How To Track (and Improve) LLM Visibility

You want ChatGBT to recommend your brand, products, and services, right? Well, with two and a half billion prompts per day on ChatGBT, yes, you probably do. To make that happen, though, you need something called AI Search Optimization, and no, AI Search Optimization is not the same as the SEO or Search Engine Optimization that you may have been doing for the last decade. In fact, there's a recent study by our friends over at SEMrush that shows this because when ChatGBT search sites' webpages, the pages it cites are typically lower ranking, i.e. they're showing up positions 21 and below. That's like page three and below. What this means is that even if you're dominating with traditional SEO, you're not necessarily going to be dominating in this new era of AI Search. And if you're not showing up when the 400 million weekly active ChatGBT users are asking for recommendations in your space, then you're gonna be invisible. Don't panic, though, because today I'm gonna show you how to use SEMrush's AI Visibility Toolkit to track and improve your visibility in AI Search. And by the way, SEMrush gave us this tool to share with you. Thank you, SEMrush. Okay, so this is how you get into the tool. It's under the AI Visibility Overview. By the way, this tool is a beast. It goes so deep. The stuff I'm gonna show you in the next few minutes is just scratching the surface. There's another whole layer below this where you can spend the rest of your career, if you so choose. But we're just gonna stick with the AI Visibility Overview to begin with. You stick in your domain name and hit Check AI Visibility. You almost immediately get some responses. I'm looking at Octopus Energy, which is the UK's number one energy provider by market share, so I wanna check to make sure I'm in the UK. You can also switch between different AI platforms. So right now, you've got the choice between ChatGBT, Google's AI Overview, which is the bit at the top of the search results, or Google's AI Mode, which is the separate sort of AI piece that you can navigate to from Google Search. And they often give slightly different answers, which is why you can switch between them. But I'm gonna look at all AI platforms, so that's gonna amalgamate the results from these three. This tool is great for SEOs, marketers, CMOs, marketing managers, even business owners that want to understand how AI tools are talking about their brand. You can also see how you're comparing to competitors, what prompts and topics you're most visible for, and it'll help you spot opportunities to improve and boost that visibility. We're gonna go through all of this today. So straight away in the visibility overview, we have a quick sort of visual representation of how we're doing. We can see our visibility is 81 out of 100, which is really good. So Octopus is absolutely killing it with their AI visibility. This little chart here shows over time how visibility is doing. So we've got total visibility, the blue dot. We're doing better in AI overviews than average. We've got green for ChatGBT. We can see we're doing pretty well here. And AI Mode, we're lowest, but we're still pretty low. We've also got a little dashboard over here of projected monthly audience. This is a projection of the number of people that are seeing our brand mentioned, how many mentions we've got in individual prompts, the cited pages, so how many pages we are referenced on. And then we've got this little visual audience versus mentions thing over here as well. And this will update over time as they're collecting more data, they'll be able to plot that over time. Now, underneath here, we've got a whole bunch of stuff, and it's not massively intuitive if you're used to the whole world of SEO. So let me just explain exactly what we've got here. So we've got performing topics. These are topics that people are searching for on these AI tools where your brand is showing up. Then we've got topic opportunities. These are topics where your competitors are showing up. Then we've got cited sources. So these are websites being referenced in the answers where your brand is showing up. Then we've got source opportunities. These are websites being cited in the answers where your brand is not showing up. And then finally, we've got cited pages. These are pages on your website that are being cited in these answers. There's a ton of stuff, even just in these sections here. This section here could inform your entire SEO search strategy. For example, in topic opportunities, you can see which topics your competitors are being talked about where you're not being mentioned. Let's just have a quick look at one of these to see how it would work. So under this topic of electricity bill payment and checking, remember Octopus Energy is an energy bill provider, so this is something that they might want to improve their visibility for. We can see individual prompts here and we can see the AI tools response. We can also see how many other brands are being mentioned, how many sources are being used. If we really want, we can click on that and we can see the exact prompt and response and which brands are being mentioned. So this is really useful because it allows you to dig into the topics that you're not being spoken about. Now we're going to talk about how to fix all of this stuff later and how to improve your visibility, but straight away, you could see that if you wanted to improve your visibility for prompts like this in this topic, you can either reach out to these sources and see if they'll mention you, or you could publish some content on this topic on your website in the hope that your website becomes a source and you can then influence this response. And that's just one prompt in one topic in one section. And by the way, we're still in the AI visibility overview section. This AI visibility toolkit has three sections and this is just one page in one of those sections. So basically the tool is broken up into AI analysis. This shows how you're doing overall, how your competitors are doing and what sort of prompts you're showing up for and that you might want to target. The next section is brand performance, which is all about sentiment. So how are these tools talking about your brand? What's your perception of the brand? And what questions are people asking that are bringing you up? This section, by the way, can inform your entire communication and even product strategy. It's huge. And then we've got the booster monitor section. This is where you've got some practical next steps that you can actually start implementing in your marketing plan. So this tool