How to Use Semrush for Keyword Research and AI Visibility

How can I use Semrush to find the right keywords for my content?

Keyword research shows you what your audience searches for. You can use that information to create content that appears in search results and AI citations on platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.

This guide walks through how to use Semrush for keyword research. You’ll learn to identify quick wins from your existing rankings, discover new search terms, analyze competitor gaps, and organize keywords into clusters for maximum impact.

Start with Your Current Semrush Keyword Rankings

Your existing rankings offer the fastest path to improved visibility. Open Organic Rankings in Semrush and enter your domain. The Overview report shows your total ranking keywords, estimated traffic, and trending data.

Click the Positions tab and scroll to the Organic Search Positions table. This shows keywords your site already ranks for—topics where you have existing authority and the quickest opportunities to boost visibility.

Focus on keywords worth prioritizing with these filters:

• Position: 7-20 (ranking just below where pages earn clicks)
• Volume: 100+ (meaningful search demand exists)
• Keyword Difficulty: Under 50% (avoids the most competitive terms)

Select relevant keywords and save them using the checkbox feature and the “Add to keyword list” button. Build on this list as you work through the remaining research steps.

You can evaluate individual keywords in depth by clicking on them to open the Keyword Overview report. This shows keyword metrics and SERP analysis for deeper insight.

Use Semrush Keyword Research Tools to Find New Opportunities

The Keyword Magic Tool generates new keyword ideas and helps you narrow them down to opportunities you can compete for. Enter a term related to your business and add your domain in the AI-powered field.

The tool returns a list of keywords with metrics that help you evaluate each opportunity. Focus on these key signals:

• Search Volume: estimated monthly searches for the keyword
• Keyword Difficulty (KD %): how difficult it is to rank in the top 10 overall
• Personal Keyword Difficulty (PKD %): how difficult it is for your specific domain to rank

If your PKD percentage is close to or lower than the KD percentage, you’re well-positioned to compete. If it’s much higher, your site lacks the authority needed to rank for that keyword yet.

Build authority in that topic by creating content around related, less competitive terms first. As your site becomes more established, you can return to these competitive keywords.

Target Question-Based Keywords in Semrush

The Questions filter helps you find long-tail terms containing your seed term. These reflect how people naturally ask questions in search engines—and increasingly, how they prompt AI tools.

Answer-style content built around these questions helps websites gain visibility in both traditional rankings and AI citations.

Discover AI-Specific Search Opportunities

Search data shows what people type into Google, but not how they interact with AI tools. To uncover prompts and topics people ask AI about, use Prompt Research in the AI Visibility Toolkit.

Enter a topic to see how it breaks down into subtopics and prompts. The Topics tab gives you a high-level view of related topics along with their AI search demand. This helps you quickly identify areas worth exploring.

Click into a topic to expand it and review the Prompts. Here you’ll see actual questions users ask, along with example AI responses and a list of brands mentioned and cited sources.

Use these results to understand how people phrase questions and what brands get mentioned by AI for relevant topics. These are topics you can use to guide your content for AI platform visibility.

Find Semrush Keyword Research Gaps Through Competitor Analysis

Your competitors capture visibility for topics you may be missing. Use their performance to identify where you should expand or improve your content.

Identify Missing Keywords in Search Results

The Keyword Gap tool compares your site against competitors. Enter your domain along with a few competitors, select “Organic keywords,” and click the Missing tab.

This shows keywords your competitors rank for that you don’t. These represent opportunities to create content around and potentially outperform the competition.

Review them for relevant, non-branded keywords tied to your core topics. These represent clear opportunities to cover new topics and compete for organic traffic.

Find Gaps in AI Platform Visibility

To find gaps in AI-driven results, use the Competitor Research report in the AI Visibility Toolkit. Enter your domain and your top competitors into Competitor Research and scroll down to the Topics & Prompts section.

Click the Prompts and Missing toggles to see topics where your competitors get mentioned but you don’t. Similar to the Keyword Gap, this tool shows you topics where your competitors get AI mentions while you don’t.

As you review both Keyword Gap and Competitor Research reports, note the keywords and prompts relevant to your business and aligned with your existing or planned content.

Focus on gaps that represent meaningful topics, not just individual terms. These are areas where expanding or improving your content helps you compete for visibility across both search and AI.

Transform Keywords into Content Clusters

Once you have a complete keyword list, use the Keyword Strategy Builder to group related terms into keyword clusters. With keyword clusters, you target an entire cluster with a single page. This allows the page to show for more queries.

Open your keyword list in the Keyword Strategy Builder and click “Cluster this list” to automatically group related terms. The resulting view tells you how many pages you should create and the search volume of each cluster a page will target.

This gives you a sense of the demand behind each topic. Expand a cluster to review the keywords, metrics, and ranking pages.

Inside each cluster, you’ll see the keywords grouped together, their search volume and difficulty, and examples of pages currently ranking. Review these together to understand what the topic covers.

The grouped keywords show how people search for the topic, while the ranking pages show what type of content is currently performing. This is where your keyword lists become your publishing plan to create highly visible content that attracts visitors.

After you’ve organized your keywords into clusters using Semrush’s Keyword Strategy Builder, consider using a content brief tool like WriterZen to translate those clusters into actionable content plans. WriterZen analyzes top-ranking content for your target keywords and generates detailed briefs with recommended headings, semantic keywords, and content structure—streamlining the path from keyword research to content creation.

Monitor Your Keyword Performance

Once you’ve found your keywords, monitor whether you’re achieving positive results as you create or optimize content to target them. Use Semrush’s Position Tracking tool to monitor performance for your target keywords.

Follow the prompts to set up your project by adding your keyword list and choosing your platform to track visibility (Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc).

You’ll see:

• Daily visibility changes for your target keywords
• How your rankings compare to your competitors
• Which pages rank for each keyword
• Which SERP features (like AI Overviews) appear in results

The Summary widget provides a quick overview of recent changes with links to detailed reports. This ongoing monitoring helps you understand which content improvements drive results and where you need to adjust your approach.

The process outlined above gives you a systematic approach to how to use Semrush for keyword research. Start with your existing rankings to find quick wins, expand into new keyword opportunities, analyze competitor gaps, and organize everything into actionable content clusters.

While Semrush excels at keyword discovery and clustering, many teams struggle with the next step: turning those keyword clusters into comprehensive content briefs and managing the entire content creation workflow. WriterZen bridges this gap by automating content brief creation from your keyword research and providing a unified platform for your entire SEO content workflow. You can explore how it streamlines the transition from keyword research to published content.