The Prompt Research report helps you discover and prioritize AI search topics to target.
Think of it as keyword research for the AI era—instead of keywords, you explore the prompts and topics people ask AI platforms.
What the Report Gives You
- Topic-Level AI Volume: See how often people ask about a given topic across AI platforms.
- Topic Difficulty: Understand how competitive it is to gain visibility for that topic.
- Intent Analysis: Break down the type of user intent behind prompts (informational, navigational, commercial, transactional, or task-based).
- Prompts: Actual prompts that make up the topic and the AI responses, along with details about the brands mentioned and source cited.
- Brands: The brands that have the most visibility in AI answers across a topic, measured by how often it’s mentioned compared to the median domain.
- Source Domains: The websites cited by AI platforms as a source in their responses.
How to Access the Report
- Go to AI SEO Toolkit → Prompt Research.
- Enter a topic, industry, or product category into the search bar.
- Click Analyze.
How to Use the Report
Step 1. Review Topic Metrics
- After entering a topic, you’ll see:
- AI Topic Volume: estimated monthly AI search activity around this topic.
- Topic Difficulty: how competitive it is for brands to appear.
- Intent Breakdown: informational, commercial, transactional, task intent.
- Brands mentioned: number of unique brands appearing in LLM responses on this topic.
These metrics quickly tell you how much demand and competition exists in this particular topic.
To explore related topics and look for something bigger or less competitive, click on one of the Related Topics, which will open up a new Prompt Research report.
Step 2. Explore the Prompts Table
- Scroll down to see the list of prompts related to your topic.
- Each row shows:
- Prompt (what users asked AI).
- AI response (expand to see the full answer).
- Number of brands mentioned in the response.
- Sources cited by the AI system for that repsonse.
Look through the table to review any prompts that are relevant to your business. For anything relevant, you can expand the response and view the list of brands mentioned and sources cited.
This lets you see exactly how the AI platform is representing the brands in your niche for specific prompts and topics.
Step 3. Take Action on Specific Prompts
If you see a specific prompt that is relevant to your business, you can:
- Create content in one click (this integrates with the Content Toolkit and starts drafting content for you)
- Send the prompt to Prompt Tracking (this will allow you to track daily visibility for this specific prompt)
Step 4. Review the Related Topics to Find More Opportunities
Below the table is the list of Related Topics. Here you can sort by average topic difficulty, AI volume, or brands mentioned to understand which topics have more opportunity to compete for.
Click on the Analyze Topic button to start a new Prompt Research report.
Data & Metrics Explained
Where the data comes from
- Prompt Research uses Semrush’s prompt database of 100M+ AI queries, covering Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT, with more platforms coming soon.
- Data is refreshed monthly.
- Reports can be run up to 300 times per day.
Key metrics
- AI Topic Volume: An estimate of how often users ask AI about a topic (measured at the topic cluster level, not for single prompts).
- Topic Difficulty: A 0–100% score estimating how competitive the space is, based on the brands most frequently mentioned in responses.
- Intent Types: Categorizes prompts into:
- Informational (learn something)
- Navigational (find a specific brand/website)
- Commercial (compare options)
- Transactional (ready to buy/act)
- Task-based (step-by-step instructions or “do this for me”).