What A Monthly AI Visibility Report Should Contain (Free Template)

A monthly AI visibility report should be short and ordered. Open with a summary a leader can read in two minutes, then report citations, share of answers, AI referral visits and competitor citations, each with the decision it supports. Most SEO report templates stop at rankings and traffic, so they tell you nothing about AI answers.

That structure suits a B2B SaaS team or agency that already sends a monthly SEO report and tracks a fixed set of prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI features.

AI answers change from one run to the next and platforms publish little of their own data, so read the numbers as a trend over several months rather than a precise monthly score.

👉 Here's the template. Open it, then use File > Make a copy to get your own editable version — the shared link is view-only. Get the free monthly AI visibility report template (Google Sheets)

What A Monthly AI Visibility Report Is For

That makes it a different thing from an SEO report. An SEO report tells you where your pages rank and how many people clicked. An AI visibility report tells you whether the answer a buyer reads already names you, and which of your pages it points to. It is not a rankings report and it is not an organic traffic report, though it sits next to both.

AI search visibility itself is simple to state. It is how often a brand appears in AI-generated answers for its target queries, and how well it is included when it does.

The report does three jobs, and every section should serve at least one of them.

• Tie results to business outcomes: Show what the numbers mean for pipeline, sign-ups or revenue, not only for visibility.
• Explain what changed and why: A number without a reason is a question the reader will ask in the meeting.
• Set the next actions: Every month ends with named work and a named owner.

We reviewed the top-ranking SEO report templates for this keyword and audited nine of the ten. None of the nine measures AI visibility. They cover traffic, keywords, conversions, links and technical health. That gap is the reason this template exists.

One more requirement before the template itself. A useful report lets a reader trace each finding back to the prompt, the platform, the date, the mention or citation observed, the source context and the owner of the next step. One score cannot replace that evidence.

The Template: Seven Sections In Order

The order is summary, citations, share of answers, AI referral visits, competitor citations, search performance, then actions and owners, with a short methodology appendix at the back. Leaders read the first and last pages. Analysts read everything in between. Build it so both are served.

Here is the plain-text version. Copy it into a document or a slide deck and fill each line, or use the ready-made spreadsheet version, where the share of answers figure and the competitor domain tally calculate themselves.

1. Summary: What changed, why it changed and what we do next, in under 150 words, with one line per headline metric.
2. Citations: The pages AI answers cited this month, by prompt and engine, and the prompts where a citation appeared or disappeared.
3. Share Of Answers: Prompts naming the brand divided by total tracked prompts, this month against last month.
4. AI Referral Visits: Sessions from AI engines, their share of total traffic and their conversions.
5. Competitor Citations: The three domains cited most often and the prompts where the brand is absent.
6. Search Performance: Organic sessions, top landing pages, conversions, ranking winners and losers, new referring domains, technical health.
7. Actions And Owners: Each action, one named owner and a due month.
8. Appendix: Tracked prompt list, platforms, run dates and any change to the set.

Keep the section names and the order the same every month. A report that changes shape each month cannot show a trend, and the trend is the point.

The Summary And Actions Pages Leaders Actually Read

The summary answers three questions in under 150 words. What changed, why it changed, and what you do next. Add one line per headline metric and stop.

Be honest about who reads what. Leaders skip everything between the first page and the last, so those two pages have to stand alone. If the summary needs the appendix to make sense, it is not finished. Write it last, after every other section is filled, so it describes the report you actually have rather than the one you planned.

Here is a three-line example you can copy. The figures are placeholders, so replace them with your own.

• What changed: Share of answers moved from X% to Y% across the tracked prompt set, and AI referral sessions rose by Z.
• Why: The pricing page was cited in N more answers after the rewrite, while two competitors lost citations on the same prompts.
• What we do next: Rewrite the integrations page, which is absent from the three prompts that matter most, and report the result next month.

The actions page is the other half. Every action gets one owner and one due month. An action with no owner is a wish, and an action with no due month will still be on the page six months from now.

If your leaders want the live version of this summary rather than a monthly document, see how to build leadership-ready visibility dashboards. The report and the dashboard should tell the same story.

Citations And Share Of Answers: What To Measure

Sections two and three are the heart of the report, and they measure two different things.

