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Visibility in AI Search is fast becoming one of the most valuable forms of online presence a business can have. If your brand is not being recommended when a potential customer asks an AI tool for the best solution in your category, your competitors are winning that conversation by default.
Tim Cameron-Kitchen, Founder of Exposure Ninja, shares a practical framework for reverse-engineering how to beat competitors in AI Search using Semrush One*.
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Why AI Search Visibility Is Now a Commercial Priority
When someone asks an AI tool “who has the best hyaluronic acid?” or “what’s the best CRM for small businesses?”, there are winners and losers in that moment.
Tim Cameron-Kitchen frames it simply: “The winners are the ones that are being consistently recommended. The losers are the ones that aren’t even being featured in the conversation.”
As Tim Cameron-Kitchen puts it, being absent from AI answers is not a neutral outcome. It is a loss.
The gap between businesses appearing regularly in AI responses and those that are invisible is growing. The businesses that take the time to understand why that gap exists, and close it deliberately, are the ones that will generate more leads from organic channels over the next few years.
How to Measure Your Competitors’ AI Search Visibility
The starting point is understanding how visible your competitors actually are across AI platforms. Tim Cameron-Kitchen uses Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit to do this, pulling data across Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
There are three core metrics to focus on:
- Mentions are the number of times an AI tool references a brand in its responses. A higher mention count means a brand is being talked about or recommended more frequently.
- Citations are the number of times an AI tool has pulled a specific web page from your competitor’s site as a reference when compiling an answer.
- Cited pages are the total number of pages on a competitor’s site that have been cited across AI responses.
Tim Cameron-Kitchen explains why benchmarking matters here:
“Whilst HubSpot has been mentioned way more than 10,000 times each month, if you put your business in and you see that you’re at 5,000 mentions per month, you know your business is being mentioned half as many times as HubSpot. So this is a great way to get an overall picture, and you can stick different competitors in here and see how they’re doing relative to each other.”
As Tim Cameron-Kitchen puts it, relative visibility is what matters. The absolute numbers mean less than how you compare to the competitors your customers are actually choosing between.
Finding the Gaps: Topics, Prompts, and Sources
Once you have a clear picture of how visible each competitor is, the next step is understanding why.
The Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit breaks down competitor visibility into topics and prompts.
- Topics are the broad subject areas AI tools are drawing from.
- Prompts are the specific questions people are asking.
The gap between where your competitors appear and where you do not is your priority list.
Tim Cameron-Kitchen is direct about how to read this data:
“Missing topics and prompts are the ones where your competitors are being mentioned and recommended, but you’re not. So this is the gap. Weak are the ones where your competitors are being mentioned more than your brand. If you’re seeing a lot in missing and weak, sad times.”
As Tim Cameron-Kitchen puts it, not all topics are equally valuable. Filtering by the most commercially relevant terms, such as your core product category or service type, quickly separates the strategic opportunities from the noise.
The second dimension is sources. These are the third-party websites that AI tools are drawing on to compile answers. Being mentioned on those pages increases the chance your brand appears in the AI response.
“Sources are the websites that these AI tools are pulling from in order to compile their answers, and this allows you to see where your competitors are being mentioned on other people’s sites that you’re not. The aim of the game is to work out which pages you really need your business featured on to be spoken about in these AI answers. These sources really become the foundation of a digital PR plan,” explains Tim Cameron-Kitchen.
Turning Analysis into a Prioritised Action Plan
Analysis is only useful if it leads somewhere. Tim Cameron-Kitchen shares a real client example that shows exactly how to apply this framework.
Value Capital Funding helps businesses struggling with debt. When Exposure Ninja began working with them, they had low visibility in both traditional search and AI Search, and were heavily dependent on paid ads, generating low-quality leads.
The team followed a clear sequence:
- First, they tightened the positioning so it was immediately clear what the business did and for whom.
- Then they rebuilt the website around conversion, not just traffic.
- From there, they identified the bottom-of-funnel topics and prompts most likely to reach people ready to take action.
- They built out content targeting those areas and ran a targeted digital PR and link-building campaign to get the brand featured on the sources already feeding AI answers.
Tim Cameron-Kitchen outlines the results:
“They’d been generating around 50 conversions per month, which is obviously super low. We’ve managed to get this to almost 400 per month. We’re also getting them more than 10 times the number of conversions directly from AI search tools like ChatGPT. Plus, prospects in their sales calls are saying that they’ve seen Value Capital Funding in AI answers about debt relief. So we know for a fact that this is driving real business for this company.”
As Tim Cameron-Kitchen puts it, you do not need to be a large brand to win in AI Search. The data is available, the gaps are visible, and the action plan is buildable for any business willing to invest in the process.
Want to know exactly where your business stands in AI Search visibility? Book a consultation, and we will look at your current visibility across AI Search and Google, assess how well your website converts existing traffic, and map out a prioritised roadmap for generating more leads.
*Disclaimer: Exposure Ninja may get a commission through the marked links above, at no cost to you.
