Semrush Tutorial 2026 - Master SEO & AEO with Semrush One

Key Takeaways

This is the complete Semrush tutorial. Whether you're brand new to SEO or you've heard about AEO and want to understand how AI search works, this video covers everything you need. I've partnered with Semrush to walk you through the entire platform step-by-step. We'll find out what your audience is searching for on Google and what they're asking AI. Build a content plan, fix what's holding your site back, and track your progress over time. And by the end, you'll be able to pull a report like this. This is Semrush showing you how AI talks about your brand versus competitors. And you'll know exactly what to do about it to increase your brand's visibility online. We'll get there step-by-step. So, let's start by getting you set up inside Semrush. I'll show you what Semrush One is, how it's organized, and we'll add our first website so we have something to work with. There's a link in the description that gives you 14 days free. That's double the normal 7-day trial. You won't be charged during the trial, and you can follow along with everything I'm about to show you. If you want to get the most out of this video, open it up now and do this alongside me. Use the link on screen or in the description below. You'll see right away that the extended 14-day trial has already been applied because you clicked our link. Go ahead and click the purple button to get started. You'll be prompted to create your account. Go ahead and sign up with Google or use your email address. I'll use my email address. You'll need to verify your email. Open your inbox and grab the six-digit code, then paste it in here. Next, they ask for your credit card to activate the trial, but I want to point out they don't charge anything today. Right here, it shows $0, and you get 14 days free, so you can follow along with everything in this tutorial for free. Go ahead and enter your card information and then click subscribe. Once you do that, you'll see that your trial's been activated via a $1 reversible transaction. So, essentially, they've charged your card $1, but they're going to give that back to you right away. Go ahead and click continue. Next, you can add your name and phone number if you want to opt in to receive text messages, but you can also go ahead and click skip. So, I'm going to do that. And just like that, we've landed in the dashboard with everything configured for your Semrush One subscription. Semrush One is Semrush's newest plan, and it combines two things. First, their SEO toolkit. That's for getting your website to rank higher in Google. Second, their AI visibility toolkit. That's for tracking how your brand shows up in AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI search. Before, you needed separate plans for each. Now, it's all in one place. Let's take a quick look around the dashboard. On the left, you'll see a sidebar. At the top, you have home, SEO toolkit, and AI visibility toolkit. Those are what's included in your Semrush One plan, and they're what we'll use today. Below the divider line, you'll see other toolkits like traffic and market, local, content, social. Those are all available add-ons that you can subscribe to separately, but we don't need those today. Let's start by creating a project. Enter your website domain in the bar in the center of the page. I'm going to use Brightland as our example throughout this video. They make olive oil. I'm not affiliated with them. I just picked a real company so you can see how this works in practice. After entering the domain, click start now. And right away, before we've done anything, Semrush gives you a snapshot of where your brand stands. Here, you can see Brightland's site health and their organic traffic trend, their AI visibility, all in one row. Think of this as your starting point. Now, let's figure out how to improve these numbers. Remember that AI report I showed you at the beginning? We're going to get there, but first, we need to build up the foundation so you actually understand what it's telling you. Let's start with the research. Now that your account is set up, the first thing you want to do is figure out what people are actually searching for, both in Google and in AI tools. That's what research is, and it's the foundation of everything else. When someone goes to Google and types in a question like, "Best olive oil for cooking?" the websites that show up on that first page didn't get there by accident. They did something called SEO, search engine optimization. It's basically the process of making your website show up when people search for things related to your business. But, there's a second game to win now, and I'll show you exactly what I mean in a second. Okay, first, on the left side, under the SEO tools, scroll down and find and click on the Keyword Magic tool. Here, we want to search for a really broad topic related to our business. This will be our seed keyword. For example, let's search for olive oil. And then here, on the Keyword Magic tool page, Semrush has pulled in a whole list of keywords that are similar to our seed keyword. So, we have other keywords like extra virgin olive oil, Graza olive oil, olive oil and extra virgin. See, these are all related to our main keyword. This is useful because we can use these other keywords to find opportunities to rank that might be easier than our main keyword. This might feel like a lot of information to look at, but let me break it down for you. Here, we have several important columns: intent, volume, and KD. Let's start with volume. Volume is the number of searches that people are doing for each keyword per month. KD, which stands for keyword difficulty, is how hard it would be to rank for each of these keywords, with higher numbers being more difficult. And then intent tells