Semrush launches framework for measuring brand visibility in AI search

Organic traffic is dying — and now companies have a tool to understand what's happening to their brand in the age of AI search. Semrush unveiled the Brand Visibility Framework at Adobe Summit, introducing a new discipline called Agentic Search Optimisation. The framework arrived at a critical moment.

According to the company itself, clicks on organic results dropped 61% for queries where Google shows AI Overview. Another figure is even more telling: 62% of brands are not mentioned at all in AI answers on topics relevant to them. Users get answers — just without links to websites and without traffic.

Traditional SEO was built on simple logic: reach the top 10, get a click, convert. That logic is collapsing. When ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google Gemini answer a user's question directly, familiar metrics of positions and organic traffic no longer reflect reality.

A brand can rank first in search results and simultaneously be invisible to millions of users getting answers through AI. Semrush developed the framework based on analysis of 213 million queries to language models. It measures brand presence across three dimensions: traditional search results, AI answers from systems like AI Overview or Perplexity, and actions of autonomous AI agents that make independent purchasing decisions or recommendations.

The last one is the newest and probably most important direction. Agentic Search Optimisation is an attempt to structure a new discipline. Agent AI systems, for example those that independently book flights, select contractors, or order goods, form their own preferences based on data from the network.

If a brand is poorly represented in structured data, authoritative sources, and model training corpora, the agent will simply ignore it — without any malice. The company positions the framework as a response to a request from large businesses: marketers are already seeing traffic decline, but lack a language to discuss the reasons with leadership. The new tool allows setting KPIs not on search positions, but on share of voice in AI answers — Brand Voice Share.

Semrush is the first to try to create a standard for measuring a new type of visibility — not SEO ranking, but AI mention-ability. If the framework takes hold, it could become as fundamental a unit of measuring brand presence on the internet as PageRank or Domain Authority were in the era of classical SEO. The market for AI optimization tools is only forming, and the stakes are enormous.