# AI Brand Sentiment: How to Change What AI Says About You

Changing what AI engines say about you is possible. See what AI engines criticize most across 6,783 brands, and 5 fixes to improve AI brand sentiment.

**Published:** September 23, 2026
**Author:** Siew Ann Tan & Connor Lahey

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You type your brand's name into ChatGPT and get a description that doesn't sound anything like your brand.

Arguing with ChatGPT won't change what it says in future chats, but you can take steps to shape how AI engines describe your brand. This guide shows you what they are.

Key takeaways:

- AI brand sentiment is the positive, negative, or neutral tone AI engines use when describing a brand.
- AI engines form a sentiment about your brand when drawing on information sources to synthesize answers. These sources include your site and those belonging to competitors, industry publications, and other third parties.
- AI engines often criticize brands that provide limited information about themselves, especially when a prompt mentions the brand directly. When users ask generic, unbranded prompts, AI engines tend to criticize specific brand traits, like pricing, instead.
- Most negative descriptors of brands are fixable because they often reflect gaps in the information AI engines find, rather than a genuine weakness of the brand.

## What is AI brand sentiment?

AI brand sentiment is the positive, negative, or neutral tone AI engines use when describing a brand. You measure it across answers to many prompts, rather than relying on a single response, to get a more reliable picture of how AI engines describe your brand.

AI responses aren't always consistent. An AI engine might describe a brand positively in response to one prompt, then negatively when you run the exact same prompt again.

Over time, though, AI engines tend to repeat certain descriptions of a brand. Identifying trends in these descriptions gives you a more accurate picture of your AI brand reputation.

### How is AI brand sentiment different from social listening sentiment?

Social listening sentiment reflects the emotional tone people express about you on social media, while AI brand sentiment reflects the tone AI engines use when describing your brand.

The two also draw from different sources. Social listening mainly draws from social media discussions, while AI engines pull information from websites and other online sources to describe your brand. These websites include your site and third-party ones belonging to competitors, review platforms, industry publications, and community forums, while the other online sources include social media platforms.

As a result, a brand can have warm social listening sentiment and cold AI brand sentiment at the same time. For example, people might speak positively about your brand on social media but more negatively in reviews and community discussions.

### How is AI brand sentiment different from AI visibility?

AI visibility measures how often AI engines mention and cite you in responses, while AI brand sentiment measures whether those mentions describe you positively, negatively, or neutrally.

These two don't move together. For example, [AI visibility tracking](https://www.searchable.com/blog/ai-visibility-tracking) could reveal your brand is highly visible in AI responses, but AI engines consistently talk about you negatively. The opposite can also happen: your brand may have lower visibility but receive more positive descriptions when it does appear.

## Where AI engines get their opinion about your brand

AI engines themselves don't form opinions of your brand. Instead, their responses reflect the opinions of your brand in the information sources they pull from.

Here's how this process works:

- A user enters a prompt relevant to your brand into an AI engine.
- The AI engine retrieves content relevant to the prompt. This content can come from various sources, including your site and third-party sites like competitors' sites and industry publications. Of the content an AI engine retrieves, reviews, comparison and roundup articles, forum discussions, and press coverage tend to carry more evaluative language about your brand.
- The AI engine scans the retrieved content for adjectives and other language describing your brand, along with other information relevant to the prompt.
- The AI engine synthesizes an answer. While doing this, it may incorporate the source content's sentiment-carrying language into its response.

Changing AI brand sentiment is therefore possible: shift the sentiment of the information sources AI engines draw from, and the sentiment of their answers tends to follow.

## What AI engines criticize most often about brands

AI engines tend to criticize brands for providing limited information, especially when users ask about those brands directly. If users enter an unbranded category prompt, AI engines usually describe specific negative traits of the brands they recommend, with price being the most common criticism.

We conducted a brand sentiment analysis of 1,943,365 negative descriptor phrases that AI engines used for 6,783 brands tracked on Searchable between July 5, 2026, and August 18, 2026.

Here are the phrases that appeared across the most brands, and the number of times each phrase appeared:

| Phrase | Number of brands the phrase appears for | Number of times the phrase appeared |
| :---- | :---- | :---- |
| limited | 898 | 3,799 |
| premium pricing | 682 | 5,448 |
| expensive | 561 | 4,771 |
| more limited | 487 | 1,663 |
| more expensive | 372 | 1,423 |
| mixed reviews | 325 | 654 |
| premium price | 289 | 1,574 |
| higher cost | 285 | 1,019 |
| communication issues | 273 | 931 |
| customer service | 264 | 826 |
| recurring complaints | 231 | 541 |
| poor communication | 215 | 691 |
| learning curve | 179 | 1,101 |

**Note:** Brands that pay to track sentiment in AI answers are likely to be documented in more detail than brands that don't. So the data we recorded may skew higher than the true picture across all brands.

