What Is Brand Sentiment? (And How to Improve Yours in Today’s Search Landscape)

Brand sentiment is the overall tone of what people say about your brand online: Positive, negative, or neutral. It covers social posts, reviews, forum threads, and the AI answers that summarize your brand for buyers.

While you can’t control what people say about your business on the web, you can measure brand sentiment by collecting and classifying brand mentions while also addressing the problems those discussions reveal.

What is brand sentiment?

Brand sentiment refers to the mentions of your brand online and the feelings behind them. If a brand receives positive word-of-mouth publicity, they have a positive brand sentiment. But if they get caught in a public relations nightmare, their brand sentiment will skew negative.

You can track these shifts in consumers’ attitudes toward your brand by conducting a brand sentiment analysis. A brand sentiment analysis gathers all mentions of your brand to determine whether they’re positive, negative, or neutral.

Why is conducting a brand sentiment analysis important?

Conducting a brand sentiment analysis is the best way to keep a pulse on how customers feel about your brand. By continually analyzing your brand sentiment, you ensure your brand remains in a positive public light. You also equip yourself to mitigate any negative publicity you might receive.

More reasons your company should conduct a brand sentiment analysis include:

Improve customer satisfaction

While plenty of social media users post negative comments about companies, these complaints don’t have to spell a catastrophe for your brand.

When you keep track of your brand sentiment, you’ll spot these complaints quickly, even if the user doesn’t tag you directly. The quicker and more thoughtfully you respond to negative comments, the better your chances of alleviating the situation.

You’ll also improve your chances of retaining those customers by showing that you care about their experiences with your company.

Additionally, other audience members will see your thoughtful response and understand how much you care about your customers’ experience and seek to improve it.

Influence word-of-mouth recommendations

People are more likely to trust what a friend or family member says about a brand than what the brand says about themselves. If your brand sentiment is positive, that can work wonders for your marketing strategy.

If it’s negative, you’ll need to remedy that to get your marketing campaigns back on track.

Conducting a brand sentiment analysis helps you keep track of your word-of-mouth mentions so you can respond accordingly. You might repost positive recommendations and adjust your strategies in response to negative word-of-mouth.

Inform market research

A brand sentiment analysis is one of the best ways to conduct market research into your industry. By analyzing what consumers say about your competitors, you can spot opportunities or threats and gain better insight into industry trends.

For example, if you work in the tech industry and notice more negative mentions of machine learning, that might indicate an industry development that could affect your brand.

Understand the target market

All marketing strategies should center on your target audience, and what better way to understand them than by analyzing how they talk about you and your competition online?

While surveys and other market research tools provide a foundational understanding of your target customer, analyzing what your audience says online helps you dive deeper.

Just remember that public posts skew toward your most vocal customers, so pair them with survey and first-party feedback. What does your target audience love most about your brand? What makes them unhappy?

Your findings will help you better target your marketing strategies to your ideal customer.

Improve marketing strategies

Similarly, you can use brand sentiment analysis to gauge your marketing performance. Have you launched a new product? Analyze how people talk about it. Initiated a new ad campaign? See if it’s generating positive buzz.

You can also use your findings to gain new ideas for future marketing strategies and tactics. Are customers talking positively about something related to your competitors, and can you leverage these insights to create something better?

How do I measure brand sentiment?

You can measure your brand sentiment by collecting all brand mentions and determining whether each is positive, negative, or neutral. From here, you can calculate an overall brand sentiment score, such as positive mentions as a share of all classified mentions each month, to gauge how many positive and negative mentions you’ve received, or you can analyze and respond to individual comments.

You’ll need to include tagged and untagged mentions of your brand, and in many cases, you’ll want to look at the mention’s context. The context sometimes changes a sentence’s meaning, so don’t overlook this step!
Untagged posts can make up a large share of the conversation.

Benefit Cosmetics told Adweek in 2026 that it has recently seen a 30% to 50% lift in user-generated content featuring its products without the brand tagged. A tool that only tracks @mentions would miss every one of those posts.

What are some brand sentiment analysis tools?

Most mid-sized or large brands receive so many mentions that make manually measuring their brand sentiment challenging. Fortunately, there are many brand sentiment analysis tools to automate the process. Some excellent choices include:

Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a brand monitoring tool that lets you select any keywords you wish to monitor, then compiles mentions of that keyword from social media and elsewhere on the web. It also features automated sentiment analysis software so you can quickly see whether those mentions are positive, negative, or neutral.

Brandwatch

Brandwatch also compiles mentions from social media, including posts and direct messages (DMs). It tells you the sentiment of each post, along with an overview of your total mentions and their sentiment. To help you stay alert, it notifies you of potential threats to your brand.

Social Searcher

On Social Searcher, it is free to search for chosen keywords and see sentiment analysis for them, along with other post statistics. If you upgrade to the premium version, you’ll also receive a stored log of your past mentions.

How do I improve brand sentiment?

You’ve seen your brand sentiment score and you aren’t happy with the results. So, what do you do if you need to improve it? Follow these tips to increase your brand sentiment:

1. Monitor consistently

The digital space changes rapidly, so you should monitor your brand sentiment consistently, across review sites, short-form video, and AI answers, to stay ahead of potential problems and mitigate them as needed.

Include this task as a regular part of your marketing activities, and use an automated tool to simplify the process!

2. Respond quickly

When you see negative brand mentions appear online, respond to them quickly. Ensure you personalize your response and do your best to answer the poster’s question or address their concern.

Public replies also matter beyond the original poster, because review sites and forum threads are some of the sources AI assistants draw on when they describe your brand to potential clients.

3. Adapt your strategies

If you notice a spike in negative brand mentions, find the source of the problem and remedy it before it becomes too troublesome.

While a spike in negative mentions can be concerning, they don’t have to spell disaster. Use your brand sentiment analysis to learn what went wrong so you can improve going forward.

You can also use the reverse — if you find a campaign or strategy correlated with a positive boost in brand mentions, lean into it!

4. Test new ideas

Brand sentiment analysis can also unveil potential new ideas for your marketing campaigns. Stay on the lookout for these, and don’t hesitate to test them. To do so effectively, run an A/B or multivariate test on your new campaign idea — where it’s a new messaging tactic, post format, or strategy.

How do I track brand sentiment in AI search?

AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews summarize reviews, forum threads, and articles into a short description of your brand. That description is brand sentiment too, and a buyer may read it before seeing a single post as research is what 65% of people use AI for.

So, track your brand’s sentiment in AI search by:

1. Listing the questions buyers ask: Include category questions such as “best CRM for small businesses,” reputation questions such as “Is your [add brand name] reliable?”, and comparison queries like “[your brand] vs. [competitor brand]”.
2. Recording the tone and the sources: Mark each answer as positive, negative, or neutral (the same way you score social mentions), and note which review sites, forums, or articles the AI platform cites.
3. Tracking the answers over time: Consider a platform built for brand sentiment tracking to measure your performance over time automatically. As an example, OmniSEO® is a paid AI visibility platform that businesses can use to not only track their AI search citations but also their brand’s overall sentiment across ChatGPT, Google, Claude, and more.
4. Improving the sources: Your website and its owned off-site listings (like Google Business Profile) are one set of resources AI uses to understand your brand. Go outside those owned channels and start responding to feedback in places like Reddit and other forums.

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