gives you everything that you need to measure, compare and implement an AI search strategy without you having to go into chat GPT and ask questions. Okay, if you're like most people, yes, you want to see how you're doing, but you also really want to see how your competitors are doing and whether you're beating them. So let's check out the competitor research section. So what you do, you stick in your brand, you stick in some competitors that you want to track against and you get the same sort of visibility thing, but you see how you're stacking up against others. And again, you can filter this by platform if you want. What we get from this is that Octopus Energy is winning, but only by a little bit. So this section on the competitor analysis breaks down all of the prompts that are bringing up either your brand or your competitors, and it groups them in topics. It does this to try and make it a bit more digestible so you can work out the themes that you're showing up for and where you're not. Of course, you can click on them to expand. Let's say, for example, that Octopus wanted to have more applications from graduates from university. Well, it could see that actually at the moment, they can see that EDF Energy is actually doing better in this area than Octopus. They're showing up for companies that offer degree apprenticeships. I'm Google's AI, whereas Octopus isn't. Now, if you want to take action on this, you can literally just click Create Content, which is going to generate some AI content. I won't publish it as is, but it might be a good first step. You can also choose to monitor this prompt over time, and that will track your visibility as you start publishing content, maybe getting content on other websites as well. It'll monitor this prompt for your visibility so you can see how you're doing. If we switch over to the Sources tab, we can see the websites that are mentioning your brand and your competitors' brands. All gives us visibility on all of the sources. If you want to find the ones that are mentioning your competitors, but not you, then you can click on the Missing tab, and this is going to filter them so that it shows the top websites referencing your competitors. Again, not all of these are going to be relevant. Just because they're mentioning your competitors doesn't mean they're going to be relevant for you. For example, Sizewell C is a nuclear power station, I think being built by EDF Energy, so there's no reason it would mention Octopus. But there are other sites like, for example, Samaritans, where Octopus potentially could get a mention, particularly as it's a high-traffic website. And if you're not sure whether or not you want to target a mention, if you click on the dropdown, you'll see the prompt that is bringing up that website as a source. So you can see, is this prompt relevant? Yes, it is. Then I might want to reach out to Samaritans' website to see if they might want to include my brand. I can offer some tips as well, and maybe AI will then pull through my brand in its answer. Okay, we mentioned prompt tracking there, and that's a really cool feature. So this allows you to measure your visibility for certain prompts over time to see whether the things that you're doing are improving your visibility or not. Now, it has to be said that with AI tools, because they're not deterministic, i.e. they're making up a new answer each time, your prompt visibility isn't as stable as maybe your search rankings. You know, if you're on a tool like SEMrush and you say, right, I'm position number three in the UK for this particular keyword, you can be pretty sure that tomorrow you're pretty much gonna be in position three. Maybe you'll move up or down. But those rankings tend to be fairly stable. Whereas with AI tools, because they're coming up with a new answer every time, whether or not they're including you can feel a lot more random. So if you're the sort of person that sits there all day hammering refresh on your rankings to see where you're doing, this might drive you nuts because you're gonna have to take things with a bit of a pinch of salt and instead look at the shape over time rather than getting obsessed with your visibility on any one particular day. I think that's why these visibility tools are really nice because they work in the background. We get a really nice summary at the top here, which if you're a marketing manager, you can just literally copy and paste this and send it to your CMO. But if you're used to keyword tracking in SEMrush, then this is gonna feel pretty familiar. You can see the top prompts, the ones that are bringing you the most visibility. You can see the positive impact. This is the ones where you're showing up for more than you were. Negative impact, the ones where you've actually lost a bit of visibility. And you get a quick benchmark against your competitors and how they're doing over time. Now that's just the landscape tab of this page, of this section on the AI Visibility Toolkit. You've also got a whole bunch of other stuff. You can see how you are doing over time against each of your competitors. You can see how your visibility is changing every week against your competitors. How many times each of your pages is being cited as a source in different responses. And if you're tracking your visibility on different devices, on different platforms, you can even see how your visibility is changing by device and by platform. There is more granularity in this tracking than any other AI tool I have ever seen. SEMrush is bringing a vast amount of data to this particular party, and I'm here for it. And by the way, if you're watching this thinking, I really wanna have a play with this monster, then just go to exposure.ninja forward slash AI hyphen toolkit. That's exposure.ninja forward slash AI hyphen toolkit. You can see a demo with Warby Parker, or you can sign up and you can have a play with your brand. Needless to say, this is one of my favorite AI tools. It gives you so much visibility, there's so much data. So well worth having a look. That's exposure.ninja forward slash AI hyphen toolkit. All right, you've had a play, you've seen loads of stuff that you wanna do. How do you start building this into a to-do list? And how do you work out what to prioritize? Well, I'm gonna show you a bunch of different areas that will give you different types of to-dos. And these will depend on whether you're in the SEO team, in the content team, or even in the company leadership, because this will even give you insight on where you should focus your business strategically. I know that sounds wild, but there we go. So starting off with