How to Track Brand Sentiment in AI Search With OtterlyAI (2026) - AI Search Visibility Blog | Insights and Data | OtterlyAI

Byline: Written by Thomas Peham · Last updated March 19, 2026

Every time someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini about your category, those AI engines don’t just decide whether to mention your brand – they decide how to talk about it. A re you recommended enthusiastically, mentioned with caveats, or dismissed outright?

Until now, there was no way to measure that at scale. Today we’re changing that.

Brand Sentiment is now available in every OtterlyAI account. It gives you a quantified view of how positively – or negatively – AI search engines describe your brand, and lets you benchmark that sentiment against every competitor you track.

Below is a walkthrough of the key metrics, where to find them in the product, and how to turn sentiment data into action.

Understanding Brand Sentiment Analysis with OtterlyAI

Introduction to Sentiment Analysis

What Is Brand Sentiment in AI Search?

Brand sentiment in AI search measures the emotional tone AI Search Engines use when they mention your brand in their responses. Unlike traditional social-listening sentiment (which monitors human conversations on social media), OtterlyAI’s Brand Sentiment feature analyzes the language AI models themselves generate about you across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.

This matters because AI-generated answers are increasingly shaping purchase decisions. If an AI engine describes a competitor as “the leading solution” while calling your product “an alternative worth considering,” that language gap translates directly into lost pipeline.

Key Brand Sentiment KPIs

OtterlyAI’s Brand Sentiment feature introduces three core metrics to your dashboard:

1. Net Sentiment Score (NSS)

The Net Sentiment Score (NSS) measures the overall emotional tone of AI-generated mentions of your brand by calculating the balance between positive and negative references. It ranges from −100 (entirely negative) to +100 (entirely positive).

(Positive Mentions − Negative Mentions) / Total Mentions × 100 = NSS

An NSS of +40, for example, means your positive AI mentions outweigh the negative ones by a healthy margin. An NSS near zero signals a mostly neutral – or evenly split – perception.

2. Sentiment Breakdown

In addition to the overall NSS, you’ll see a percentage breakdown of negative, neutral, and positive sentiments in your Brand Ranking view. This gives you a quick visual read on the distribution – not just the net number – so you can spot when neutral mentions dominate even if your NSS looks decent.

3. Sentiment Count

The absolute count of negative, neutral, and positive mentions lets you understand the volume behind the percentages. A brand with an NSS of +60 based on 10 mentions tells a very different story than an NSS of +60 based on 500 mentions.

Together, these three metrics let you benchmark not just how often AI engines mention your brand, but how favorably – and compare that directly against competitors.

How to Use Brand Sentiment in OtterlyAI

Competitive Benchmarking at a Glance

The Brand Ranking view now includes sentiment columns alongside visibility and mention counts. At a glance, you can see which brands in your competitive set have the most positive AI perception – and which ones are struggling with negative sentiment.

This is where it gets strategic: a competitor might outrank you in raw mention volume but carry a lower sentiment score, which means there’s an opportunity to win on quality of perception even if you trail on quantity.

Prompt-Level Sentiment Analysis

Brand Sentiment analysis is available across multiple OtterlyAI reports. You can filter, sort, and drill into individual search prompts to compare your sentiment against competitors at the query level.

This is one of the most powerful views in the feature. Sorting by best or worst brand sentiment instantly reveals which topics and prompts generate positive coverage for your brand – and which ones surface neutral or negative mentions. That insight tells you exactly where to focus your content and PR efforts.

Per-Response and Per-Answer Drill-Down

It doesn’t stop at the prompt level. Open any specific search prompt, and you can analyze brand sentiment for each individual AI response – and even drill down into each answer within that response to see the exact sentiment attributes.

This granularity lets you understand not just that a prompt generates negative sentiment, but why – which specific claims or comparisons in the AI’s answer are driving that perception.

Three Ways to Act on Brand Sentiment Data

Tracking sentiment is only valuable if it changes what you do. Here are three ways to put this data to work:

Bonus: Stress-Test Your Brand With Positive and Negative Prompts

Here’s a power move most teams overlook: don’t just track how AI engines respond to neutral, informational queries – deliberately ask for the best and worst in your category.

When you add prompts like “What are the best project management tools?” alongside “Which project management tools should I avoid?”, you force AI engines to reveal the specific positive and negative attributes they associate with each brand. This creates an extreme-sentiment lens that surfaces things a balanced query would never show – the exact language AI uses when it’s praising you and the exact language it uses when it’s warning people away.

Add these prompt patterns to your OtterlyAI tracking set and monitor the Brand Sentiment for each:

Once these prompts are tracked in OtterlyAI, you’ll see sentiment data at its most polarized – and that’s exactly where the most actionable insights live. If your brand shows up in “worst” or “avoid” responses, you now know precisely which narrative to fix. If a competitor appears there but you don’t, that’s a positioning advantage worth amplifying in your content and messaging.

Try Brand Sentiment now

Brand Sentiment is available now in your OtterlyAI account. Log in and head to your Brand Ranking to see how AI search engines really feel about your brand — and your competitors.