Use Semrush to Benchmark Brand Mentions in AI Answers

AI platforms like Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT are shaping buying decisions before customers even visit a website. 

When people turn to AI for purchasing guidance, they’re asking the system to make sense of a crowded market and point them in the right direction. 

Traditional search handled this by ranking pages and letting buyers compare options themselves through metrics like rankings, impressions, and clicks.

AI answers change the structure of the decision. 

Instead of presenting a list to evaluate, the system synthesizes what it knows and names a short set of brands it believes fit best. 

If your brand isn't being mentioned in AI answers, another brand often is—meaning you may be losing visibility before a click even happens.

Semrush helps you track when, how, and where these AI platforms mention your brand, and benchmark that visibility against competitors.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to:

• Identify your AI competitors
• Benchmark AI brand mentions  
• Measure visibility by topic or campaign
• Analyze sentiment and narrative
• Build an ongoing AI visibility report

The workflows below range from quick baseline checks to deeper competitive analysis, depending on the level of access available.  

1. Identify Your Brand’s Competitors  

Before you can benchmark your AI mentions, start by choosing which brands to compare against.

These AI competitors don’t always match your traditional SEO competitors, as AI systems may surface brands based on different signals and narratives.

Competitor benchmarking gives your visibility numbers context. Without the context of the competition, it’s difficult to know whether your AI visibility score means you’re a leader, a peer, or an outlier. 

The Quick Way: Start with Brands You Already Know Are Competitors  

You probably already have a short list in mind of your close competitors. For a benchmark, aim to pick 3-5 close competitors who are similar in audience size and cover similar topics and services as you. 

With a list of at least 3 competitors, you can start benchmarking in Semrush. If you’re ready, jump to step 2 of this article. 

If you don’t know which competitors you should benchmark against, you can use Semrush (even with a free account) to find your top competitors in search.

Find Your Organic Search Competitors with Semrush

With a free Semrush account, you can use the Organic Research Competitors report to generate a list of competitors based on shared keywords and search visibility.  

Enter your domain in the Organic Research section and click the Competitors tab to see an automatic comparison of your closest search rivals.

For example, when using the Warby Parker website, the tool returns Zenni Optical, Eyebuy Direct, Vision Works, Frames Direct, and LensCrafters as competitors, along with a visual of your positioning relative to them.

Identify AI Search Competitors with Semrush One 

With Semrush One, you can see who competes with you the most on AI platforms with the Competitor Research report in the AI Visibility Toolkit. 

This report compares how often brands appear across AI answers on Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and more. The tool automatically suggests competing domains, which you can adjust as needed.

Enter any brand, and the tool will suggest up to four competing domains to research. 

In this case, Zenni Optical, Eyebuydirect, Glasses.com, and Ray-Ban were chosen for comparison against Warby Parker. 

You can view alternative competitors by clicking the drop-downs or typing in any specific domain. 

2. Measure Each Competitor’s Brand Mentions in AI Answers

With your comparison set defined, the next step is to figure out how often AI systems mention each brand. 

Keep in mind: counting brand mentions will tell you how often a brand gets mentioned, but not why the brand is mentioned. A mention could be positive, neutral, or even negative. 

This is why mention counts should be read as a starting signal, not a performance verdict on their own.

We’ll explore this later in the post, but for now, start by benchmarking the total number of mentions. 

Semrush offers several ways to measure AI mentions depending on your access level, from free snapshots to deeper competitive reports. 

Free tools are useful for directional checks, while paid reports support deeper trend analysis and competitive comparisons.

Use the Free Semrush AI Search Visibility Checker

If you want a fast, free snapshot, start with the free AI Search Visibility Checker.

Enter your brand URL to see an automatic comparison between you and two competitors.

In this example, Warby Parker shows higher AI visibility, more AI mentions, and a larger estimated audience reach than Zenni Optical and EyeBuyDirect, indicating a stronger overall AI presence.