some of the most simple tasks, we can start identifying content topics and websites that we need to get featured on. So if we head back over to the AI visibility overview, using the topic opportunities section, we can start to identify particular topics and prompts that we want our brand to show up for. And you can just go straight into the prompts and dig through all of these prompts manually to see which are the most interest. But to be honest, there is so much in here that's gonna take a long time. So I'd start with the topic opportunities that allows you to see the categories, which is gonna save you a bit of time. So Octopus is typically very price competitive. So we're gonna have a look at this topic here, which is currently not mentioning Octopus, electricity cost and pricing in Ireland and the UK. Here is the prompt, can I compare electricity prices across different providers in Ireland and the UK? And Octopus is not being mentioned, despite 19 other brands being mentioned and 18 sources. Over in this sources section, there is a whole bunch of high quality sources that I would want my brand to be mentioned in. So I can start to make a list of these. So first up, I might want to add this topic to my content strategy, if it's something that's really relevant to my business. If I'm publishing some content on my website about this topic, there's a chance that these AI tools will then cite that and mention me. If this is a really important topic, and I can see that some of these sources are highly relevant for my brand, I may actually want to target these sources with some outreach to see if I can get featured. And if it's more sources that I want to find by going into source opportunities, I can see all the source websites that are being referenced that aren't including me. And I can either hand this list to the outreach team or I can get to work myself. If you're used to doing SEO and using a tool like SEMrush, this is essentially your keyword research. Now it doesn't have every single prompt ever asked because the beauty of these AI tools and why we love them so much is that so many of the prompts being asked are completely unique. But what it does do is match your question with a prompt that it does have some information about. For example, here, the topic is suggested is high energy bills investigation, which if I have a look at all of these prompts, they're actually really close to what I'm looking for. So this might give me some ideas for prompts that I want to make sure I've got answers to on my website so that I can be cited and my brand can be mentioned. Why is my energy bill suddenly increased? This might be a topic that clogs up customer service. If I've got some content on my website about this topic, that might save them some time whilst also getting me in front of people who are potentially really unhappy with their competitor provider. So I can see the prompt and the full response inside chat GPT. And again, I can go out to these sources if necessary, reach out to them, offer my contribution, and maybe produce some content on my own site about this topic to help increase my chances of being recommended. Or maybe you've got some content about this topic, but it's just not being cited. What can you do about that? Well, we've produced other videos on how to optimize your content for AI search. So check those out, we'll link in the description. All right, let's say that we want to take things to another level and you don't just want to be recommended, but you want to be recommended by these AI tools favorably. You want to influence your brand sentiment. Well, that's where you go to the brand performance section. This section gives you everything and anything from content recommendations to adaptations to your business strategy. It really is absolutely wild. So we've got an insight section up at the top here that gives you some overview stuff. You can see your overall sentiments or how these AI tools are talking about you, whether that's favorable or whether it's just a bit meh. And you can see your share of voice against your competitors. And then we've got key business drivers. So down here, we've got how your brand is perceived across all of these different categories against your competitor. This is what I mean about marketers becoming central to actually business strategy, because we can now go to company leadership and say, hey, look, we need to improve our smart meter rollout because it's damaging our perception amongst customers and amongst these AI tools. I mean, in Octopus's case, it isn't, but if I'm over, I'm taking that message to my board. If there's a particular competitor on your kill list, you can track yourself against them. I mean, not that you have a kill list, but if you did. And then at the bottom, we get the gold, your AI strategic opportunities. These are categorized according to their timeframe. Short stuff is the stuff that you want to do now. Medium stuff is stuff that's going to take a bit of time. And then urgent is the stuff that you want to do right now because it's impacting perception. Look at this, it's suggesting Octopus opens up its data for tariffs and grants so that it becomes the default UK reference source. That's an amazing idea. So if you want to have a play with this, go to exposure.ninja.com forward slash AI hyphen toolkit. This is a paid tool because the amount of data that goes into this is vast. But as you can see, this might not only influence your search and content strategy, it may influence your business strategy as well. And by the way, if you want to work with a company that does this all day every day, including for some of the world's largest and most recognizable brands, then the team here at Exposure Ninja can help. We have an AI search audit process that we can run for you, which audits your brand's visibility across AI platforms and uses data from tools like SEMrush's AI visibility toolkit. And we've won multiple global search awards for the impact that our work has had on clients' revenue, including from AI search. And we work with clients that have both an in-house team and that want to outsource that work to an agency like us. If you're interested in working with Exposure Ninja, then you can head over to our website at exposureninja.com and either contact us through the contact page or request a free digital marketing review where we'll take an initial look at your brand's visibility across these AI platforms and make some quick recommendations on how you can improve things. So if AI search optimization is one of your priorities over the next year, then contact us through exposureninja.com.