A citation is a link from an AI answer to one of your pages. It tells you which pages the engine trusts enough to point at. Share of answers tells you how often your brand is named at all, with or without a link.

That is our formula, and it is a TRM framework rather than an industry standard. The full definition and the cadence table sit in our guide to AI visibility metrics. Here is a worked example with round placeholder numbers.

• Tracked prompts: 40
• Prompts whose answer names the brand: 12
• Share of answers: 12 divided by 40, which is 30%

Run the same 40 prompts next month and compare. If the figure moves to 35%, you gained five points on the same yardstick. If you changed the prompt set, say so in the appendix, because the two months are no longer comparable.

Add prompt-level presence beneath the headline number. A table of prompts with a yes or no for the brand and a cited page for each is the most useful single view in the report, because it shows where you are present and where you are not.

Two platforms now report some of this themselves. Google's generative AI performance report in Search Console reached all websites on 31 August 2026, and Bing Webmaster Tools added Citation Share in its 16 June 2026 update. Use them for citation and impression counts. Do not use them for share of answers, because neither tells you how often your brand is named across a prompt set you chose.

Each metric supports one decision. Citations tell you which pages to strengthen. Share of answers tells you which prompts to target. If your share is stuck and you need to raise it rather than report it, that is the work of Answer Engine Optimization.

AI Referral Visits: The Traffic Side Of The Report

AI referral visits are sessions that arrive from an AI engine, such as a click on a link inside a ChatGPT or Perplexity answer. They are small. They are still worth reporting, for one reason. Citations without visits tell you that you were seen but not whether it mattered, and visits without citations tell you that someone clicked but not why.

The click-through data explains why you need both. Pew Research Center found in July 2025 that Google users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits where an AI summary appeared, against 15% of visits without one. Fewer people click through when the answer is already on the page.

A second figure points the same way. Ahrefs analysed December 2025 Search Console data across 300,000 keywords, and the result, as reported by Supermetrics, associated an AI Overview with a 58% lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page. That is a secondary report of an association, not proof of cause, so treat it as direction rather than a forecast for your site.

What this means for your report is simple. A page can lose clicks to an AI answer and still gain brand exposure, because the answer may name you. If you only report clicks, that page looks like a loser. If you only report citations, you cannot see whether anything came of it. Report them side by side.

Read AI referral sessions from the source or referral report in your analytics tool, filtered by the domains of the AI engines. Show them next to total channel traffic and conversions. The decision it supports is which cited pages convert and which only inform, so you know where to push for the click and where to be happy with the mention.

For a real example of the kind of AI citation result a report like this would track, see the PSOhub case study.

Competitor Citations: Who Gets Named Instead Of You

Section five answers the question leaders ask first and analysts avoid. Who is the engine naming instead of us?

The method is plain. For each tracked prompt, log which domains the answer cited and compare them with yours. Then report the three domains that appear most often and the prompts where you are absent. We recommend this as a standard section of the report, and it is a recommendation rather than a sourced industry standard.

The rule for the log is one row per prompt per engine per run. Here is an example with placeholder prompts and domains.

In this example, competitor-a.com appears in all three answers, so it is the domain to study. Open the cited pages and look at what they cover that yours do not. The two prompts where the brand is absent become next month's writing list.

The decision it supports is which topics to write for and which competitors' pages to learn from. If the log shows you absent from the prompts that matter most, that is where Generative Engine Optimization work pays off. No borrowed statistics are needed here. The log is your own evidence, and it is more persuasive in a meeting than any industry average.

Where Each Number Comes From

Some numbers in the report come from the platforms themselves. Others come from your own repeated prompt runs. The first kind is a measurement. The second kind is a sample, and it should be labelled as one.

It is a sample because AI answers vary from run to run, so the same prompt can name different brands on different days. A fixed prompt list run on a fixed schedule gives you a consistent sample, which is what makes month-on-month comparison fair. It does not give you the true share of every conversation about your category.

Connect the platform sources first. Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and your analytics tool take an afternoon to connect. Then fix the prompt set and start the log, because the prompt runs are the only source for share of answers and competitor citations.

The Traditional SEO Section: Keep It To One Page

Section six is the report you already send, cut down. Keep it to one page. It reports what changed, not everything.

