The Competitor Research Report is part of Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit and lets you compare your brand’s presence in AI-generated search results against competitors. Use it to uncover visibility gaps, benchmark against rivals, and identify the prompts and topics where others are getting cited, but you aren’t.
What the Report Gives You
- Competitor Mentions: See how often competitors are mentioned versus your brand across AI platforms.
- Topic & Prompt Gaps: Identify where rivals appear in responses, but your brand is missing.
- Visibility Benchmarks: Measure your brand’s relative presence in AI-generated answers compared to others.
- Strategic Opportunities: Spot strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for first-mover advantage.
How to Access the Report
- Go to AI Visibility Toolkit → Competitor Research.
- Enter your domain in the search bar, and add up to 4 competitor domains for comparison (Semrush will suggest competitors for you).
- Click Run Competitor Analysis.
How to Use the Report
Step 1. Benchmark AI Visibility Across Competitors
- At the top of the report, you’ll see a graph comparing your domain’s AI Visibility, Audience, and Mentions against competitors. Over time, this view will populate with six months of historical data.
- Toggle between metrics to see where you stand.
- AI Visibility: A benchmark score (0–100) showing how often a brand appears in AI-generated answers compared to its competitors.
- Audience: Used to approximate the scale of a brand’s exposure, this is an estimate of the total query audience across all topics where the brand appears.
- Mentions: The total number of prompts in which a brand is included in the text of AI responses. Each mention represents visibility in a unique AI query.
Step 2. Analyze Topics & Prompts
- Scroll down to the Topics & Prompts table.
- Use the filter tabs in the table header to find:
- Strong topics/prompts: Topics or prompts where your brand is more visible than competitors.
- Weak topics/prompts: Topics or prompts where your visibility is lower than that of competitors.
- Missing topics/prompts: Topics or prompts where competitors are cited but your brand is not.
- To quickly locate specific data, use the search bar in the table header to filter results by topic name, prompt name, or domain. Also, you can filter your results by search demand using the AI Volume drop-down filter located next to the search bar. Simply click the drop-down to select a preset range or define your own custom range.
The topics in the table represent your competitive gaps — areas where your brand isn’t represented in AI platforms. Take note of any that look like good opportunities for your brand to cover, and consider developing a strategy to increase your visibility in AI for that topic.
Step 3. Send Prompts and Topics Directly to Prompt Tracking
When you’ve found a topic or prompt that you’re interested in optimizing for, use the Monitor all Prompts button to add these prompts to your Prompt Tracking campaign.
After you start tracking, you’ll be able to track daily updates on your AI visibility for that topic.
Step 4. Spot Citation Opportunities
- Switch the view to Sources. You can use the search bar here to look for specific external domains cited by AI.
- This shows all the domains cited by AI when one of these brands is mentioned in an AI response.
- The Missing filter shows which external domains are cited sources in AI answers that mention your competitors — but not you.
- These sources represent potential outreach or content opportunities to boost your own visibility.
Data & Metrics Explained
Where the data comes from
- Prompt Research uses Semrush’s prompt database of 317M+ AI queries, covering Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, and ChatGPT, with more platforms coming soon.
- Data is refreshed daily on a rolling basis.
- Reports can be run up to 300 times per day.
Key metrics
- AI Visibility: Each brand’s overall presence across all relevant prompts.
- AI Volume: The estimated number of search queries the topic gets on a selected AI Platform.
- Audience: Estimated exposure level for the prompts mentioning the brand.
- Mentions: Number of prompts where a brand is included in AI responses.
- Missing Prompts: Prompts where competitors are mentioned in the AI answer but your brand is not — new visibility opportunities.
- Missing Sources: Domains that are cited by AI when competitors are mentioned in the AI answer but your brand is not — new visibility opportunities.