### "Limited" is the single most repeated negative word about brands

Over the seven-week window from July 5, 2026, to August 18, 2026, AI engines used the word "limited" to describe 898 unique brands tracked on Searchable.

That's more brands than any other negative phrase we measured, including price-related descriptors like "expensive." This figure rose to 1,112 when we included variants like "more limited" and "very limited."

When AI engines use the word "limited," they generally aren't criticizing a product's shortcomings. More often, they're flagging gaps in their knowledge of it.

The longer phrases the word appears in make this clear. In the same dataset, the most common negative descriptors that begin with "limited" were, in order of how many brands they appeared for: limited independent reviews, limited independent review volume, limited independent customer reviews, limited review volume, limited independent review data, limited public information, and limited public evidence.

Every one of those describes how much evidence about a brand an AI engine could find, not what the brand's product actually does.

### What AI engines criticize depends on whether the question names a brand

When AI engines responded to prompts that named a brand, their top criticisms of the brand tended to include the phrase "limited" or "more limited" ahead of price- and service-related complaints.

But when AI engines responded to category prompts asking for recommendations without naming specific brands, these engines tended to criticize specific brand traits, like pricing (e.g., "premium pricing") and customer service experience (e.g., "recurring complaints"), when recommending a brand.

| Rank | Phrase in responses to branded prompts (number of brands) | Phrase in responses to unbranded category prompts (number of brands) |
| :---- | :---- | :---- |
| 1 | limited (697) | premium pricing (395) |
| 2 | more limited (413) | expensive (334) |
| 3 | premium pricing (357) | limited (265) |
| 4 | expensive (286) | more expensive (229) |
| 5 | mixed reviews (223) | recurring complaints (202) |

### Price is more than twice as concentrated in negative descriptions

AI engines regularly discuss brands' pricing, with price-related language being 2.2x more concentrated among negative terms like "more expensive" and "higher cost" (11.5%) than among positive terms like "competitive pricing" (5.2%).

This isn't to say most brands have a pricing problem. When describing brands' pricing, AI engines generally use positive language instead of negative language.

But if an AI engine's information sources consistently talk about a brand's pricing negatively, the engine is more likely to mention price over other weaknesses when describing the brand.

Price is also what AI engines get wrong the most. We had over 1,700 brands review over 32,000 AI-generated statements about themselves, and price was the type of fact AI engines got wrong most often. They were incorrect about price 13.5% of the time, according to [our AI brand misinformation report](https://www.searchable.com/data/ai-brand-misinformation-report).

## How to measure AI brand sentiment

Measuring AI brand sentiment accurately involves tracking what multiple AI engines say about a brand across a fixed set of prompts over time. A single response from one AI engine isn't a reliable indicator of sentiment when the AI engine may say something else when asked the same prompt again.

[Sentiment tracking in Searchable](https://www.searchable.com/features/aeo-insights/sentiment) works like this: we weight positive, neutral, and negative answers about a brand at full, half, and zero value, respectively. We then divide this score by the total number of answers scored.

Let's say that out of 100 AI responses about your brand, 50 are positive and the remaining 50 are neutral. Your AI sentiment score is therefore ((50 × 1) + (50 × 0.5)) ÷ 100 = 0.75, or 75%.

Plus, we don't just report on your brand's sentiment score. We also report on the exact words AI engines use to describe your brand.

![Searchable Brand Perception panel showing how ChatGPT perceives a brand: a 90 out of 100 sentiment score split 90% positive, 8% neutral and 2% negative, based on 128 responses, with the exact descriptors underlined in the summary. Strengths are underlined in green and weaknesses in red, including "premium pricing", "spec confusion" and "budget alternatives"](https://www.searchable.com/blog/ai-brand-sentiment-brand-perception.webp)

The report lets you filter by branded and unbranded prompts, as well as specific AI engines. Use these features to see the narrative different AI engines give, depending on whether users search for you by name.

### What counts as a good AI brand sentiment score?

The higher your AI brand sentiment score, the better, and you can see where you stand by comparing your score with other brands'.

Tracking 11,289 brands with at least 100 sentiment observations on Searchable from July 5, 2026, to August 18, 2026, we found the median AI brand sentiment score to be 66.9, the 10th percentile's score to be 56.4, and the 90th percentile's to be 78.2.