you what the person wants. Are they looking to buy, learn, or just browse? There are four different intent types. I, or informational, means the searcher wants to learn something. N, or navigational, the searcher is looking for a specific website or brand. C, or commercial, the searcher is researching before a purchase. T, or transactional, the searcher is ready to buy or take action. Now, to identify keyword opportunities, you could just scroll through here and look for ones you like. Or, Semrush makes it easy to really narrow it down and find the best opportunities using filters. The first filter I recommend using to get started is the KD percentage filter. If you click into that, you can set a range for how difficult you want your keywords to be to rank for. The difficult range starts at 50% and up. So, let's set a custom range from 0 to 49 to find easier keywords to rank for. You can see it narrows it down and removes the most difficult ones. Next, we want to make sure there's actually a good amount of people searching for this search term every month. So, here we can add a filter for volume. Let's make sure that we are selecting keywords that have at least 5,000 for their volume. And here, we're left with a list of keywords that will be easier to rank for and have decent volume. Just to the left of this list, there's this whole other column here that shows you topic clusters. So, you can drill deeper and identify keyword opportunities based on category. When you identify a keyword you like in the list, you can get more information about it by clicking this little icon to the right of the keyword. This will open the keyword overview. This mini keyword overview is a small version of the full keyword overview page, and it shows you all the most important stats at a quick glance. In the upper left, we have volume. At the very top, there's global volume, and then they show you splits by country. In the upper right, you've got KD percentage. You've already seen this. It shows you the search features, search intent, cost per click, and trend over time. Then, it'll also show you related questions and the search volume for each of those. Show you some additional related keywords, and then in the bottom, it shows you the SERP analysis. SERP stands for search engine results page, and this is a quick preview of what would actually show up when you search for this keyword on Google. And you can see right here at the top of this list, before any of the actual search results, is this AI overview. So, the first thing a searcher sees isn't even a website. It's an AI-generated answer. And that's why we really need to think about AI visibility, not just traditional SEO rankings. The question isn't, "How do I rank on page one?" Now, it's, "How do I get my site mentioned in that AI answer at the top?" What you see here is happening for more and more keywords every day. Google shows an AI-generated answer before any organic results. And it's not just Google. People are going straight to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and other chat tools to answer questions, too. Optimizing for those AI answers is called AEO, answer engine optimization. It's the same idea as SEO, it's just a different playing field. Semrush One tracks both. So, as we go through each tool today, I'll show you how it helps with Google rankings and with AI visibility. When you're done looking at this mini overview, you can click X in the upper right. When you're starting out, I don't recommend chasing the absolute biggest keywords. You want to start with keywords that are low-hanging fruit. These are often keywords that have low difficulty and a decent number of searches. You're more likely to rank for these and more likely to get real traffic. For example, here in this list, we have, "Is olive a seed oil?" This is a question that could be answered, and it has still 14.8 thousand searches per month and a low keyword difficulty. This means we could create some content and very easily start to rank. When you identify a keyword opportunity like this, something that you could rank for, you can add it to your keyword strategy list by clicking the plus button to the left side. The first time you do this, you'll need to name your first list that you put it on. Let's call this month one focus. These will be all the keywords I want to focus on during month one of using Semrush. You'll click the check mark to lock it in. And now, any other keywords that we want to target, we can simply click the plus button to the left of it, and it'll automatically get added to the same list. While we're here, I recommend going through and adding your top 10 to 15 keyword opportunities to a list. Later, I'll show you how to send that list to other Semrush tools or export it as a spreadsheet. All right, so we just saw that AI is taking up the top spot in search results. The next question is, what exactly are people asking AI? And how do we make sure our brand shows up in those answers? That's what prompt research is for. On the left side, go to the AI visibility toolkit and then click prompt research. This functions very similarly to that keyword magic tool we just used. You want to enter a high-level topic to analyze. So, let's enter olive oil for Brightland, but you can enter whatever high-level topic makes sense for you. Click analyze when you're ready to search. And here's the results page. The top bar shows us some really important stats at a quick glance. For example, on the left side we can see that the total volume with AI tools searches for this topic per month are 3.2 million. This spans 706 subtopics, 19.9 thousand prompts, five different intent types, 15.3 thousand brands, and 23.3 thousand source domains. So, let's take a look at the related topics here. I'm going to close out this pop-up. Just like the