With a Free Semrush Account: Use Domain Overview

With a free Semrush account, Domain Overview provides quick AI visibility metrics, such as mentions, cited pages, and your AI visibility score, showing how strongly AI already references your brand.  

Just enter your brand’s URL to review the AI Search widget. 

In this example, Warby Parker shows an AI Visibility score of 75, with 10.1K AI mentions, and 5.8K cited pages. The breakdown below shows that ChatGPT, AI Overview, and AI Mode already frequently reference the brand.  

Repeat this process for each competitor to identify which brands are winning on each AI platform.

With Semrush One: Use the Competitor Research Report

If you’re using Semrush One, revisit the AI Toolkit's Competitor Research report and click the “Mentions” toggle to see how often each brand appears in AI answers across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT.

In the example shown, Warby Parker, Zenni Optical, Eyebuydirect, LensCrafters, and Frames Direct are compared side by side, making it easy to see which brands AI systems mention most often and how those positions change month to month. 

Here, Warby Parker leads all competitors except LensCrafters, which suggests LensCrafters may be referenced more consistently across the prompts AI draws from.

For Warby Parker, this is a cue to check whether their brand is answering the same questions AI is responding to. 

If those questions are missing, that points to content to create; if they’re already covered, it signals a need to improve how clearly those answers are presented or where they’re being cited.

3. Analyze Where AI Mentions Come from (and Why They Happen)

Mention totals tell you how often brands appear. What they don’t show is how those brands are being described, positioned, or contextualized. 

A brand can appear frequently while being framed narrowly, inaccurately, or even unfavorably.

Without narrative context, visibility alone can give a false sense of competitive strength. 

Narrative analysis fills that gap.

Looking at which topics trigger mentions and how brands are described shows how AI is positioning a brand, and where that narrative needs to be corrected or reinforced.

To understand what’s driving those patterns, examine the topics and intents behind the mentions. Semrush’s Prompt Research and Brand Performance tools can help uncover the patterns shaping AI-driven visibility.

Use Prompt Research to Benchmark Mentions by Topic or Category

The Prompt Research report lets you enter any topic and see which brands AI mentions the most across relevant prompts and queries. 

This helps you understand which competitors lead particular themes if your brand mentions vary with different user journeys.

To use the Prompt Research tool, enter a search phrase, click “Analyze,” and open the “Brands” tab.

For example:

Virtual Try-On Glasses

This shows you which companies AI systems most frequently include in answers for that topic. You can check several topics in a row and capture screenshots to see how competitive visibility shifts by intent. 

Affordable Glasses

Designer Glasses

In these reports, it’s evident that:

• Warby Parker often leads virtual try-on-related prompts
• Eyebuydirect and Zenni Optical lead the affordability topics
• Luxury brands like Gucci and Versace rise to the top for designer queries

These patterns show which topics AI systems most often associate with each brand, and where competitors are more commonly included for the same types of questions.

While these topic-level mentions connect your brand to specific searches, they don’t yet explain the sentiment behind those connections. AI platforms will mention specific qualities or pros and cons when mentioning brands in a response. 

Semrush also offers a quick way to get a breakdown of how AI sees you and your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.

Use Brand Performance to Understand AI Narratives

Brand Performance reveals the reasons behind your AI brand mentions. 

You’ll learn which attributes AI systems most strongly associate with your brand, whether that’s value, customer trust, standout convenience, or some other recurring advantage AI detects in your content.

Once you’ve set up your brand profile in this report, scroll down to the Key Business Drivers by Frequency report to see:

• Which features or benefits are most frequently associated with your brand
• How competitors score on the same drivers
• Which themes dominate your category, and where there are gaps you could own

In the eyewear example, Warby Parker leads in areas like home and virtual try-on experiences and customer-friendly returns and guarantees, while competitors outperform in areas like price bundles and free shipping. If AI repeatedly links your brand to convenience but not cost, you’ll show up in prompts about experience and fit while competitors capture searches focused on “cheap” or “budget” eyewear.

