Sentiment and citations

Sentiment

Being mentioned is good, but being mentioned favorably is better. Sentiment captures how positive the assistants' mentions of your brand are. A high mention rate with weak sentiment can mean assistants know you but aren't enthusiastic, which is worth digging into.

When AI describes you negatively

We look at the answers that actually mention your brand and check how many describe it negatively. We measure it over your mentions, not over every answer, so the questions where you never come up don't hide the problem. A few negative answers among many is normal; when negativity is a real share of your mentions, it's worth acting on, because that framing gets repeated and cited elsewhere.

If it flags, find the recurring complaint behind those answers and address it in the open: fix the issue, publish updated docs or a clear response, and earn positive third-party reviews so the balance shifts back.

What AI says about your brand

A percentage tells you how positive the mentions are, not why. This view reads the concrete themes the answers raise about you and splits them into two lists:

• Praised for: the qualities the answers describe favorably (for example ease of use, support, integrations).
• Criticized for: the qualities they describe as a weakness (for example pricing or setup). The one raised most often is your top complaint, and it is the theme worth addressing first.

Both lists count only the answers that actually mention you, and they apply from this scan on: older scans do not carry themes, so they show none.

There is a third case worth watching: passive mentions, where an answer names you but says nothing for or against, no strength and no reason to pick you. A bare mention like that rarely wins a recommendation, so we count it as a soft weakness (it is kept separate from negative sentiment, which stays honest). When a large share of your mentions are passive, the Actions Hub suggests giving assistants a clear reason to choose you. Note this is different from the AI not recognizing you at all, which is an identity problem covered by Brand understanding.

You can also slice the same signal three ways:

• By AI engine: how each assistant describes you, since they often differ. A theme can be criticized on one engine and praised on another.
• By topic: how you are described on each topic you track, so you can see where a specific subject helps or hurts you.
• Vs competitors: how positively AI describes you next to the competitors you track. This is measured per brand across every answer, so it can differ slightly from the overall percentage above.

Citations

Citations are the sources behind your brand's visibility. They show you where the impression of your brand comes from and which references carry weight in your market. We pull them from three places and group them by domain, so the same site shows up once with a running count:

• AI: the pages the assistants pulled up while answering, when your scan uses live web sources.
• Web: public pages that mention your brand, such as forum threads, articles, and search results.
• SEO: outbound links found on your own site when we crawl it.

Each domain is tagged with the sources it came from (AI, Web, SEO), so you can tell at a glance whether a reference is something the assistants relied on, somewhere the web talks about you, or somewhere you link out to. The count next to a domain is how many times it appears across all three sources combined.

The AI tag only fills in when a scan uses live web sources. On plans that answer from a fixed snapshot, the assistants reply from what they already know, so most citations come from the Web and SEO sources. To see those AI sources broken out per question and per assistant, open Sources the AI retrieved.

How to use them together

• Low sentiment? Look at what's being said and where it comes from, and work on the story that shapes it.
• Citations point you toward the places worth investing in, since strong, relevant sources tend to lift how assistants describe you.
• Pair this with Off-site presence, which measures where your brand actually shows up across the web.