keyword magic tool showed us keywords that were related to our seed keyword, the prompt research tool shows us subtopics that are related to the bigger topic. For example, this first one here we have olive oil and its benefits. And if you click into it using the arrow at the left, you can see a list of prompts that are being searched for as well as the AI response. The right column shows you the brands that are mentioned or how many of them there are. And it also shows you the sources. In our case here, we can see that people are searching quite a bit for best olive oils to buy. That's great to know that people are asking that of AI. And we can click view full response to see what the Google AI summary is telling people. This pop-up shows us here the prompt at the top. So, someone searches on Google for best olive oils to buy, the Google AI response comes back something like this. It gives the top paragraph here explaining a few different brands, lists some best olive oils to buy, and then goes on to explain other things like tips for buying quality olive oil, it lists a bunch of different resources, and you can scroll through it. This is quite interesting to look at, uh and there's a lot of information here. The top right shows you all of the different brands that are mentioned. We can actually see Brightland is mentioned, so that's good. It's mentioned along all these other brands though, and so we definitely want to try to see what we can do to get Brightland featured a little bit more prominently. It shows you all the sources down here, and this is quite information dense. So, look at it, but don't get overwhelmed. Just scan through, see if your brand is being mentioned or not, and then from there you can decide if it's worth targeting this keyword. All right, see the pattern? Keywords are what people type into Google, prompts are what people ask AI. It's the same intent, just different platforms. And Semrush One lets you research both from the same dashboard. That's the whole point of this tool. Okay, so we've got some thorough research here. How do you take action on this though? Well, what you can do is you can create content to target one of these keywords. Like in our example here, if we wanted to create some content to try to target and rank better for best olive oils to buy and get AI talking about us more, the easiest thing you can do is click create content. That will route you into Semrush's content toolkit. Now, this is an add-on beyond the Semrush One plan that we've just signed up for, but you can try it out free with a trial for 7 days. This will get you access to their AI article generator. It's a really powerful, robust toolkit that lets you create entire articles that are optimized to help you rank better for your selected keywords and prompts. And it'll also give you access to their SEO brief generator. This helps you generate briefs if you're working with a marketing agency or a copywriter and you want to brief them quickly on the kind of content you want to create to rank better. I highly recommend checking out this content toolkit because it's a really easy way to supercharge your content creation efforts. That said, it's beyond the scope of what we're going to cover today. Next in this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to spy on your competitors. On the left side, under the SEO toolkit, click organic rankings. Here you can plug in the domain for one of your competitors. For example, let's check out graza.co. This is a competitor for Brightland. So, this page here shows us every keyword that our competitor ranks for. You can look at top keywords, see what they're doing best in for organic search, see how they're being featured by the search engine results page features, and then you can also see over time how their balance is of keywords by intent. So, it looks like the vast majority of the keywords that they're getting traffic for are informational keywords. And then you can see how their positions have changed over time in the organic results as well as the SERP features. It's a really handy tool to figure out what your competitors are ranking for. Think of it like looking at their playbook. If a competitor is ranking high in Google for certain topics, there's a good chance AI tools are also pulling from their content. So, this research helps on both fronts. So, what do you actually do with this information? Well, next I'm going to show you how to identify keywords that your competitor is ranking for and you're not. These are your opportunities. On the left side, in the SEO toolkit, click keyword gap. On the keyword gap page, enter your domain in the first field. Next, click the add domain field and wait for the pop-up. This will show you what Semrush believes are your biggest competitors. You can click different competitors from the drop-down, add up to three more, and follow the same process. And you can even enter domains manually if you want to compare to specific competitors. Once you've got a list, click compare. When it loads, scroll down and you'll be able to see all the keywords that are shared by you and your competitors. But if you click the missing tab here, you can see the keywords that your competitors are ranking for that you are not ranking for. In the column that shows your domain, if you see zero, it means you're not ranking for that keyword at all. The numbers for your competitors show you what position they are in on the search engine results page. So, graza.co here is ranking in the 16th position for olive oil smoke point, but Brightland doesn't show up at all for this. I recommend picking a few keywords here that are important to you to try to compete with your competitors with. For example, for Brightland, maybe we want to try to compete on olive oil smoke point, cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil, Spanish