Negative descriptors make up a small share of how AI engines talk about most brands. For the median brand, 1.6% of descriptors were negative, compared with 10.2% for the 90th-percentile brand.

Even at that higher end, the large majority of descriptors were still positive or neutral. This finding suggests that negative AI brand sentiment tends to come from a handful of repeated phrases rather than broad criticism.

## How to change the way AI engines describe your brand

Use these five tactics to change the way AI engines describe your brand, ordered from the fastest and cheapest to those that take more time to work.

For the wider strategic frame for sequencing these tactics, see our guide to an [earned versus owned AEO strategy](https://www.searchable.com/blog/aeo-strategy-earned-owned-decision-tree).

### Publish the fact AI engines currently guess at

Publish more information about your brand so AI engines have something concrete to cite, rather than guessing or telling users that their knowledge of you is "limited."

Pricing is a common target here. If you don't disclose your prices publicly, AI engines may fill the gap with what competitors say about them, as well as the language you use to position your brand. They may then report to users that you charge "premium pricing" or that you're "expensive" even if this language doesn't fairly reflect your pricing.

Identify the factual claims AI engines make about your brand, like pricing, founding year, headcount, funding, locations, and integrations. Disregard opinions, because they'll change when you correct the facts they're based on.

Then, publish the correct facts on your site. Doing this should be straightforward, given that you control your site's content.

Balance transparency with confidentiality where needed. For example, even if you can't share exact pricing, giving a range or starting price still helps close information gaps.

### Correct the third-party pages AI engines quote

Correct the third-party pages AI engines quote from, because evaluative language about brands typically traces to content on third-party sites, like review profiles, comparison roundups, directory listings, and news articles.

Searchable helps you view [which sources AI engines cite](https://www.searchable.com/features/aeo-insights/sources) for your brand, so you don't have to run prompts across multiple engines manually.

![Searchable prompt detail view showing Mention Sources on the left, listing the brands named for a prompt with their share of voice, and Citation Sources highlighted on the right, listing the domains cited for that prompt with the percentage of runs each appeared in and a type label such as Editorial, UGC or Review](https://www.searchable.com/blog/ai-brand-sentiment-sources.webp)

Once you've identified the third-party pages AI engines cite, read what these pages say. Then, work on getting them updated.

Online directories and review sites often let you claim a business listing to display vetted facts about your brand. This screenshot shows part of Yelp's process for claiming a business page:

![The first step of Yelp for Business's claim flow, headed "Hello! Let's start with your business name!", with a search box for a business owner to find and claim their listing](https://www.searchable.com/blog/ai-brand-sentiment-claim-listing.webp)

To correct a roundup article, reach out to its author, or an editor at that publication, and ask them to update it. Frame the request as helping them keep their content current for their audience, so they maintain reader confidence.

### Answer the objection where AI engines will find it

If AI engines consistently speak negatively of your brand, don't try to argue by shooting back a reply. Instead, publish site content that addresses the objection head-on, using language AI engines can retrieve and quote.

Here are examples:

| Objection | Content to publish |
| :---- | :---- |
| Steep learning curve | Your typical customer onboarding timeline |
| Limited integrations | An integrations directory listing the apps you currently support |
| Slow customer support | Your support response timelines |

How much effort publishing this content will take depends on the content's complexity. For example, blog posts are generally easier to publish and keep updated than building an interactive integrations directory from scratch.

Where possible, have your page titles mirror the questions prospects ask about your brand. Doing this helps AI engines extract and cite information from the right pages, so you [increase AI search citations](https://www.searchable.com/blog/increase-ai-search-citations).

### Refresh comparison pages holding your old position

AI engines regularly draw on comparison pages for information on brands (yours **and** your competitors'). This becomes problematic when you release a new feature or discontinue a product, but the comparison pages AI engines cite aren't updated for these changes.

Identify the comparison pages that AI engines cite when talking about your brand. Then, check what these pages say about your offerings, and work to correct any outdated or missing information.

Comparison pages that live on your site are easier to update since you control your site's content. Updating pages on others' sites often takes more time and effort because you'll need to coordinate the work with another organization.

There's also no guarantee a competitor will help update what they say about you.

### When to leave a negative descriptor alone

Not all negative descriptors of your brand need addressing. Some of them are true and may even align with your positioning. Meanwhile, other descriptors may appear too infrequently to be worth acting on.

