Most brands chasing AI visibility focus solely on content volume and technical fixes. Those matter. But they're not why AI recommends your competitor over you.
Here’s what you need to keep in mind: AI search engines don't rank pages in the traditional sense.
They build a model of your brand from the signals they find across the web. Then they decide whether to recommend you based on factors like how clearly and confidently they can describe what you do, who you do it for, and how relevant you are to the specific query.
That makes consistent, relevant brand positioning one of the key variables in AI search visibility. And we’re not talking enough about it.
How AI evaluates your brand
AI systems build a probabilistic understanding of your brand based on patterns across everything they've been trained on or can retrieve: your site, press coverage, reviews, partner mentions, social content, and forum discussions.
All of it gets folded into a single implicit judgment about what your brand is, what it's known for, and whether it's credible in a given context.
If AI associates a specific perception with your brand, it might not surface you even for a seemingly relevant query. For example, I asked ChatGPT to list the best WordPress hosting providers for small businesses, but it didn't mention the most obvious choice — WordPress.com.
This could be for a few reasons, including how ChatGPT interprets "WordPress hosting." But it's worth asking whether a hidden perception is also shaping how AI represents the brand.
Consistent, corroborated claims across multiple authoritative sources build a stronger brand and help AI agents make the best recommendations possible.
To contextualize this, our team at Semrush recently developed a search visibility framework that organizes the brand signals AI systems use to evaluate a brand into four actionable layers: Discoverability, Clarity, Authority, and Trust.
Each layer answers a question AI is implicitly asking about your brand. Can it find you? Does it understand you correctly? Does it consider you qualified? Does it trust you enough to recommend you?
Winning at each of these layers requires getting your positioning right first.
How to find out how AI perceives your brand
The first step is simple: Find out what AI thinks about your brand right now and whether it recommends you where it matters most.
You can start manually. Open AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini run a structured set of prompts across three categories:
- For direct brand understanding: “What is [Your Brand]?"; "What does [Your Brand] do?"; "What is [Your Brand]'s main value proposition?"
- For category context: "How do I [problem your product solves]?"; "What is the best way to [outcome your product enables]?"; "What tools or processes do [your target audience] use to [job to be done]?"; "Who should I follow or trust for advice on [your core topic]?"
- For competitive positioning: "[Your Brand] vs [Competitor A]"; "Alternatives to [Your Brand]"; "How is [Your Brand] different from [Competitor A]?"
That said, AI answers are not static. They're personalized, they shift as content changes, and two people asking the same question won't always get the same response. A manual check gives you a directional snapshot at best.
To track how your brand is being perceived over time, you need to go deeper. This can be done with Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit. The workflow looks like this:
1. Start with the Brand Performance report to get a high-level picture: your AI Share of Voice compared to competitors and your AI sentiment score.
For WordPress.com, the Brand Performance report clearly shows it's the category leader. However, its favorable sentiment is only 60%, suggesting there are still some potentially problematic perceptions that AI associates with the brand. As a result, while AI recognizes WordPress.com, it may not always recommend it because of those perceptions.
You can also look at specific cross-brand factors that influence growth, such as value, trust, and access. Use them to benchmark performance and decide where to focus your efforts.
2. Next, move to the Perception report to understand the specifics: what AI consistently praises about you, what it flags as a weakness, and how that breaks down by feature category.
Looking at the report, we can clearly see the positive perceptions AI systems attribute to WordPress: ecommerce features and a managed performance stack that scales, flexibility, and ease of use. These strengths should be highlighted across the company's assets.
At the same time, there are negative perceptions, and some of them are actually outdated. For example, ChatGPT thinks that plugins are only available on higher-tier plans, even though that has recently changed. The Perception report also highlights various limitations for both beginner and advanced users.
All of these assumptions that AI makes about a brand come from multiple sources across the web. They're a direct reflection of the gap between how the brand positions itself and how the broader web, and therefore AI, has come to understand it.
To close that gap, WordPress first needs to define where it wants to focus: which perceptions to correct, which strengths to double down on, and which audiences to prioritize. From there, it can update existing content on its website, create new content that addresses the gaps, and push the right narrative on external platforms like Reddit and review sites.