oil, and olive oil California. Next, let's go to the weak tab. These are similar to the missing tab, but these are actually keywords that you do rank for, just much lower than your competitors. Here you can see the second competitor is ranking number one for high-quality extra virgin olive oil. Same thing here with competitor number three, they're ranking at number two, very high. Brightland on the other hand is only ranking at 36, so we definitely want to try to rank higher for this. The keyword difficulty is only 41, and there's a volume of at least 1,000 searches per month, so this is a great one to try to target. Let's add this to our list. And here there are a few more low KD keywords. Let's go ahead and add them to our list, too. Now that we've added a bunch of keywords to our list, let's go take a look at our keyword list and organize it. On the left side, click keyword strategy builder. The top of this page lets you start a new list, or you can scroll down and see your existing lists. Let's click on month one focus. This loads our full list of keywords that we've selected. Here you can see some quick stats. There are 21 keywords, the total search volume monthly across all these keywords is 136.23 thousand, and there's an average keyword difficulty of 20.05%. These are all very easy to target considering the difficulty level, and there's a healthy amount of volume. You can also filter and organize your list by any of these columns here, volume, keyword difficulty percentage, cost per click. So, what do you actually do with this? Well, I recommend organizing it by clustering your list. Click cluster this list in the upper right. You may get this prompt like this that says this list has too few keywords to create profitable pages, and it'll ask you to go back to the keyword magic tool and add more. You can click cluster list anyway, which I'm going to do now, but you will probably get better results if you add more keywords. This can take a few minutes to process, so just sit back and let it do its thing. When it's done, you'll see that Semrush automatically groups related keywords into clusters. Each cluster is basically one piece of content you should create. So, here our first example is a page for high-quality extra virgin olive oil. Let's click to expand it. In this expanded view here, you can see that Semrush recommends we create a piece of content that targets these six keywords. On the right side, you can see that the primary intent that we're targeting with this piece of content is commercial, meaning people are researching before they buy. In the upper right, we can see that the average keyword difficulty of this cluster is about 22%, and we're targeting a potential search volume of 55.9 thousand searches a month. From here, you can send your content cluster keywords to a couple different places. You could send it to position tracking to track your results over time by clicking send keywords, clicking position tracking, and then click apply. We'll come back to this later, though. Or you can click create content or brief to send this to the content toolkit. There you can use their tools to write articles to help rank your content. Finally, you could also export the whole thing as a spreadsheet by clicking export and then choosing your format. I recommend creating and picking your first five clusters. That is now your content calendar for the next month. Okay, you've got your keyword clusters. Now, the question is, what do you actually write? Next, we'll cover two tools that help you figure that out. Both Google and AI tools reward websites that cover a topic thoroughly. One blog post about olive oil makes you a footnote, but 10 articles covering health benefits, cooking tips, different varieties, well, now you're the expert. That's what a content strategy does. So, let's start by using the topic research tool to jump-start our content. On the left side navigation under the SEO tools, navigate to topic research. And here on this page, enter in a high-level topic. For example, for Brightland, I'm going to enter olive oil, and then click get content ideas. And then SEMrush will surface a ton of different subtopic ideas based on your prompt. So, in my case, I put olive oil, and then here we've got Mediterranean diet, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, anti-inflammatory, and it goes on. There's even one down here, olive oil benefits. Now, this gets even better if you can get more specific and use some of the longer keywords that you found in your keyword research and you have in your keyword strategy. So, for example, I know that we have best olive oil in my keyword strategy list, so let's search for that. We can click get content ideas. And now the content ideas are even more specific. So, here we have side-by-side, grocery stores, cold-pressed, organic extra-virgin olive oil, and you can see the potential volume for all of these. So, let's click into side-by-side. It presents a bunch of different headline ideas with them ranked from best to worst. This has high resonance with the audience. So, this particular article here has 552 backlinks, and you can actually click to see the original article. And here you can see the actual article that SEMrush is referencing, and it believes has high resonance. I'll go ahead and close this out. So, the beauty of this topic research tool is that now instead of staring at a blank page when you're trying to come up with what to write, you've got real headlines that are already working, plus the exact questions that people are asking. So, I recommend favoriting some of these ideas. Click on some headlines you like, and then click on some questions that you could answer with your content. Like here, what is the best olive oil to buy in the USA? Let's add that. What