Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit Tutorial

This is a graph you should really care about. It predicts that traffic from AI tools like ChatGPT will overtake traditional search traffic in 2028. But the date isn't the important part. Whether it happens next year or in five years, it's going to happen at some point. We're already seeing the effects of AI-infused search features like AI overviews, eat-in to organic website traffic, and more than a billion people around the world actively use chatbots to answer their questions. If your brand doesn't show up in the answers these tools give, you're missing out on a large and growing slice of your market. But right now, it's tough to gather any real data to understand how well you're doing. We don't have a Google Analytics or a Google Search Console for AI channels. That's why SEMrush built the AISEO Toolkit. It's a major unlock for marketers trying to understand how AI is impacting their business and how they can show up in more of the right places. My name is Chris, and in this video, I'm going to show you how to use the SEMrush AISEO Toolkit to boost your brand's visibility step-by-step. ♪♪ First, here's what you actually need to know about SEMrush's AISEO Toolkit. Starting with what it actually does, it tracks how your brand appears across chat GPT, Google AI mode, Google AI overviews, and perplexity. It shows you which prompts include your brand and where you're currently missing, and it provides prompt tracking, so you can easily monitor your AI visibility over time as you make optimizations. Chris from the future here, just a quick update to say that since I recorded this video, SEMrush have changed the name of the AISEO Toolkit to the AI Visibility Toolkit. You can still follow along with this video as the functionality remains the same, and you'll find it in the same place within the SEMrush dashboard, just with a different name. SEMrush have also launched SEMrush One, meaning you can get access to core SEMrush SEO tools for tasks like keyword research and backlink analysis alongside the AI visibility tools that I'll show you in this video. Pricing for the SEMrush One solution starts at $199 per month, but you can also get the AI visibility toolkit on its own for $99 per month per domain. The tool is brand new, so the UI and functionality may change in the future. Keep an eye on SEMrush's landing pages for any new features. Before we actually analyze anything, let's pick a brand to make this walkthrough concrete. To find an example, I went to exploding topics, the e-commerce category, and I picked Petlibro, a trending startup that sells smart pet feeders and water fountains. We are not affiliated with Petlibro, and this is not a sponsored video. We just wanted a brand that's growing fast and has enough search demand to really make this example interesting and hopefully relevant to you. But you don't need to be in e-commerce for this tool to be useful for your brand. AI visibility is going to become increasingly important for just about every industry, so I recommend trying what you're about to see in this video for your own brand to see how the tool can help you. Before we look at AI visibility, we want to know how Petlibro is doing in traditional search. This will give us super useful context for how they're doing at the moment overall, because as things stand right now, if you perform well in search engines thanks to good SEO, you can often expect to perform quite well in AI search too. So let's see how Petlibro has been doing in traditional search. So to understand how Petlibro have been performing in regular search, I've opened up domain overview within SEMrush here, and you can see that they've been growing a ton over the past couple of years, both in terms of traffic that they get and the keywords that they rank for. They currently rank for more than 25,000 keywords and they have a domain authority score of 43. Now, you also get a sneak peek at their AI visibility over here, but we'll talk more about that in the next step. Now, if we jump over to the organic research tab, you can see I've set a few filters here to only show keywords that they rank for in the top 10 and to exclude some branded terms, but you can see that they rank well in traditional search results for a bunch of highly relevant category and product keywords as well. So they're clearly a brand that's already doing a good job with SEO, but now let's check out their AI visibility. Back in the SEMrush dashboard, look for AI SEO in the sidebar on the left-hand side. And in particular, we want to go to the brand performance tab and in here, you will enter your brand name. I'll just use this Petlibro project since we have that set up already. And a few minutes later, your brand performance report will be ready for review. So let's quickly go over what all of this means because there's a lot of data here. Also, this is still brand new as I record this, so it might look a little different by the time you actually watch this video. At the top, you'll see Petlibro and a few competitors that I've already added to this project, but you can add and remove them as needed. Then you'll see a dropdown for the AI model that you want to focus on. So you can swap between these. For example, if you want to use ChatGPT, you can change that and the data down below changes as well. This lets you dial in on specific platforms that you may want to target or understand your AI visibility for. Below that are some AI-generated strategy ideas with links to the relevant tabs that we'll explore shortly. And on the right side, you can see share of voice versus sentiment score. Now, this essentially shows you how often you're mentioned and how high up in the answers you're mentioned compared to how positively the AI tools portray your brand when they do mention it. Ideally, your brand will be up and to the right, signaling high share of voice and positive sentiment. Now, we'll come back to this idea of sentiment soon, but this is a handy way to quickly gauge your visibility compared to your rivals. The most interesting thing I noticed right away is that when I changed the model to regular ChatGPT without search enabled, Petlibro has a relatively low share of voice of about 6%. That's because ChatGPT without search enabled has a training