How to find AI visibility gaps with Semrush

Semrush helps you find AI visibility gaps by identifying the topics, sources, and narrative themes where competitors get mentioned in AI answers but your brand doesn't.

The process is similar to SEO competitor analysis. You find where competitors are winning and close the gap. 

The Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit helps you do just that. 

Here’s how to get started.

How Semrush helps you find AI visibility gaps 

Using the AI Visibility Toolkit, you can benchmark your AI presence and understand how large language models (LLMs) describe your brand.

The toolkit also allows you to:

• Find relevant prompts to track
• Identify the topics to cover to improve your visibility
• Monitor AI visibility fluctuations daily
• Find technical issues that could prevent AI crawlers from accessing your website
• Create AI visibility reports to share with your team

The key to understanding your AI visibility gaps is getting enough data.

LLMs are probabilistic. They produce different responses to the same question, so a single prompt response tells you very little.

To get a reliable read, you need to spot patterns across hundreds of responses collected over time.

Semrush's data comes from a database of more than 289 million prompts and responses across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and AI Mode, covering 40+ regional databases.

The sheer amount of data collected lets you identify patterns instead of drawing conclusions from one-off answers.

5 AI visibility gaps to know

AI visibility is a broad term. So when we talk about AI visibility gaps, we first need to define the levels where those gaps appear:

Note that mention and prompt gaps surface together. When you find the prompts where competitors appear and your brand doesn't, you also identify where AI doesn’t mention your brand.

The other AI visibility gaps can manifest differently. 

For example, AI platforms might mention your brand in responses but not cite your website. Or, you might be highly visible in prompt responses concerning a specific use case, but completely absent from others.

Fixing each visibility gap may require a different approach, so it’s important to identify them correctly. We’ll cover this in detail in the next section.

How to find AI visibility gaps

Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit helps you surface AI visibility gaps across levels like prompts, sources, and citations. 

1. Find the prompts where competitors get cited and you don't

The Competitor Research report identifies topics and prompts where your competitors appear in AI-generated answers but your brand doesn't.

Start by launching “Competitor Research” inside Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit. 

Enter your site’s URL with up to four competitors. If you’re unsure who to track, Semrush will suggest top rivals based on your domain. 

Then, click “Run competitor analysis.”

You'll see a benchmark overview comparing your brand’s AI visibility against competitors’ across several AI platforms. 

This includes:

• AI Visibility: A benchmark score (0–100) that measures how prominently and reliably a brand is featured in relevant AI-generated answers.
• Audience: An estimate of the brand’s total AI reach/exposure based on the volume of all the prompts and topics where the brand is mentioned.
• Mentions: The raw total count of unique prompts where your brand name appears in the text of the AI response.

Use the dropdown at the top to filter by a specific AI platform: 

• ChatGPT
• Gemini
• Google AI Overviews
• Google AI Mode

To find specific topic gaps, scroll down to the “Topics & Prompts” section.

You’ll see a list of thematic clusters that you can sort based on each brand’s mentions. You’ll also be able to check the estimated AI Volume for each topic. 

Use this metric as a guide to prioritize which topics represent the biggest opportunities.

To explore specific prompts, click any topic in the table.

Use the "Missing" filter for topics where AI platforms mention competitors but not your brand. 

Sort the column for one of your competitors from high to low to see topics with the highest number of mentions.

This will give you the topics where a specific competitor has a high number of mentions, while your brand is missing completely.

Review this list to prioritize the topics most relevant to your business, then expand them to see the specific prompts driving those gaps.

For a more granular view, switch to the “Prompt” view at the top of the table and apply the same “Missing” filter. 

Here you’ll find the exact questions and instructions users are giving to AI where competitors appear but your brand doesn’t.

If these prompts are relevant to your business, it means you have an AI visibility gap. 

Plan to close the gap by creating and optimizing content specifically for this topic so that AI platforms can cite your domain as a source and mention your brand when prompted. 

2. Find the sources influencing your competitors' AI mentions 

Finding the websites that influence your competitors’ AI visibility helps you measure your AI source gap.

An AI source gap is when an AI platform cites a specific source (like a third-party review site, a news outlet, or a niche blog) in responses that mention a competitor, but not your brand.

For example, consider Monday and Asana as two competing project management software platforms.

If ChatGPT recommends Asana but not Monday in an answer that cites a niche tech blog to validate that choice, that blog would be a source gap for Monday.

