Manage Your Brand's Reputation in AI (Platform: Measure & Improve Your AI Search Performance)

AI engines don't just decide whether to mention your brand — they decide how to talk about it. This lesson walks you through the sentiment workflow in Your Performance to monitor your brand's reputation, diagnose what's driving positive and negative narratives, identify the sources behind them, and take targeted action to shape the story AI is telling about you. 

Topics include:

• Reading your Sentiment Score trend and drilling in to see positive vs. negative statement breakdowns

• Using the Top Influential Sources widget to identify which domains are shaping your narrative

• Using Explore to get the full source-level picture — including sentiment scores by domain

• Understanding "Unsourced" statements and what they mean for your strategy

• Using the Personas and Intent Heatmap in sentiment mode to spot audience-specific reputation risks

• Turning sentiment insights into PR, content, and outreach actions

Step-by-step

Here are the steps we cover in the video, with relevant links to more information. Be sure to watch to get more context and decision support for potential choices you might have to make as you go: 

1. Navigate to the Your Performance tab in AI Search Performance ↗️ (Performance > AI Search > Your Performance).

2. Click the Your Sentiment Score KPI card at the top. This activates the sentiment lens — the widgets below update to show sentiment data. The KPI card shows your overall Sentiment Score (1–10) and its period-over-period change. A score of 10 is most positive; 1 is most negative.

3. Review the Your Sentiment Score trend widget — a line chart showing your score over time. Click Explore to open a detailed view that breaks down Positive statements, Negative statements, and the overall Sentiment Score trend together, with statement counts and change data. This is your first diagnostic layer — use it to understand whether a change in your score is driven by rising negatives, declining positives, or both.

4. Scroll to the Top Influential Sources widget. This shows the domains most responsible for driving sentiment in AI responses about your brand. Use the three tabs to switch your view:

   • All statements — all sources ranked by total statement volume

   • Positive statements — sources driving positive perception

   • Negative statements — sources driving negative perception

5. Click Explore on the Top Influential Sources widget to open the full source table. Here you can see each source's statement count, period-over-period change, number of prompts, and the topics they're most associated with. This gives you a complete picture of which publishers are your biggest allies — and which are your biggest reputation risks.

   • 💡 Note on "Unsourced" statements: You'll notice "Unsourced" as a row in both the widget and the Explore table. These are statements the AI generated from its training knowledge rather than a specific web page — meaning there's no source URL to directly influence. Knowing the volume of unsourced statements helps you understand how much of your reputation narrative you can actually affect through direct outreach initiatives.

6. Scroll down to the Personas and Intent Heatmap — now in sentiment mode — to see how your brand's reputation varies across different audiences and intent categories. Your overall score may look healthy while a specific persona or intent stage tells a different story.

7. Use your findings to take action:

   • For negative sources: share the specific statements and source URLs with your PR or content team. If the source is a publisher, consider a direct outreach conversation. If the language appears on your own site, address it in your content.

   • For positive sources: these are partnership and co-marketing opportunities — sites AI already trusts to speak positively about your brand.

   • For unsourced negatives: the lever is increasing the volume and authority of your own content so that AI has better, more accurate sources to draw from.

   • For persona/intent gaps in the heatmap: use these to prioritize which audience narratives need the most attention.

Related Resources

• AI Search Performance Support Article

• AI Search FAQs