data cutoff date of September 30th, 2024. And as we saw with traditional search, Petlibro has grown quite a lot over the past year, going from around 70,000 organic visits to 95,000 organic visits this year. So that's about a 35% increase in a world where traffic declines are becoming the norm. The site even topped 100K visits at least once in that time. So it's no surprise that whenever we switch to SearchGPT, which is what this tool is still calling ChatGPT with search enabled, we can see that the share of voice jumps to 20%, which makes a bit more sense. And if we switch to Google's AI mode, we can see it jumps to 25%. Keep this in mind when analyzing your own brand too, because these tools might not have your newest content in their training data. This can affect your apparent visibility. So be sure to check your visibility when search is enabled, as search-powered experiences are becoming more common anyway. We'll come back to the sentiment stuff soon, but the next step here will help you get more granular about your site's AI visibility. You can get prompt level details by heading to the Competitor Research tab. Now you just enter your brand here and your competitors. You can see I've already added one here, but the tool will also suggest some and you can add up to three. I'm just going to stick with Sure Pet Care for now, and then run the competitor analysis. And you can always add more competitors at this stage as well. Now, as I mentioned earlier, the tool is brand new. So right now this top section doesn't really have a whole lot of data, but that will build up over time. And for this part, we're more interested in the topics and prompt section further down anyway. So we want to sort by missing to see the topics that you're not appearing for, but your rivals are. Think of this like a keyword gap analysis in traditional SEO. We're basically seeing all the topics that we could be appearing for, but we're not yet. Now, not all of these will be relevant because your competitors may be appearing for prompts that aren't even relevant to them. But if we take a look at these for PetLibro, we can already see one on the first page that would probably be relevant to us. So dogs, slow feeders, and elevated bowls, since PetLibro does offer automatic feeders for both cats and dogs, that is relevant. So you can click the topics to see the specific prompts as well. Then we can look at the response and see where the competitor is mentioned and in what context. So looking at this one, if we scroll down, we can see this SureFeed microchip pet feeder that is from SurePetCare. We can see they're mentioned there. And if we scroll down a little bit more, we can see they're also mentioned in this comparison table a little bit further down as well. Now you can swap to the prompts view instead here and then go through these prompts and add the ones that are most relevant to your business to a list. And then you can even monitor them within SEMrush itself by clicking this monitor button. Think of this part like the keyword research stage in a traditional SEO campaign. Now let's take a closer look at this idea of brand sentiment because it's an important one. You want to understand where your brand is doing a good job of appearing trustworthy to both your users and the LLMs themselves. Now this is key because if you're showing up a lot in AI tools, but for all the wrong reasons, that visibility isn't actually going to help your business. To do this, we'll head back to the brand performance tab and we'll scroll down to key business drivers. This essentially shows where your brand is strong compared to your competitors in various areas that help convey trust to your users. Now this might look a little overwhelming at first, but let's break it down. So the main thing you have to take away here is that darker colors and bigger numbers are better with the trophy icon showing you where you're ahead of your rivals. They essentially illustrate how often key business drivers, which you can think of as like trust factors, appear in answers where your brand is also mentioned. Again, the bigger the number, the better. For example, searchers might value the ability to access smart features without a subscription when they're buying a smart pet feeder. You see that here and you can click this little question mark icon to see a bit more information about what each business driver is referring to. And when the tool mentions PetSafe, which we can see here at one of our competitors, it mentions these features, but not as often as it mentions PetLibro alongside those features. But if we scroll down to compare us to specific competitors and we look at Sure Pet Care down here, we can see that they're beating us on selective feeding and access control. And what that basically means is control over which pets can access the feeder. And in this case, Google AI mode is more than twice as likely to talk about these features when Sure Pet Care is the brand compared to us. And if we go to this narrative drivers tab again, we can see that queries like this do mention Sure Pet Care. So for example, this one about multi-cat households, we can see that PetLibro isn't mentioned, but the Sure Feed Connect, which is from Sure Pet Care is mentioned. If I look at the earlier part of this response, I can see that it mentions microchip and RFID detection. Now, if I look at PetLibro's website for some of the feeders, this is an RFID smart feeder, but it's only RFID and the Sure Feed is both microchip and RFID. So maybe this is something we could tweak in our product design, or maybe it's just something we need to accept that we can't offer and instead focus on other prompts. It's a bit like traditional SEO and keyword research. So you might jump into, you know, SEMrush keyword magic tool for a query like pet feeders and see, hey, look, it's, you know, 700 keywords, 34,000 monthly search volume. I'll target everything and get a ton of traffic. Obviously that's not how SEO worked. You ended up wasting a ton of money, creating content on keywords that you'll never rank for or make money from. And it's not how AI SEO works either. So when you go through these brand trust factors, think about which ones actually matter most to your business. If you spot areas where your competitors are strong, but