Identifying these gaps lets you reverse-engineer the sources of influence behind your competitors' AI mentions on the prompts that matter most. 

Much like link building outreach, you can plan outreach to pitch partnerships and mentions of your brand on these relevant sources of influence. 

To find your AI source gaps, stay in the “Competitor Research” report and click the “Sources” tab. 

You'll see a list of domains referencing you and your competitors. 

Apply the "Missing" filter to see which domains cite competitors but haven't mentioned your brand, and again sort by a competitor’s mentions.

Prioritize sources by looking at three signals:

• The number of prompts they appear in
• Their organic traffic
• The number of URLs cited from that domain

Together, these tell you how influential a source is in your category. 

Click any domain to expand it and see the exact pages mentioning your competitors.

Then group them by type to decide how to act:

• Industry publications and niche blogs: Review the specific pages citing competitors to understand the angle (a roundup, a comparison, a best-of list), then pitch editors for inclusion on those pages.
• Review and comparison sites: Find the specific listing or comparison pages referencing competitors and plan outreach to get your brand added directly to them.
• Community platforms like Reddit and Quora: Contribute directly to the specific threads AI is already pulling from.

3. Check how AI platforms represent your brand

AI visibility gaps also manifest as inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated information about your brand appearing in AI responses.

Narrative and sentiment gaps occur when AI associates competitors with beneficial traits (like reliability, security, or ease of use) more often than your brand.

To find these gaps, use the Brand Performance reports.

To get started, launch the “Brand Performance” report inside the AI Visibility Toolkit. 

Enter your domain, select a target location, and choose a target language. 

The Brand Performance report collects data from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, and Gemini.

Identify whether AI uses inaccurate information about your brand

AI platforms use information from the entire web to describe your brand, which means they can pull in outdated, misrepresented, or inaccurate information.

In the Brand Performance report, check whether:

• The sources AI cites use the right facts about your brand
• Competitors are overrepresented in the sources shaping the answer
• AI answers use outdated or inaccurate context

To find this information, head to the "Key Business Drivers by Frequency" view in the Brand Performance report. Choose a Business Driver to investigate and click on the chat icon to view the prompt.

Set “Show” to “My brand and selected competitors.”

Then, read the response to verify it's accurate and represents your brand well.

Scroll down to “Sources” to check which pages shaped the AI response. Visit each source and compare how the pages talk about you versus your rivals.

This is important especially if the AI response is unfavorable about your company.

Identify key business drivers influencing your AI narrative

The Key Business Drivers heatmap inside the Brand Performance report shows which of these attributes (like pricing, fulfillment speed, or product assortment) AI mentions most often for each brand in your category.

These are the decision-making factors AI platforms use to differentiate you from competitors. When users ask for recommendations (like "What's the best project management tool for small businesses?"), AI determines which brands "own" specific attributes: pricing, fulfillment speed, features, product assortment, or value.

Notice the trophy icon marking the leader for each driver. 

Scan for topics where competitors have the trophy and your brand ranks low. These are your narrative gaps.

Identify sentiment gaps by question

Next, you can dive deeper by analyzing your sentiment gaps by specific questions.

The Narrative Drivers report scores your brand's sentiment in AI responses to a set of specific prompts and questions, classifying it as favorable or general.

Scroll down to the “Breakdown by Question” section to see your brand's position and sentiment score for specific buyer prompts alongside each competitor.

At the top, use the following preset filters to focus on gaps. These two are most relevant for competitive analysis:

1. Answers | Non-branded: question-style prompts where you can see you and your competitors’ position of being cited and the overall sentiment 
2. Citations | Non-branded: sources that AI cites for non-branded queries in your category where your brand isn't represented.

In the “Answers | Non Branded” view, you'll see your brand's position, sentiment score, and how both have changed over time; alongside the same data for every competitor. 

You can also filter by position changes, sentiment shifts, and specific competitors to narrow the table further.

For instance, filtering for prompts where Asana doesn't appear but competitors rank #2-5 reveals questions like:

• What is the best way to manage risk registers in a project tool?
• How do engineering teams manage cross-team initiatives outside issue tracking?
• What are effective ways to manage quarterly planning and resourcing?

These are your competitive gaps.

In the “Citations | Non-branded” view, you can see the average sentiment of each brand across the prompts where a specific domain is cited. 

For example, in this first row, Asana has 92% favorable sentiment and Monday 67%. 