Use these questions to decide whether to fix a negative descriptor:

- **Do you want your brand to be known by the phrase?** Accurate negative descriptors of your brand may be worth keeping if they improve brand perception in AI search. For example, if you're a luxury brand, being described as having "premium pricing" is correct and even desirable.
- **Is the phrase factual or evaluative in nature?** If the phrase is evaluative (that your pages are slow to load, for instance), the right approach is to fix its root cause (like your pages' load time). Fix the underlying facts, and the opinions may change after that.
- **Do the prompts that surface the phrase have commercial value?** Prioritize fixing negative descriptors that appear in AI responses for prompts more likely to drive leads and sales.
- **How often does the phrase appear?** Focus on addressing recurring criticism rather than phrases that show up only once or twice in answers to rarely-used prompts.

## How long it takes to change AI brand sentiment

Changing AI brand sentiment may take weeks. **It's generally slower than updating pages to improve organic rankings**, where changes can take effect within days.

That's because when you update information about your brand, the search indexes that AI engines rely on for live online data may take a few days or weeks to reflect those changes. The updated information then needs to appear in enough AI answers to affect your sentiment score, which is measured across many prompts over time.

Updating your own brand information is usually fastest because you control the changes. Making changes to third-party sites takes longer because you have to coordinate with other organizations.

Getting corrections made on third-party sites is slower, as it often involves back and forth with outside organizations. This is especially true when you're working with the press, as media outlets aren't always willing to update published articles. In these cases, you may need to secure new coverage rather than rely on corrections.

## How to confirm your AI brand sentiment actually changed

After updating content about your brand, confirm your AI brand sentiment has changed by tracking shifts in AI engines' descriptions of your brand.

Don't just watch for improvements to your overall sentiment score. A change in the score doesn't tell you which of your actions caused it. In contrast, changes in how AI engines describe your brand can give you more specific evidence about what's working.

First, check whether a specific phrase, like an inaccurate description or outdated fact, has stopped appearing. If it has, your efforts to suppress it have worked, and you can replicate what you did to target other negative phrases.

Next, look for changes in the descriptor mix. Check whether AI engines are using different adjectives to describe your brand and whether they're comparing your product more favorably against competitors'. These changes can happen before your overall sentiment score improves.

Then, confirm the change holds across repeated prompt runs, including on different days if you can. A single favorable result could be a fluke rather than a lasting change.

Run these tests across multiple AI engines, too. Each one retrieves information from different sources, so one AI engine changing how it describes your brand doesn't mean the others have changed as well. If you run [sentiment tracking in Searchable](https://www.searchable.com/features/aeo-insights/sentiment), you can monitor changes in your AI brand sentiment across different AI engines in one place.

## Frequently asked questions about AI brand sentiment

### Can ChatGPT do a sentiment analysis of your brand?

ChatGPT can analyze the sentiment of any text about your brand that you paste into it, but it can't tell you what itself or other AI engines say about you across multiple prompts. That's because it has no view of its own aggregate output or that of other AI engines.

### Can you ask an AI engine to change what it says about your brand?

You can, but it won't work. The corrections you make in one conversation won't carry over to AI responses in subsequent chats, since AI engines use their information sources to rebuild their answers each time. You'll need to change what these underlying sources say about your brand to change how AI engines talk about you.

### Does negative AI sentiment reduce how often AI engines recommend you?

Yes, it can. AI engines rely on their sources' descriptions of brands to decide which ones to recommend, so negative descriptors of your brand could get you excluded from these engines' shortlists. Unless you strategically want to be known by certain negative descriptors, it's worth fixing them to increase your chances of AI engines recommending you.

### Is AI brand sentiment the same in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews?

No. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and other AI engines can reflect different AI brand sentiment, since each one draws from a different source mix. This means that improving your sentiment on one AI engine won't automatically lead to improved sentiment on others. You'll need to check and manage your brand's sentiment on each AI engine separately.

### Can a competitor influence how AI engines describe your brand?

Yes, they can. If a competitor publishes content like a comparison page that talks about your brand, AI engines can draw from it like any other retrievable source. Getting competitors to change what they've written about you is often challenging, so focus on shaping AI brand sentiment through content you have more control over, like your site's pages.

## Improve your AI brand sentiment

AI engines aren't judging your brand when they say negative things about it. They're summarizing what their information sources report about your brand, and you can change this narrative.

To do this, find the specific descriptors of your brand that regularly appear across the AI engines your audience uses. Then, fix the ones that portray your brand negatively, and monitor changes to your AI brand sentiment.

AI engines can form a sentiment about your brand only if they're talking about it frequently enough. If your brand rarely surfaces for relevant prompts, work to [improve AI brand visibility](https://www.searchable.com/blog/improve-ai-brand-visibility) before turning your attention to improving LLM brand sentiment.

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