The AI SEO Toolkit includes a set of unique metrics designed to help you measure brand visibility, track competitors, and understand AI-generated search performance.
This page explains each metric you’ll encounter in the toolkit, including what it means and how to use it.
For more information on how this data is calculated, read: Where does the data in the Semrush AI SEO toolkit come from?
Visibility Overview Metrics
Visibility Overview helps you benchmark your brand’s overall presence in AI-generated answers and spot where competitors are appearing instead of you.
- AI Visibility: A benchmark score (0–100) showing how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers compared to competitors.
- Mentions: The total number of prompts in which a brand is included in AI responses. Each mention represents visibility in a unique AI query.
- Monthly Audience: An estimate of the total query audience across all topics where your brand appears. Helps approximate the scale of exposure.
- Your Performing Topics: Topics or prompts where your brand is already mentioned in AI-generated answers.
- Topic Opportunities: Prompts where your competitors are visible, but your brand is not. These represent growth opportunities.
- Cited Sources: The websites that AI systems reference when generating answers. These sources influence how your brand is represented in AI.
- Source Opportunities: Sources frequently cited in AI answers that mention your competitors but not your brand. Reaching out to or getting featured in these sources can help improve your AI visibility.
- Owned Sources: Any website or content property owned by your company (e.g., your domain, blog, or knowledge base) that is cited in AI responses.
Competitor Research Metrics
With the Competitor Research report, you’ll compare your visibility side by side with competitors to uncover strengths, weaknesses, and missed opportunities.
- Audience: A benchmark estimate of the overall reach of prompts where a brand is mentioned. This gives you a directional measure of how broad the exposure could be across AI platforms.
- Topics & Prompts: The topics where the competing brands appear in LLM responses, along with the specific prompts within each topic.
- Weak Topics & Prompts: Topics and prompts where your brand is visible, but competitors are mentioned more frequently.
- Missing Topics & Prompts: Topics and prompts where competitors are cited but your brand is absent.
- Sources: External websites cited in AI answers that mention your brand or your competitors.
- Missing Sources: External websites cited in AI answers that mention competitors but not your brand. These are potential outreach or content opportunities.
- Shared Sources: External websites cited in AI answers that mention all of the competitors in the comparison.
- Strong Sources: External websites cited in AI answers that mention your brand more than the competitors in the comparison.
- Unique Sources: External websites cited in AI answers that mention your brand and none of the competitors in the comparison.
Prompt Research Metrics
Prompt Research allows you to discover which topics people ask AI about most, measure how competitive they are, and see the top brands being mentioned.
- AI Topic Volume: An estimate of how often people ask about a given topic across AI platforms. Measured at the topic level, not for individual prompts.
- Topic Difficulty: A score (0–100%) estimating how competitive it is to appear for a topic, based on the brands most frequently mentioned in AI answers.
- Brands mentioned: The number of unique brands that were found in the LLM responses to all of the prompts in a given topic.
- Task (Intent Type): Prompts where the user is asking AI to perform an action or generate an output directly (e.g., “Write me a blog post outline” or “Create an ad headline for my campaign”).
- Other (Intent Type): Prompts that don’t clearly fall into informational, navigational, commercial, transactional, or task-based categories. This catch-all intent type captures less common or ambiguous queries.
Brand Performance Metrics
The Brand Performance reports (Brand Performance, Perception, Narrative Drivers, Questions) help you understand how AI platforms talk about your brand and track share of voice, sentiment, and narrative drivers.
- Share of Voice: Percentage of mentions your brand receives in AI-generated answers compared to competitors in your market.
- Overall Sentiment: The balance of positive and general sentiment in the mentions of your brand in AI answers.
- Key Sentiment Drivers: The themes or attributes that contribute to positive or negative perceptions of your brand.
- Cited Pages: Specific pages from your website referenced in AI answers, along with their associated sentiment.
- Narrative Drivers: Prompt responses, topics, and sources most responsible for shaping your brand’s visibility and reputation in AI-generated responses.
Prompt Tracking Metrics
With Prompt Tracking you can monitor your daily visibility for specific prompts to measure progress and protect your position.
- Average Position: Where a citation of your domain typically appears in AI-generated responses for tracked prompts (e.g., first citation, second citation, etc).
- Visibility: Visibility shows a website’s overall progress in ChatGPT or Google AI Mode’s top citations from the current prompt tracking campaign. A zero-percent visibility means that the domain isn’t ranking in the top citations for any of these prompts; and a 100-percent visibility means that the domain keeps the first citation for all of these keywords.
AI Search Site Audit Metrics
Site Audit checks your site’s technical readiness for AI search by identifying blockers and optimization opportunities.
- AI Search Health: A summary score from Site Audit that reflects how ready your site is for AI search. It considers whether AI bots can crawl your content, whether key AI-visibility elements (like structured data and llms.txt) are present, and whether technical blockers exist.
Other Semrush Tools with AI Search Metrics:
- Enterprise-level advanced features for large-scale AI reporting and custom integrations. AI search metrics in Enterprise AIO include Share of Voice, Mentions, Brand Visibility, Sentiment, as well as deeper insights like concept analysis and metrics for ChatGPT Shopping.
Traffic & Market Toolkit: AI Traffic Report
- Estimate traffic referrals from AI platforms to any domain.
My Reports: AI Referral Traffic filters in GA4 Widgets
- Connect your GA4 data to My Reports and filter reports by AI Referral Traffic to measure sessions and conversions coming from AI engines in your scheduled reporting.
- See the number of keywords in a domain’s SEO rankings that trigger AI Overviews. This can be filtered to show AI Overviews linking to the domain and also not linking to the domain.
- Track the presence and volatility of AI Overviews across industries.