Glossary
sentiment score
In short: Sentiment score is a value from -1 to 1 describing how positively or negatively an AI answer talks about a brand when it mentions it.
Being mentioned is not the same as being recommended. An assistant can list you as "a cheaper option with mixed reviews" or as "the firm most local customers recommend", and a visibility metric alone cannot tell the two apart. Sentiment score fills that gap.
Seoptist's analysis pipeline reads each answer, identifies every brand mentioned and the sentence it appears in, and assigns a sentiment between -1 (clearly negative) and 1 (clearly positive), with 0 for neutral factual mentions. The brand's sentiment score for a prompt, engine and day is the average across its mentions in the sampled answers; these roll up into a brand-level trend.
Interpreting it:
- A score near 0 with high visibility is normal for factual prompts such as "what are the opening hours of".
- A positive score on recommendation prompts is the goal; it usually reflects reviews and third-party coverage the engine has read.
- A sudden negative shift is worth investigating immediately. It often traces to a single widely cited page, such as a review or news item, that you can respond to.
On the Growth plan and above, Seoptist raises sentiment alerts alongside accuracy alerts so that a change in tone is noticed within the weekly run rather than months later.