is the best olive oil brand? We'll grab that. What are the best organic 100% olive oils? And you can continue like this grabbing headlines and questions. Everything you favorite gets collected up here in the favorite ideas tab. This becomes your content planning board. I recommend favoriting 10 to 15 ideas across a few topics. That's now your article queue. So, now you've essentially got the formula right here. You've got three headlines that we know are working well. Mix and match, take the best bits from each, and make your own similar headline. Then, simply include these questions and their answers in your article. So, now that you've got your writing formula here, how do we know if what we've written is actually good? This is where the SEO writing assistant comes in handy. Navigate to the SEO writing assistant on the left side. Click analyze my text. And here on this page, we can either import our article or blog, whatever text from an existing webpage, or we can type or paste that text directly in here. So, I've actually written up an article based on the headlines and the questions we were just looking at, as well as the keywords we're trying to target. I'll paste it in here. Now, remember I showed you earlier how to export a spreadsheet with the keywords from your keyword strategy builder? Well, here is where you could paste those in. So, I'm going to paste in the keywords from that first big cluster we created. Then on the right side, we'll scroll down and click get recommendations. This tool now will compare our article against the keywords we're trying to target and give us recommendations for how to improve it. When it's all done here, it'll give you an overall score. It says this is good, it's 6.6 out of 10, so there's definitely room for improvement. And it shows you this chart here, which basically shows you how close you are to good on any of these axes. So, the tone of voice is pretty good, the readability is pretty good, but our SEO has room for improvement here. You can see based on the red. Same thing with our originality. If you scroll down on this right side panel, you can see it'll give you recommendations for things to improve. It says your title is longer than 60 characters, it could be truncated when displayed in search results. So, we might actually want to shorten this headline to improve the readability. So, let's remove some filler words here. We'll remove actually and taste. And just like that, we've eliminated one issue. We're down from 51 issues to 50. You can click on the issues on the left side here, and in the floating bar, it'll show you what the issue is and what it proposes for the fix. Here it says this is a hard-to-read sentence, consider rewriting it. Okay, let's click simplify. Then, you can either accept or reject the change or try it again. I'm pretty happy with this though, so we'll accept. Let's take a look at this next one. Readability again, hard-to-read sentence, consider rewriting it. Simplify. And I like that. Work your way through your article until you've reduced the issues as much as you can. Now, you see here, sometimes new issues emerge after you fix other ones, so this can take a little bit of refining and it's never going to be perfect, but really at the end of the day, the idea here is that you improve the score. And just there we improved this by 0.3. The closer you can get to 10, the better, but don't worry if it's not a perfect 10 out of 10. Just get it as close as you can. You've done the research and built a plan. Before you start creating content, let's make sure your website doesn't have any problems holding it back. And then, find some opportunities to build your site's authority. Let's start by conducting a site audit. Think of a site audit like a health checkup for your website. It looks for things like broken links, slow pages, missing meta descriptions, stuff that makes it harder for Google to understand and rank your site. On the left side under your SEO tools, navigate to site audit. On this page, you can see all of your SEO projects in a list. We created our first project on the welcome screen when we plugged in our domain. Let's go ahead and click on our domain here. Here you can see SEMrush has put together a detailed report about the state of this website. At the top here, you can see an indicator showing your site's health. This site has 87% health compared to the top 10% of websites performing at 92%, so it lags behind about 5%. On the right side, we can see the AI search health. It's performing at about 75%, and there's room to improve it to about 80% to better compete with other websites in AI search. Scrolling down, it lists your number of site errors and warnings. The errors are the more severe ones that you should probably address first. Once you've taken care of those, you can slowly work your way through the warnings. Now, don't panic if you see a lot of issues with your site. Most websites have issues. So, focus on the critical and high priority ones first. Let's click on the number under errors to see what the errors are and how to fix them. On this issues tab, we can see the different issue types grouped by the number of pages that have these issues. So, let's go ahead and click on this first one here, two pages returned 4XX status code. And on this page, you can see that there are two different links that are broken. You can tell it's broken because it's returning a 404 error code. If you click this little square with the arrow icon, you can go to the page itself, and we can confirm that this page doesn't go anywhere real. We get a 404 error. So, you'd want to fix this. The great thing about SEMrush's site audit is that it tells you how to fix every error if you're not already sure how to do so. Here you can see under this group, two pages returned the 4XX status