TL;DR Summary:
AI Visibility Audits: Semrush says brands need to check whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews mention them at all, not just where they rank in search.Find the Gaps: The audit spots which pages earn citations, which topics competitors own, and where your brand is missing from high-value prompts.Fix the Foundations: Start with technical issues like weak internal linking and missing llms.txt, then improve cited pages and fill content gaps over time.Track Ongoing Signal: Semrush’s example shows that sentiment, share of voice, and third-party sources all shape how AI talks about your brand.Does ChatGPT recommend your brand when someone asks about your product category? Semrush published a guide on September 23, 2026, explaining how to run an AI visibility audit, a structured check of whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews name your brand at all. This matters now because most companies track Google rankings closely but have no idea how often AI tools mention them, or skip them entirely, until a customer brings it up.
What an AI Visibility Audit Actually Measures
An AI visibility audit checks whether AI systems trust your brand enough to name it in generated answers. This differs from a normal ranking check. Semrush’s process looks at crawlable content, consistent entity signals, and whether other sources back up claims about your brand. In a worked example using the shoe brand Allbirds, Semrush found 4.9 thousand mentions and 1.9 thousand cited pages across AI platforms including ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini.
Running the Six-Step AI Visibility Audit Process
Semrush lays out six steps for the audit. First, you establish a baseline of mentions and cited pages, then compare that baseline against competitors. Second, you identify which existing pages already earn AI citations. For Allbirds, educational and comparison pages earned more citations than product pages, a sign to build more content in that format. Third, you find topics where your brand is missing. Allbirds showed gaps in high-volume topics like “Running Shoes” and “Diabetic and Neuropathy Shoes,” where competitors appeared and Allbirds did not. Manually rechecking these baselines and gaps every few weeks is tedious, which is why tools like Nuwtonic SEO exist to monitor whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews are citing or mentioning your brand on an ongoing basis, then flag the visibility gaps as prioritized fixes rather than a one-time report.
Why Brand Sentiment Changes the AI Visibility Audit Score
Step four covers sentiment and share of voice. AI systems describe brands with pros and cons instead of ranking them by web address. Allbirds held an 88 percent favorable sentiment score and a 14 percent share of voice against competitors in the Semrush example. Step five looks at third-party sources shaping those answers, including Reddit, YouTube, Quora, LinkedIn, and Medium. Semrush recommends checking which external domains get cited most often in your category, since those are the places your brand needs a presence.
Site-Level Fixes That Support Your AI Visibility Audit Results
Step six checks technical issues that block AI systems from reading your site clearly. Semrush names three common problems: internal links without descriptive text, pages with only one incoming internal link, and a missing llms.txt file, a text file that tells AI systems how to interpret your content. None of these fully block crawling. However, they make most pages harder for AI to use as sources, so AI ends up citing only a small number of your clearest pages.
What to Do After Completing an AI Visibility Audit
Semrush suggests a three-stage timeline. In week one, fix technical access issues site-wide. Over weeks two through four, improve pages that aren’t yet cited by making them clearer and more complete. Over months two and three, build new content to close topic gaps found in step three. Semrush states a single marketer can run this whole process without an agency or a separate data team.
Start by checking whether your brand shows up at all when someone asks an AI tool about your category. If you find gaps, fix technical access issues first, since Semrush notes these have site-wide impact before any content work pays off. Watch your cited pages and sentiment scores over time rather than treating this as a one-time check. If you want this kind of AI visibility audit running continuously rather than as a one-off check, Nuwtonic SEO tracks brand citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI while auto-generating the fixes needed to close visibility gaps.