The core of that page is a short checklist. Each line carries the decision it informs.

• Organic sessions: Tells you whether search traffic is growing, flat or falling.
• Top landing pages: Shows which pages earn the traffic and deserve protecting.
• Conversions from organic: Shows whether the traffic is worth having.
• Keyword rankings, winners and losers: Points to the pages to refresh or defend.
• Brand versus non-brand split: Separates demand you already have from demand you are winning.
• New referring domains: Shows whether link building is moving.
• Technical health: Flags crawl and indexing problems before they cost traffic.

Add two more lines. One on page-level cannibalisation, where two of your pages compete for the same query, and one on click-through, so the reader can set it beside the AI referral figures in section four.

The conventional report this replaces runs to ten parts, from a title card through rankings, links and technical health to next steps. Most of those parts are exports. Cut any part that has not changed a decision.

For this half of the report, Semrush has a monthly SEO report template that covers SEO KPIs, organic traffic, conversions, keyword performance, link analysis and technical health, so you are not rebuilding the traditional section by hand each month.

If a stakeholder asks why the AI sections sit beside the old ones, point them to our explanation of how traditional SEO and AI SEO differ. Short version, the old metrics still matter and they are no longer the whole picture.

What To Leave Out Of The Report

Keep a metric only if someone can name the decision it changes. If nobody can, it is decoration, and decoration makes the useful numbers harder to find.

Cut these.

• A single composite score: It hides the evidence and nobody can act on a number they cannot trace.
• Full keyword exports: Nobody reads a 4,000-row sheet, so summarise winners and losers instead.
• Tool names in client-facing versions: Clients buy your judgement, not your stack.
• Sentiment charts nobody acts on: If no decision follows, the chart is noise.
• Any figure without a stated prompt set and date: A reader cannot tell whether it is comparable with last month.

Apply the rule to your own habits too. If a chart has been in the report for six months and no one has mentioned it, remove it and see whether anyone asks.

Prompt Set, Cadence And Client Versions

Sources disagree on how many prompts to track. Recommendations run from 20 to 30 at the low end up to 50 to 150 at the high end. The number matters less than the discipline. Keep one fixed core list from month to month, add new prompts in a separate group, and note any change in the appendix. A list that keeps changing destroys the trend.

If you already have keyword research, start there. You can map keywords to prompts rather than inventing a prompt list from scratch.

For cadence, we use three rhythms. A weekly operational check catches sudden drops. A monthly leadership narrative is this report. A quarterly reset is when you review the prompt set and the targets. Running the prompts weekly and reporting monthly gives you more data points without giving leaders more pages.

Different readers need different versions of the same report.

Client-facing AI visibility reports are usually white-label. Use the agency's brand only, rename metrics in the client's language and hide the tool names. Agencies producing these should look at AI visibility tools with client-ready reporting.

On format, send a PDF or a link, with a short email that carries the summary. Which of the two to choose is a different question, and we cover it in live dashboard or monthly PDF. Short answer, the summary in the email body is what gets read.

How To Build The Report Step By Step

Six steps take you from an empty document to a finished report. Each ends with something you can put on a page.

1. Fix the prompt set. Choose a core list of prompts tied to your keywords and save it as the baseline for every future month.
2. Connect your data. Link Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and your analytics tool, and end with the platform numbers ready to export.
3. Run the prompts and log the answers. Record the engine, date, mention, cited domains and cited pages for each prompt, ending with a complete log.
4. Fill the seven sections. Move the log and the platform data into the template, ending with sections two to six complete. Each tab in the template spreadsheet matches one of these sections, in this order.
5. Write the summary last. Describe what changed, why and what happens next, ending with a half page a leader can read in two minutes.
6. Assign owners to actions. Give every action one owner and one due month, ending with section seven.

AI can help with step five. Give it the filled sections and ask it to draft the summary, then edit the draft yourself. It cannot run your prompts for you, and it must never be asked to supply a number. A summary with an invented figure in it is worse than no summary.

To automate the data side, compare SEO reporting and client dashboard tools, or build a Looker Studio dashboard for AI visibility that pulls the same sources. If you would rather hand the whole monthly build to someone else, that is what monthly reporting inside the Growth Programme covers.