code, there's this little link here that says how to fix. If you click on that, it gives you a pop-up that explains what the error is, what caused it, and then it gives you a whole bunch of information about how to fix each specific error. If you're not the person responsible for fixing these errors, you can click the share button to share it with the person who is. Once you've identified this error and how to fix it, you can click back to all issues, and then work your way down this list. Fix the red critical issues first, and then work through the orange warnings. For now, you can ignore the blue notices, but once you've addressed all your errors and your warnings, you can start to work through the notices, too. Again, there's no need to aim for perfection here, just try to reduce as many issues as possible. Now, let's return to our main site audit page by going back to the overview tab. All right, now let's take a quick look at the AI search health. You can see here that it says blocked from AI search, we have 100 pages crawled and four are blocked from each of these AI tools. For this particular website, if you click how to unlock pages, you'll see it wants us to review the robots.text file. There are two text files you can add to your site to improve crawlability. There's robots.txt and llms.txt. Robots.txt tells Google which pages on your site to crawl. llms.text does the same thing for AI. It tells ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI tools which pages on your site are most important and what they're about. It's just a plain text file that lives at yourdomain.com/llms.text. If your site doesn't have one, it's worth adding. If we scroll down here, we can see it also mentions this llms.text file down here. If your site has this issue, click on the how to fix link, and it'll give you all the information about the issue, as well as resources for how to fix it. You'll need to create this file and add it to your site. Now that your site's foundation is solid, let's talk about backlinks. A backlink is when another website links to yours. Google treats these like votes of confidence. The more quality links you have from respected websites, the more Google trusts you. And AI tools work similarly. They tend to cite and reference sources that other websites also reference, so backlinks help you in both places. On the left side under your SEO tool kit, scroll down to link building, and then click backlinks. Next, enter your domain. Then click analyze. Here on this backlinks overview page, we can see all the information about other sites linking to this site. In the top bar here, we can see that there are 2.6 thousand other websites referring traffic back to this website. The backlinks column here shows us that across those 2.6 thousand sites there are 28,000 links which are responsible for 161,000 monthly visits. Scrolling down here we can see the sites authority score. What is authority score exactly? Well, if you hover over this eye here, you'll see that it says the authority score is SEMrush's metric measuring the domains overall reputation. It takes into account the number and quality of the backlinks coming back to this site and the overall authenticity of the site and its profile. 47 here is pretty good, but the higher you can get this number, the better. To the right of this panel, you can see it shows the sites authority score over time. To see which sites are linking back to this website, we can click the backlinks tab up above. On this backlinks tab here, you can see SEMrush has identified and listed almost 28,000 links pointing back to this website. What do you do with this information? Well, you can look at these links by type. So here, if you click on the best filter, you can see which of these links are the best, meaning they're increasing your sites overall authority because they're coming from reputable sites. The next best filter to check out is the lost and vital filter. This tells you which websites and links used to point back to your website, but don't anymore. You don't need to do something about every single link on this list, but if you notice that there is a high value, high page authority score site that no longer points back to your site, it's worth reaching out to them to figure out why and see if you can somehow repair that link. Perhaps it just got broken and they need an updated link, or perhaps something about their content has changed and they've decided not to feature your site anymore. Either way, it's worth investigating so you can potentially restore those links and increase your sites authority score. The higher your authority score, the more Google trusts you and will recommend you and your content. These list pages show you which backlinks you have, which ones you've gained recently, and which ones you've lost. But how do you identify new opportunities to get more backlinks? Let me show you. On the left side in the SEO toolkit under competitive analysis, click backlink gap. On the backlink gap page, make sure your domain is in the first field labeled you and then add several of your competitors. Then click find prospects. Just like the keyword gap tool earlier surfaced keywords that your competitors are ranking for that you are not ranking for, this tool shows you sites that are linking to your competitors, but not linking to you. Each one of these is a potential opportunity. Let me quickly show you how this list works. If we scroll down, we can see the referring domain on the left side as well as each site's authority score. Again, the higher this authority score is, the more reputable the site is. The matches column shows you how many of the sites that were input are being linked to by this domain. If any site says zero, it means it's not being linked to at all. The number indicates how many links are coming from