3. Finally, go to the Narrative Drivers report to see the high-intent queries featuring your brand and the external sources AI is pulling from, so you know which sources to target and which queries to build content around.
How to manage brand positioning and perceptions in AI search
Controlling and managing brand perceptions is a three-part process: clearly define your brand positioning, make it visible on your own site, then reinforce it externally.
Step 1: Do your brand positioning homework first
As surprising as it might seem, many brands don't have a clearly defined positioning. Some are trying to serve everyone, jumping from one angle to another, or are in the middle of a transition.
That ambiguity shows up directly in how AI describes and recommends you.
Before doing any content work, get this down first:
- Who you serve: The specific audience or buyer persona you're targeting
- What you do for them: The core outcome or problem you solve
- Why you're credible: The proof points, credentials, and differentiators that back it up
Then compare that against what the AI audit using the Brand Performance and Perception reports revealed. For each positioning attribute that matters to your buyers, ask: Does AI know this about us? Does it say it consistently? Does it say it favorably?
Let’s look at some examples from Semrush case studies.
For rtCamp — a WordPress design agency — the positioning was clear internally. They serve enterprise buyers who weigh security and compliance heavily. The credentials existed: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and FedRAMP authorization through WordPress VIP. However, AI tools weren’t highlighting security enough compared to other features.
For WorkLounge, a coworking space, the mismatch was even deeper. The Perceptions report revealed that AI systems describe the space as loud, with 9-to-5 access only and no quiet zones. All of this is inaccurate.
The brand's actual strengths — 24/7 member access, dedicated quiet zones, and flexible workspace options — simply weren't documented anywhere AI could find them.
In both cases, the content problem was a positioning clarity problem first.
Step 2: Audit your site content and update it to close perception gaps
From here, audit your existing site content to check whether your positioning is visible and consistent, then address the perception gaps you identified in step 1.
Go through your highest-traffic and highest-intent pages and ask: Does this page clearly communicate who we serve, what we do, and why we're credible? Specifically:
- Are credentials, certifications, and trust signals in crawlable page content?
- Do service and product pages consistently reflect your current positioning?
- Are pages structured so AI can extract information cleanly: clear headers, FAQ sections, direct answers up front?
- Are the positive and negative perceptions identified during research properly and visibly addressed?
- Do all owned channels tell the same story?
Then, update your site content to ensure consistency, create missing pages, and give AI agents the information they need to understand and recommend your brand
Step 3: Reinforce your positioning through external channels
Once your site reflects your positioning accurately, push the same narrative across the external sources that shape how AI systems understand your brand.
The channels that matter will depend on your industry, but some commonly important ones include:
- Review platforms: G2, Clutch, Trustpilot, and any industry-specific review sites. Third-party validation is a trust signal for both AI models and human buyers.
- Press and industry coverage: Get your key positioning attributes into the stories journalists write about you. If security and compliance matter to your buyers, those words need to appear in external coverage.
- Partnerships and ecosystem mentions: Being associated with credible brands strengthens your own credibility signal. Make those relationships visible and make sure partners reference you accurately.
- Social and community platforms: LinkedIn, Reddit, and industry forums all feed into AI's picture of your brand. Consistent messaging across these platforms reinforces what your site already says.
Positioning is the new visibility factor
For most of SEO's history, brand positioning sat outside the discipline. It was often the brand or marketing team's job, not the content team's.
AI search has blurred that line.
The same model that determines whether to cite your blog post is also deciding whether your company sounds trustworthy enough to recommend.
The results, however, are worth the effort:
- rtCamp's overall favorable sentiment moved from 73% to 100% in a month, with their specific security and compliance sentiment climbing to 100%, and organic form fills up 117%.
- WorkLounge's sentiment score went from 67 to 82 over five months, AI Overview visibility nearly doubled from 17% to 34%, and traffic from ChatGPT grew almost 20x.
The Brand Performance report in Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit helps you stay on top of this. Track AI sentiment and perceptions against your competitors and spot strategic opportunities as they shift. If you're wondering what makes AI choose alternatives over you, that's the place to start.