you're not being picked up, there could be opportunities to include trust factors and unique selling points on your website homepage, or add mentions of relevant features to your product pages, or even write helpful FAQ questions on product pages and blog posts that cater to these trust factors. Next up, we'll go beyond trust and feature awareness and look at how AI tools actually portray your brand positively or negatively. To do this, we'll head to the perception report and we'll scroll down to the key sentiment driver section. This will show you brand strength factors and areas for improvement. And this is a great snapshot to see where you're already doing well and where you may need to focus new efforts on improving your brand's perception and these AI responses. So brand strength factors, they are essentially areas where the AI tools are talking positively about your brand. And in Pet Libro's case, this would be things like food freshness, flexible scheduling, and feeders and fountains operating quietly, being able to use them at nighttime, that kind of thing. Look for anything that's not accurate here because you don't want AI tools to be recommending your brand for things you don't offer, as this will just lead to disappointed customers. The areas for improvement are areas where you might want to create optimized content to make it clear to customers what you actually offer. You may want to optimize your existing product pages to better reflect their strengths, or you may want to improve your products and services themselves to better meet your customer's needs. That final point is worth emphasizing. Zemrush's AI SEO tools don't just give you content ideas. You can use the insights you gain here and the prompts real users are actually inputting into AI tools to understand where you can improve your products and services. At Backlinko, we believe the future of marketing is truly collaborative across departments. And these kinds of insights can help align your SEO and content teams with your product and marketing divisions. This can lead to a better user experience on your site, a better product for your customers, and of course, growth for your business. Now, the next and final step is to identify more specific content ideas to help you optimize your existing content and create new content too. To find more content ideas, head to the Questions tab and then scroll down to the Query Topics section. These are questions from real users asking about your industry, and you can answer these questions with new content or in your existing content. For example, to answer this question at the top about scheduling multiple meals per day, Petlibro could create a blog post titled How to Schedule Meals with a Smart Pet Feeder. They could also update their product pages to highlight that their feeders support different portion sizes to cater to this question. And then they could add an FAQ section answering common branded questions. For example, people ask what Wi-Fi features the Petlibro Polar Feeder app offers, or what warranty and customer support the brand offers. Now, you don't have to actually compare these to competitors whenever you're putting these questions together, but these are the kind of questions that users may ask ChatGPT or Perplexity, and the tool might rely on your FAQ section to answer that question. Unlike with traditional SEO where somebody might type a query into Google like Petlibro versus PetSafe customer support, and then they might see a dedicated page answering that question from a review site, something like that. In this case, the tool might actually pull the information from your site and from PetSafe's site. So you want to make sure you have content that actually answers these questions accurately. To understand what content you might want to create and which prompts are actually worth optimizing for, enter the relevant ones into tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity. Just make sure you enable web search if you're using a tool like ChatGPT. For example, for this prompt about the smart feeder accuracy when you're measuring portions over time, ChatGPT returns a lot of scientific papers, so it would probably be a tough one for Petlibro to actually appear for. This next one is a more likely candidate, and we can see PetSafe, one of our competitors, is cited as a source. And further down, there's also a product carousel with some links, none of which are from Petlibro. So this would definitely be worth digging into to see why PetSafe and the other products are being recommended, but we're not. Do the product pages provide a better job of conveying trust signals? Are they more descriptive? Do they have FAQ sections that answer the prompts question or other questions the user may have? The takeaway here is that you need to look closer than simply the prompts themselves to understand why other brands are being recommended ahead of yours. You need to do some of the groundwork. But if you're in a pinch or if you just want some quick solutions, you can head back to the AI SEO toolkit and scroll to the bottom of many of the tabs and you'll find AI-powered strategic opportunities for you. These are insights that can give you a headstart. Some of these will be related to specific product features, but you'll also see suggestions for content like white papers and educational content. You can then use these insights and the information you've gained from the other steps in this video to create and optimize your content for AI visibility. It's hopefully clear by now that the SEMrush AI SEO toolkit is packed with features. It's only going to get better as we learn more about how AI tools surface and present content and responses. And as the tool gathers more data, you'll be able to monitor your AI visibility over time. For now, follow the steps I've outlined in this video to understand your overall visibility, which prompts you are and should be appearing for and how AI tools are presenting your brand to your target audience and potential customers. Then check out this video to learn how to perform a full AI search audit for your brand. And be sure to subscribe to the Backlinko YouTube channel for more videos designed to help you boost your search and AI visibility. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one.