that referring domain to the destination domain. Okay, so how do you identify the best opportunities? Well, I recommend using the authority score filter. If you click that drop down up here, set a lower threshold of 50, then click apply. Now we can see a list of all the websites that are sending traffic to our competitors and are reputable. This page now becomes your checklist or to-do list. For example here, we have the Food Network linking to three of our competitors, but not to us. If they're willing to write about three of our competitors, there's a good chance that they'd be willing to write about us, too. They have a high authority score and get 22.5 million monthly visits. So we should try to get them to link to our site somehow. A few high-quality backlinks from relevant sites in your niche are worth more from random directories. Look for patterns. If a food blog reviewed three of your competitors, but not you, that's your outreach target. And SEMrush makes it easy to begin an outreach campaign. Simply check the box next to any referring domain you want to try to get links from and then click start outreach. This will open up the backlink builder tool, which you can use to manage an outreach campaign. I'm not going to demo that here, but it's pretty straightforward to use. Just follow the prompts. You've done the research, built a plan, and fixed what was broken. Now you need to track whether it's actually working. This is where SEMrush One really stands out because you can see your Google rankings and your AI visibility side by side. SEO and AEO aren't things you do just once. You make changes, then you watch what happens. Are your rankings going up? Are AI tools starting to mention you? Without tracking, you're just guessing. So let's set that up so we can monitor progress over time. On the left side in your SEO toolkit, navigate to position tracking. Then select your SEO project from the list. You'll land on the position tracking landscape tab and you'll see some high-level details immediately. For example, you can see your visibility score. Brightland Co is at 65.72%, which is pretty good, but there is still room to grow. Could increase that over 3 months to potentially 66.02 by making a few small tweaks. It shows estimated traffic and average position per keyword. If you scroll down, you can see what the top keywords are. Let's click to see those. If you scroll down here, you can see the rankings overview, which shows all of the different keywords and how they're performing. This first keyword in the list, agave versus honey here, is showing up in the first position in the AI summary, which is really great. If you want to see what this actually looks like on the search engine results page, you can click this little browser with a magnifying glass icon. This shows you a cached result of the page. Back on the rankings overview page, if you click to expand any keyword, you can see how that keyword's position has changed over time. The longer you have your account open, the more data you'll see here. Now let's say you want to track the position of specific keywords. Remember earlier we built a keyword list with that keyword strategy builder. Let's add those keywords to our position tracking. Click on keyword strategy builder on the left side, scroll down the page and select your keyword list, click the checkbox in the upper left, and then click send keywords. Click position tracking, and then click apply. In project or new domain, select your project, and then click send keywords. Here we got a confirmation that 19 keywords were sent and two weren't sent because they were duplicates. They're already being tracked. Go ahead and click go to position tracking. Then you can click back to the overview tab and filter by the keyword you want to check the position tracking for. Let's say we want to check best olive oil, then click search. We can scroll down, click best olive oil to expand it, and see all the information for how this particular keyword is performing and changing its position over time. I recommend adding your 20 to 30 most important keywords and then check back weekly to see what's moving both in Google and AI search. Now if you want to see how this domain is performing overall over time instead of individual keywords, you can see that in the domain overview section. You can navigate there in your SEO toolkit on the left and to your domain name and click search. And here you can see at a high level the standings for your both your AI search visibility and traditional SEO visibility. If you scroll down, you can see traffic by type over time and you can toggle between how you're doing in AI search and Google search in both your distribution by country and your cited sources, branded versus non-branded. This gives you the big picture at a glance. Brightland's traffic has been declining and that's exactly the kind of trend you want to catch early on and reverse. Now this AI search and AI visibility is what makes SEMrush One different from anything else out there. It tracks how your brand appears in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Google AI overviews, Google AI mode, Perplexity, and Gemini. You can see your AI visibility score, how you compare to competitors, and which prompts mention you. This is just a small version. Let me show you how to get the even bigger, more detailed version of this AI visibility report. On the left side, go to your AI visibility toolkit and then click visibility overview. Here on the AI visibility overview page, we start with our region being set to worldwide. I recommend selecting the region that's most relevant to your brand. So if Brightland Co, for example, sells primarily in the US, we want to select the US region. And here we get the most relevant numbers. You can see that the AI visibility is