we may not be to gain more brand mentions and citations.
When they optimize for both traditional and AI search together, the results compound. For their cybersecurity client, this led to a 137% YoY increase in conversions along with 1,118% increase in AI referral traffic and 39% increase in organic traffic.
Activate Digital: Fixing Content Gaps On Traditional and AI Search
- Agency: Activate Digital
- Clients include: Home services, auto dealers, finance, healthcare
- Focus: Content strategy that wins on all discovery channels
- Tools used: Brand Performance, AI Visibility Toolkit
Most SEOs assume you build traditional search rankings first, then optimize for AI visibility second.
Jonathan Banks flipped that playbook.
His team uses Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit to find the topics where competitors are being cited in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, but his clients are not.
Those gaps soon become content plans to win on both visibility layers—traditional and AI search.
We use Semrush to identify topic gaps, entity gaps, and over-reliance on single keywords. Then, we validate whether content is built in a way that supports AI summaries, answer extraction, and entity association. Without that visibility layer, AI SEO becomes guesswork. Semrush gives us a structured way to make it repeatable.
Their story is proof that AI visibility gaps can reveal high-value SEO opportunities competitors are missing.
Content Gap Analysis that Works for Both SEO and AI Visibility
Here’s how Activate Digital executed their content gap strategy for their home services client, Dryer Vent Wizard.
With Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit, they identified common dryer error code queries people asked AI about.
When they opened the Brand Performance report, it showed a list of relevant AI prompts related to their business. What stood out?
There was one question about a very specific dryer error code where the competition was mentioned, but Dryer Vent Wizard wasn’t.
They created a comprehensive guide, localized it across 100+ Dryer Vent Wizard locations, and each location now ranks locally for error codes.
After working with Activate Digital, the client’s organic traffic doubled and now 10% of all franchise leads come from AI visibility.
The Client Education Challenge
The biggest hurdle? Expectation-setting. AI visibility breaks the old “one page, one keyword” model.
Jonathan helps his clients understand three key shifts:
- Authority beats frequency
- Fewer, better pages often outperform dozens of thin SEO pages
- AI systems reward consistency, structure, depth, and mentions—not hacks
Semrush helps us bridge that gap because we can show the data, not just explain the theory. It gives credibility to conversations that would otherwise sound abstract.
When reporting, they build a narrative from multiple viewpoints: keyword tracking to monitor AI Overview volatility, content audits to flag pages AI ignores, and competitive analysis showing who AI systems consistently cite.
Coalition Technologies: Rescuing Brand Sentiment in AI Summaries
- Agency: Coalition Technologies
- Clients include: Restaurants, Army surplus equipment, niche ecommerce shops
- Focus: Reputation management and data accuracy.
- Tools used: Brand Performance, AI Visibility Toolkit.
After reviewing how their clients were represented in AI answers, Jordan Brannon’s team immediately spotted AI hallucinations and outdated info.
And with the Competitive Perception chart in Semrush’s AI Visibility toolkit, that misconception was measurable.
Their Army Surplus World client sells surplus military equipment like sleeping bags and heavy jackets to the public.
The equipment is all high-quality and unused, but in several instances, ChatGPT was calling the products “outdated technology.”
Fixing Brand Sentiment and Misrepresentations
Coalition Technologies refreshed messaging on their client’s homepage, about page, and social profiles to correct ChatGPT’s misrepresentation of their products as ‘outdated technology.
The brand visibility and sentiment score help us understand where there’s a problem. Looking at the prompts that we’re actually ranking for. We’re able to ask ourselves ‘what’s an actionable step we can take from here?’
To attack this issue, his team tested the way they phrase content and refreshed messaging across key areas.
We’ve really seen AIs and LLMs put a bigger emphasis on very clearly worded, very directly phrased content connected to the prompts… We had to refresh messaging on the about page, homepage, and social profiles to steer those responses back toward accuracy.
Coalition Technologies knows that LLMs will see a brand as an “entity” represented across the web (including social media and third party publishers), and not just the official website. So the fix is more than on your own site.
With their updates to on-site and off-site messaging, they were able to increase AI referral traffic by 429%.
This same client saw a 547% lift in conversions over that same time.
Practical Takeaways for Your Agency
These agencies don’t treat AI visibility as a separate standalone service. It’s an evolution of what they already do with SEO, applied to another layer.
Here’s what you can take away for your own agency workflow:
- Connect the dots of the AI funnel reporting: Use Semrush’s Position Tracking to show AI Overview appearances, the AI Visibility Toolkit for mention and citation data, and My Reports with Google Analytics 4 (GA4) widgets for AI referral traffic. Combine them in one client report to show the full picture
- Prove your case with your own agency: Set up AI visibility tracking for your own domain before pitching it to clients. When you can show prospects that you’ve boosted your own AI Overview appearances by 286% and that 40% of your new leads now come from AI visibility, you’ve built instant credibility before the pitch even starts.
- Leverage AI Visibility gaps as content opportunities: Find topics where competitors are cited but you’re not, and build content to close the gap and win on both traditional search and AI.
- Monitor sentiment to protect reputation: Use the Perception report in Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit to review Competitive Perception and Key Sentiment Drivers weekly. Catch misrepresentations before they cost you clients.
Ready to add AI visibility to your agency’s services?
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