The Semrush AI SEO Toolkit is designed to help you understand and improve your brand's presence in the new landscape of AI search. Follow these simple steps to explore the toolkit and uncover strategic insights for your business.
How to Access the AI SEO Toolkit
You can find the AI SEO Toolkit in the left-hand navigation menu of your Semrush account. Simply click on "AI SEO" to expand the list of reports and get started.
Step 1: Get a High-Level Benchmark with Visibility Overview
Start by getting a snapshot of your brand's overall presence in AI search. The Visibility Overview report provides a single, benchmark score to show you how you measure up against the competition.
Enter your domain to see your key metrics, including the AI Visibility Score (a score from 0-100), total Mentions, and Monthly Audience to get a quick benchmark of your overall presence and potential reach in AI search. From there, you can review the specific topics where your brand is included or missing. The report highlights these Opportunities, as every missing prompt represents a chance to improve visibility.
Step 2: Analyze Your Rivals with the Competitor Research Report
Next, see how you stack up against the competition. The Competitor Research report lets you directly compare your AI visibility against other brands in your space.
Enter your domain and add up to four competitors to begin your analysis. Use the report to identify Topic & Prompt Gaps where rivals are getting mentioned but you aren't. This is a great way to find strategic opportunities and close the gap.
Step 3: Discover New Opportunities with the Prompt Research Report
Think of this as keyword research for the AI era. The Prompt Research report helps you discover what questions your audience is asking AI platforms so you can build a content strategy to meet their needs.
Enter a broad topic or product category to get started. You'll see the estimated LLM Topic Volume and Topic Difficulty for related topics, helping you prioritize your efforts. You can also analyze the Intent behind the prompts to better align your content with user needs.
Step 4: Understand Your Brand Perception with Brand Performance Reports
Beyond just mentions, it's crucial to know how AI platforms are talking about your brand. The Brand Performance suite of reports analyzes your Share of Voice, sentiment, and the narratives driving your reputation.
Explore the Brand Performance suite to understand your AI reputation. Start on the main Brand Performance dashboard and check the Share of Voice vs. Sentiment chart to quickly assess how your visibility stacks up against competitors and if more mentions are leading to a better perception.
Then, switch to the Perception report to monitor sentiment trends over time, which helps you see how your brand's positive perception changes in comparison to others.
Use the Narrative Drivers report to discover the Top Cited Domains and specific questions shaping your brand's story, allowing you to identify influential publishers for outreach and understand the exact prompts driving the conversation in your market.
Finally, dive into the Questions report to see the specific prompts where your brand and competitors are mentioned, helping you understand the exact queries driving the conversation in your market.
The AI-generated "Insights" and "Strategic Opportunities" sections provide actionable recommendations based on your data, helping you quickly turn your analysis into a strategic action plan.
Step 5: From Insights to Action
The first four steps have armed you with a wealth of data about your AI visibility, competitive gaps, and brand perception. Now it’s time to put those insights into action.
This is where the actual optimization work begins, which often happens manually or with the help of other Semrush toolkits and tools:
- Content Toolkit: Create and optimize new AI-friendly content
- Social Toolkit: Manage your online reputation and find relevant influencers to secure positive brand coverage
- Traffic & Market Toolkit: Understand your audience’s demographics and interests to tailor content for AI-driven personalization
This process involves creating new content that targets your opportunity prompts, updating existing pages to better align with AI search, and building your brand's authority through outreach.
To learn more about the strategies and tactics for AI search optimization, here are some helpful resources:
- How to Optimize for AI Search: Key Steps
- LLM Seeding: The Art and Science of Influencing AI Language Models
- What Is LLM Optimization? A Guide for Marketers
Before committing to long-term tracking, you can manually test your optimizations to get a quick sense of their impact. To do this, use an incognito browser and run conversational prompts your audience would ask across platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Check to see which competitors are cited and how your brand is portrayed. This manual testing provides valuable feedback on whether your optimizations are working.
Once your optimizations are live and tested, you can move on to the next step: tracking your progress.
Step 6: Monitor Your Progress with Prompt Tracking
Once you have identified your key prompts, it's essential to track your performance over time. Prompt Tracking is part of the Position Tracking tool. It allows you to monitor your domain's daily visibility in today's leading AI environments: ChatGPT Search and Google's AI Mode.
This is crucial for comparing your performance in AI against traditional search results and understanding how your visibility shifts over time.
Set up a Position Tracking campaign and select "ChatGPT" or "Google AI Mode" as the search engine. Add your target prompts to the campaign to receive daily updates on your Visibility and Average Position.
To directly compare your performance, use the Devices & Locations tab to see your AI search rankings side-by-side with your traditional Google rankings. This will help you identify gaps and measure the impact of your optimization efforts.
Step 7: Check Your Technical AI Readiness with Site Audit
Your content strategy can only succeed if AI bots can access your website. The Site Audit tool helps you find technical issues that could prevent your content from appearing in AI-generated answers.
Run a Site Audit and check the Al Search Health widget and the Top issues report. These sections will flag potential problems that could harm your AI visibility, such as missing llms.txt files, content that is too long for AI models, outdated "last-modified" headers, or pages that are blocking key AI bots in your robots.txt file. Fixing these issues helps ensure your site is well-prepared for the evolving world of generative search.
Create and Share Your AI SEO Reports
Sharing your findings and progress is a key part of the optimization process. The AI SEO Toolkit integrates reporting features to help you communicate insights to your team and stakeholders. Most tools in the toolkit include an export button that allows you to save data as a PDF, schedule recurring reports, or create a shareable online dashboard.
Note: The export button may not be available in all tools yet but will be added in future releases.
The Brand Performance suite is also fully integrated with the My Reports tool, allowing you to automatically transform AI insights into visually compelling, presentation-ready reports. With just a few clicks, you can pull brand perception data, competitor comparisons, and strategic recommendations into editable templates.
You're all set!
By exploring these reports, you can build a comprehensive strategy to measure, improve, and protect your brand's visibility in AI search.