Understanding these patterns helps you adjust your messaging so that more of the pages LLMs reinforce the traits you want to be known for.

Once you understand the landscape, it’s time to present the data.  

4. Create a Simple AI Visibility Benchmark Report

You’ve gathered the data, now make it shareable with AI Visibility reporting. 

You can start with the basics: create a simple table comparing each brand’s total AI mentions to get a quick “top of the leaderboard” snapshot. You can copy the numbers directly from Semrush or capture screenshots for easy review.

For many teams, this lightweight benchmark is enough to guide early AI visibility decisions. 

* Table was made with data from Domain Overview using a free Semrush account

To go deeper, expand your table to include:

• Topic-level visibility from Prompt Research: shows which searches each brand “wins”
• Key business drivers from Brand Performance: shows  the why AI choices, like perceived value or consumer trust

This turns a static scoreboard into real insight. It tells you whether a competitor is beating you because of pricing signals, trust indicators, convenience attributes, or simply because they dominate more topics.

Need reporting automation? 

Semrush’s My Reports lets you build a monthly AI visibility dashboard in minutes. You can drag in widgets from the AI Brand Performance and Visibility Overview tools and build your report from scratch.

Or you can use preset templates to generate a clean, monthly AI visibility dashboard with zero design decisions.Either way, Semrush updates the data automatically.  

Follow these steps: Create an SEO + AI Search Marketing Report [+Template]

Ready to climb the AI mentions leaderboard?

Tips to Increase Your AI Mentions

Once you know how your brand compares, you can adjust your content based on where and how your brand appears in AI answers. Below are several ways to work toward greater AI visibility.

Make Your Content Easy for AI (and People) to Understand

Google’s AI Overviews are most likely to cite pages that are:

• Well-structured (use headers, lists, short paragraphs)
• Direct (answer the question immediately)
• Helpful (clarify concepts, include definitions, show steps)

This doesn’t mean rewriting all of your content for AI; it means structuring key information so both users and AI systems can interpret it quickly. 

For example,to target AI Overviews for a query like “which glasses are best for round faces,” an eyewear brand can create a short, scannable page that answers this question.

Learn more in: How to Rank in AI Overviews

Reinforce the Brand Qualities You Want AI to Associate With You

AI models learn through consensus. When your brand consistently reinforces the same strengths, like affordability, fast shipping, and sustainability, AI becomes more confident connecting those qualities with your brand.

Consistency builds memorability, for users and AI. This is the essence of LLM seeding, or shaping how AI perceives your brand by repeating key themes across many pages.

For instance, if free home try-on for eyewear is a signature feature, this topic should show up in your product descriptions, FAQs, category pages, etc. When AI sees this benefit repeatedly, it’s more likely to include you in responses to prompts surrounding try-on options.

Learn more in: LLM Seeding: An AI Search Strategy to Get Mentioned and Cited

Target Topics Your Audience Is Already Using

Semrush’s Prompt Research tool reveals the topics where AI already recommends other brands. These are high-impact opportunities.

For example, if Zenni Optical frequently appears for affordability-related topics such as “best affordable glasses” and “cheap prescription glasses for kids,” and your brand doesn’t, you can create or refine content that speaks directly to those needs.

This could include pages or sections that:

• highlight budget-friendly options
• compare price tiers
• provide clear recommendations for kids’ eyewear
• include a structured section such as “Affordable Options for Kids”

Aligning your content to the language people (and AI systems) already use makes it more likely that AI will recognize your brand as relevant and mention you in future answers.

Learn more in: How We're Driving LLM Visibility at Semrush

Make AI Visibility Measurable: Turn Mentions into a Repeatable Metric

AI is changing how customers discover brands, and Semrush makes that shift measurable.

Instead of guessing which content matters, you can monitor which questions AI includes your brand in, how it’s described across topics, and which competitors appear alongside you. 

That visibility informs decisions around content priorities, brand positioning, and competitive analysis.