AI Visibility Optimization: How to Audit and Improve Your Brand in Answer Engines

Traditional SEO focuses on technical factors, backlinks, and website content to rank in standard search engines. AI search optimization is different. It evaluates your brand's total visibility and sentiment across AI tools like Google's AI Overviews, AI mode, and ChatGPT. If you're not showing up—or not being recommended favorably—you're missing a growing share of how people discover brands.

This guide walks you through conducting a comprehensive AI visibility optimization audit and how to prioritize fixes by impact and effort.

What an AI Search Optimization Audit Covers

An AI search optimization audit focuses on two main areas: visibility and brand sentiment. Both matter. Being visible without favorable sentiment means you appear but don't get recommended. Favorable sentiment without visibility means you're invisible to AI tools entirely.

1. Assessing Visibility and Sources

Instead of manually searching to see if your brand appears, use tools like Semrush's AI visibility toolkit to measure:

• Visibility score — how often your brand shows up in AI responses
• Number of prompts where your brand is seen
• How many of your pages are cited by AI tools

Topic Opportunities

Identify topics where competitors are mentioned by AI tools but you are not. These are content gaps you need to fill. If AI recommends a competitor when users ask "best [category] for [use case]" and you're absent, that's a direct opportunity to create or improve content that targets that query.

Source Opportunities

AI tools pull their answers from specific websites—known as sources. If you can get your brand featured on these high-traffic, authoritative sites, you increase your chances of being recommended by the AI. Identifying which sources feature your competitors serves as a highly effective hit list for your digital PR efforts. Prioritize earning mentions on those sites over generic link-building.

2. Analyzing Brand Sentiment and Perception

Being visible is only half the battle. Your brand needs to be recommended favorably. AI tools assess your brand's sentiment and compare it against competitors.

Use Sentiment as a Strategy Tool

By analyzing the perception and narrative drivers behind AI responses, you can uncover exactly what the AI—and by extension, your customers—considers to be your brand's strengths and weaknesses. This feedback can inform business strategy. For example, if AI consistently labels your brand as having unclear pricing, fixing the underlying business issue and updating your website can quickly erase that negative AI sentiment. AI tools generate real-time answers based on current web data, so changes on your site and across the web can shift sentiment relatively fast.

How to Prioritize Fixes

When addressing issues found in your audit, order your tasks by impact and effort. Use this framework:

1. Fix brand, product, or service inaccuracies (highest priority)

Correcting misrepresentations is the top priority. False information could be actively costing you sales. If AI is citing outdated features, wrong pricing, or incorrect positioning, fix those first—both on your site and anywhere else you control or influence.

2. Address negative or neutral sentiment

Resolve underlying issues related to customer service, pricing, or pushy marketing that might be suppressing AI recommendations. Negative reviews, unclear pricing pages, or aggressive sales language can all feed into how AI describes your brand. Fix the root cause, then update your owned content and work on earned coverage.

3. Fill missing mentions and citations

If your blog or knowledge base isn't being picked up by AI tools, improve your site's topical authority and fill content gaps. Create or expand content that directly answers the questions AI tools are being asked. Structure content clearly so it's easy for AI to extract and cite.

4. Launch digital PR campaigns

If you have low visibility on the third-party websites that AI uses as sources, use structured PR campaigns to earn those mentions over time. This is a longer-term play but can significantly improve how often and how favorably AI recommends your brand.

Summary

An AI visibility optimization audit evaluates your brand across answer engines—not just search rankings. Focus on visibility (where you appear and which sources cite you) and sentiment (how favorably you're described). Use the prioritization framework: fix inaccuracies first, then sentiment, then content gaps, then digital PR. AI tools update in near real time, so improvements to your site and reputation can translate into better AI visibility relatively quickly.