Once you identify sentiment gaps, close them by creating content that addresses them directly, so AI has more accurate and positive information about your brand to draw on. 

Consider publishing this type of content on your website and in reputable industry publications to increase the likelihood that the AI surfaces this information.

4. Compare your AI citation gaps against competitors

To analyze citation gaps versus your competitors, go to “Visibility Overview.” Scroll to “Topics & Sources” and note the number that appears in “Cited Pages.” 

That’s the number of unique webpages on your site that AI platforms are citing in their responses. You can compare it to your rivals’ to measure your citation gaps. 

Scroll down to “Cited Pages” to see the complete list of URLs. You can click on each URL to see the prompts it appears in. The table also shows whether the AI mentions or cites your brand, or both.

Download the data by clicking the “Export” button > “All” > “Export to CSV.” 

Then, follow the steps above for each of your competitors. Note any large differences in the number of cited pages among their domains. Often, websites with large content libraries or authoritative pages get more citations.

Once you have the CSV exports of your and your competitors’ citations, use an LLM to dig deeper into the data. It can help you quickly understand the competitor topics that AI cites the most.

Here’s an example using Claude Opus 4.8.

This is the first prompt we used: 

These CSV files contain competitor website pages that are cited the most in ChatGPT, AI Overview, AI Mode, and Gemini in the US region. Help me understand the kind of pages that are most frequently cited across the entire dataset, especially any pages under "blog" or other types of knowledge hub subfolders.

Claude extracted the main insights from 400 pages, immediately identifying that knowledge hub content dominates AI citations.

Then, we continued the competitive analysis of AI search visibility with this prompt:

What are Monday’s biggest citation gaps compared to the other domains?

Claude automatically categorized the AI citation gaps into clusters for easier analysis.

Now, you can close the competitor citation gap by publishing pages AI typically cites for those topic clusters. For example, Monday could publish a content cluster targeting team-building topics to catch up to their competitors.

How to report AI visibility shifts in client-ready reports

When working with clients, report AI visibility shifts using the following:

• Overall visibility versus their competitors
• Number of cited pages
• Number of mentions
• Sentiment and narrative shifts

Always provide an executive summary at the top of the report.

For example: “Your AI visibility grew 5 points in June, ahead of competitors whose visibility remained the same. The number of cited pages increased 3%, while the number of mentions jumped 7%. Sentiment has remained stable, and we’ve identified two new areas for improving narrative differentiation.”

If you see drastic changes, identify which AI platform is driving the change. Then, investigate if any model updates could have influenced your client’s visibility.

In Semrush’s My Reports, you can build an AI visibility report from scratch or use one of our templates.

Use the "Competitor Research" template to get a report analyzing competitors' AI visibility and how it compares with your brand.

To start, add your domain and at least one competitor. Click “Create Report.”

The tool will generate the baseline report. You can customize it by adding additional data from Semrush AI visibility tools like “Brand Performance” or “Prompt Tracking.”

My Reports also supports integrations with over 20 tools. So you can pull in data from LinkedIn Ads, Google Analytics, and any other performance tracking platform.

FAQs about finding AI visibility gaps

How can I find out which of my pages AIs cite most often?

You can find your top-cited pages using Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit. Enter your domain, go to “Visibility Overview,” and scroll down to “Topics & Sources.” 

Click on the “Cited Pages” tab. This will display all of the URLs on your website that AI platforms cite most frequently.

What's the difference between an AI citation gap and a content gap?

A content gap is a topic or keyword your competitors cover and rank for in search, but your brand doesn't. An AI citation gap is when an AI platform cites your competitor’s pages to answer prompts, but not your brand.

You close both gaps by creating content that targets those topics, and by building authority in your industry and earning visibility in key publications.

Which AI platforms does Semrush track for visibility gaps?

Semrush tracks AI visibility gaps across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode. The Brand Performance report also tracks Perplexity in addition to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Mode.

Improve your AI visibility today with Semrush

Most brands still have no clear picture of where they stand in AI-generated answers, much less where competitors are pulling ahead. 

Measuring AI visibility is still new territory, and most teams are still figuring out where to start.

But don't overcomplicate it. Treat finding AI visibility gaps as simply an additional layer to your existing competitor analysis.

With Semrush, you get a clear view of competitors and gaps in both AI Visibility and SEO. Use it to start finding gaps today so you can take action and stay ahead of the competition.