currently a score of 50 out of 100. So it's all right and occasionally mentioned by LLM outputs, but the overall visibility can improve. It looks like we're getting about 2.3 thousand mentions by AI tools monthly and here you can track that performance over time, mentions versus citations versus cited pages. If you scroll down, you can see the overall number of mentions by country. The US dominates the number of mentions here, which is exactly why that worldwide region was so low for it. And on the left side, you can see distribution by LLM. So here we can see that ChatGPT hardly ever mentions Brightland, but the Google AI overview is doing a lot of mentioning. So they're doing most of the heavy lifting. We can also toggle to see which LLM is citing Brightland's pages the most. This is useful to know because it tells you where to focus your efforts. If I was Brightland's marketing manager, I would focus my attention mostly on getting ChatGPT and Gemini to mention Brightland more. Now you might wonder, how do we actually get these LLMs to mention a brand more? Well, that's what this next section is below. It's called What's Next and you can get exact ideas for what would be helpful to get your LLM rankings higher. For example, you can click uncover topic opportunities and it'll give you a whole list of topics it recommends covering with your content to be mentioned more by LLMs. If you want to see what topics are already performing well, you can scroll up and click on your performing topics. And here you can see the topics that are being most mentioned by LLMs. In the very first position here, we have Brightland Mini Artist Series followed by Brightland Olive Oil and Gourmet Products. If you click into it, you can see which prompts people are using that are getting LLMs to talk most about this brand. All right, next I want to show you what I think is SEMrush's most powerful, coolest AI performance tracking tool. On the left side, click brand performance under the AI visibility toolkit. This tool will help us to see how AI talks about your brand. So, go ahead and enter your domain and click analyze. Select your target location. I'll say United States, and then click get started. So, this page can take a while to load, but give it some time, and when it does load, oh boy, you're about to get a whole treasure trove of information. For example, right here in this first panel, the insights panel, we can see exactly how ChatGPT is talking about this particular brand, Brightland, across all of the different conversations where Brightland comes up. And in almost all of these panels, you get a short little summary explaining what the data means. So, for here, share of voice versus sentiment, we can see that Brightland has a strong sentiment at 78%, but the lowest share of voice. The recommendation it gives is to push more high-visibility campaigns to grow volume without losing that overall positivity. You can scroll through here, and there's a ton of good information. The overall sentiment about your brand in LLM responses, the key business drivers. So, for example, it says that Brightland ranks number two on design-led appeal, but lags on freshness. Then it gives a suggestion, "Amplify harvest origin and testing signals to match your aesthetic strength." Now, my favorite part of this report is if you scroll down all the way to strategy recommendations. Here, you get several different recommendations across varying time frames for what this brand could do to improve how ChatGPT is talking about it. The first one I want to draw your attention to is any urgent timeline one. So, here it says Brightland performs as a culturally powerful design-led premium brand in ChatGPT, but it's not yet the default go-to cooking oil. It says Brightland is firmly in the top tier of brands that ChatGPT recommends. However, it doesn't show up as often for questions like best olive oil for everyday cooking. It's considered more of a specialty or upgrade option rather than a baseline option. So, then it provides three recommendations. Make Brightland's everyday value proposition as sharp as its aesthetic one. Publicly codify a simple promise like chef-worthy California EVOO for everyday cooking and beautiful finishing. And it continues on like this. My biggest recommendation for you is to read through the strategic recommendations, pick the ones marked urgent, and make those your priority this week. Then, work on the short-time frame ones, work on the medium-time frame ones after that, and so on. If you can go through the checklist that this gives you, you will supercharge the way AI talks about your brand. All right, we've covered a ton of different topics today. So, let me give you a quick action plan so you know exactly what to do after this video. Here's the workflow. Step one, research. Find out what people search on Google and what they ask AI. Keywords and prompts, same idea. Step two, organize that research into topic clusters and figure out what content to create. Step three, fix your foundation. Audit your site and make sure AI can actually read it and fill your backlink gaps. Step four, track everything. Google rankings and AI visibility side by side. Then, rinse and repeat. The starter plan is $199 a month, and I'm not going to sugarcoat that, but here's what I'll say. This is the only tool I've seen that tracks both your Google rankings and how AI talks about your brand in the same place. That brand performance report we just looked at, companies pay consultants thousands of dollars for that kind of competitive analysis, and Semrush regenerates it automatically with new data. If AI search matters to your business, and after what we just saw, I think it should, use the link on screen or in the description below to start your extended 14-day free trial. Thanks so much for watching.