Sentiment

A mention isn’t automatically a good mention. Sentiment is how an AI answer talks about your brand when it names you. Every mention is classified as positive, neutral, or negative.

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How is sentiment calculated?

Sentiment is calculated from the overall tone and context of the answer — how it frames your brand, not whether it mentions you at all. Alongside the three buckets, FixAEO reports a single average on a scale from −1 to +1, where 0 is neutral. You’ll see it in three shapes. Your dashboard shows a single word, the largest of the three buckets. The competitive quadrant on Industry benchmarks plots you above or below a neutral line on its vertical axis. The Citations table breaks it down per domain, so you can see which sites describe you well.

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What’s a good sentiment score?

Most healthy brands sit close to 0, and that’s fine. AI answers are written to be descriptive, not promotional, so a category-leading brand still collects plenty of flat, factual mentions. Read the direction rather than the exact figure. A steady lean toward positive is good. A drift toward negative over several weeks is the one that needs attention, and the negative mentions themselves will tell you why.

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How do you improve it?

Start by reading the answers. Understanding AI answers lets you filter to negative mentions and see the exact wording. Negative sentiment usually traces back to a source. Use Sources to find which sites the engines read on those prompts. An outdated review or an old comparison page is a common culprit, and fixing the source fixes the answer.