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AI Visibility Score measures how consistently and prominently brands appear across relevant AI answers.
Mentions, citations, sentiment, and Share of Voice reveal how AI platforms discover, source, compare, and describe brands.
Missing prompts and sources help marketers identify content and third-party visibility opportunities.
AI search has changed the value of a brand mention. A high Google rank no longer tells the full story. ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews can name a brand, cite its website, compare it with rivals, or leave it out of an answer altogether.
Semrush now gives marketers a way to measure those outcomes through its AI Visibility Toolkit. The platform uses more than 317 million AI prompts and responses across 117 regional databases, with daily updates on a rolling basis.
The central metric is the AI Visibility Score, which ranges from 0 to 100. The score measures how often and how prominently a brand appears in AI answers. Semrush combines two factors: topic coverage and mention consistency. Topic coverage shows how many relevant topics include a brand. Mention consistency shows how often the brand appears across answers within those topics.
This gives marketers a wider view than a simple count of brand mentions. A brand may appear across many topics but receive only one mention per topic. Another brand may appear in fewer topics but hold a strong position within those answers. The second brand can still earn a higher AI Visibility Score.
Mentions count the prompts where an AI answer includes a brand. This metric helps show whether AI platforms recognize a brand across relevant searches. Citations offer a different signal. They count AI responses that cite a brand's domain as a source.
That difference matters for content teams. A brand can earn many mentions without earning the same level of citation value. A cited page gives an AI answer a direct source from the brand's own domain. Semrush also shows Cited Pages, which reveals the exact website pages that earn citations. This detail can help teams identify which content attracts AI attention and which pages need stronger work.
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AI search rarely puts one brand in isolation. Several brands can appear in the same answer, especially for comparison and purchase-related prompts. Semrush therefore adds Share of Voice to its Brand Performance data. The metric shows how a brand compares with competitors across AI answers.
Sentiment adds another layer. AI platforms can describe a company as reliable, expensive, easy to use, difficult to use, or strong in a particular area. Semrush's Brand Performance tool helps marketers assess sentiment and the narratives linked to a brand. The data receives weekly updates and covers Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.
Semrush also shows Missing Prompts. These are prompts where competitors appear in an AI answer while a target brand does not. Missing Sources show domains that earn citations for competitors while the target brand does not.
This turns AI visibility data into a practical content plan. A missing prompt can reveal a topic that deserves stronger coverage. A missing source can point to a publication, community, review site, or reference platform that shapes the AI answer. The data therefore extends beyond the brand's own website.
Semrush's 2026 AI Visibility Index adds a much larger research base. The study examined more than 126 million real U.S. AI search prompts across 22 industries and four major platforms: ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini. The study found 36 brands that held top-100 visibility across every month of the research period.
The research also highlights a major shift in brand discovery. AI systems draw from company websites as well as Reddit, Wikipedia, publishers, retailers, community sources, and other third-party references. ChatGPT cites an average of 15 sources per response, while Gemini cites an average of three.
AI visibility does not equal website traffic. An AI answer can mention a brand or cite a page without producing a measurable visit. That makes AI search different from traditional search, where clicks often provide a clearer path from visibility to site activity.
Semrush therefore treats AI visibility data as a directional measure rather than an exact count of every AI interaction. The platform uses large datasets to identify patterns, compare competitors, and measure changes over time.
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Semrush's toolkit gives marketers a broader view of AI search: visibility, mentions, citations, cited pages, sources, Share of Voice, sentiment, prompt gaps, and AI crawler access. Prompt Tracking also lets teams monitor custom prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and AI Overviews with daily data.
The result is a clearer measure of brand presence in AI search. Traditional rankings still matter, but they no longer capture the full path to discovery. AI search adds a new question: not just whether a brand can rank, but whether AI systems can find it, cite it, recommend it, and describe it accurately.
1. What is Semrush’s AI Visibility Score?
It is a 0–100 metric measuring how often and prominently a brand appears in relevant AI-generated answers.
2. What is the difference between AI mentions and citations?
Mentions measure when a brand appears in an AI response, while citations measure when the AI response references the brand’s domain as a source.
3. What are Missing Prompts in Semrush?
Missing Prompts identify relevant AI queries where competitors appear in the answer but the target brand does not.
4. Does AI visibility directly equal website traffic?
No. A brand can be mentioned or cited without generating a measurable website visit, so AI visibility should be treated as a directional performance signal.
5. Which AI platforms can marketers track?
Semrush provides AI visibility and prompt-tracking capabilities across platforms including ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini.
