The Reputation page provides critical insights into the sentiment and framing of your brand mentions. It moves beyond simple visibility to analyze whether your brand is being portrayed positively or negatively in AI responses, and reveals the core themes driving that perception.

Why Reputation Matters

Reputation adds the essential layer of qualitative context to your AEO metrics. A high mention count is good, but if the tone is negative, it can be actively harmful.

• Impact on Buyer Perception: The framing of an AI response is often a potential customer's first impression. Negative sentiment can immediately decrease their consideration of your brand.
  
  

• Identify Brand Vulnerabilities: Negative themes act as an early warning system, highlighting recurring issues or points of negative comparison that you need to address.
  
  

• Validate Your Strengths: Positive themes confirm what resonates with the market, showing you which value propositions are being successfully amplified by AI.

How to Use the Reputation Page

Overall Reputation Score

At the top of the page, you'll find your overall Reputation Score. This represents the percentage of your brand mentions that are framed positively. Mentions with a neutral tone are filtered out, so this score is a direct comparison of positive versus negative framings.

Reputation Themes Breakdown

The main table on this page identifies and groups the recurring reputation themes found in AI responses. This shows you the specific narratives—both good and bad—that are being associated with your brand.

• What is a theme? A theme is a summarized concept that appears repeatedly (e.g., "Praised for ease of use," "Criticized for high price," "Considered a good enterprise solution").
  
  

• What the table shows: The table lists each theme, its classification (Positive or Negative), and the number of times it has occurred in AI responses.

Drilling Down for Proof and Context

To understand the exact context behind any theme, you can view the source responses.

1. Find a theme in the table you want to investigate.
   
   

2. Hover over the theme and click View Details.
   
   

3. A window will open displaying the most recent AI response that includes this theme, with the relevant sentence(s) highlighted. You can then toggle through all the other responses where this specific theme appeared.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: What determines brand reputation in AI responses? Why is the AI framing my brand this way?

Reputation is a direct reflection of your brand's public sentiment across the internet. The AI models synthesize information from a vast range of public sources to form their conclusions. Key sources that influence reputation include:

• Third-Party Review Sites: Aggregated scores and user comments from sites like G2, Capterra (for B2B), Google Reviews, and Trustpilot heavily influence perceptions of quality and customer satisfaction.
  
  

• News Articles and Press Coverage: Media coverage, both positive (e.g., product launches, funding news) and negative (e.g., security issues, customer complaints), directly shapes the narrative.
  
  

• Industry Blogs and Publications: How analysts, experts, and influencers talk about your product in articles, reviews, and comparison pieces is a major factor.
  
  

• Community Forums and Social Media: Unfiltered user discussions on platforms like Reddit, Quora, and social media provide a wealth of real-world opinions that AIs use to gauge public consensus.
  
  

• Your Competitors' Content: How competitors position themselves against you on their websites can influence how AIs frame comparison-based answers.

Q: How can we improve our brand's sentiment framing in AI responses?

Improving AI sentiment is a proactive, long-term strategy that involves amplifying positive signals and addressing negative narratives at their source.

1. Amplify Positive Signals:

   • Encourage Reviews: Actively encourage your satisfied customers to leave positive reviews on major third-party sites. This is one of the most direct ways to improve sentiment.

   • Promote Case Studies & Testimonials: Publish and promote content that showcases customer success. This provides positive, authoritative material for AIs to reference.

   • Engage in PR & Media Outreach: Proactively pitch positive stories and thought leadership articles to industry publications to build a library of positive press.
     
     

2. Address Negative Narratives:

   • Engage in the Community: Use the drill-down feature to find the source of negative themes. If a Reddit thread is the cause, have your team engage directly and helpfully in that thread.

   • Respond to Negative Reviews: Publicly and professionally address negative reviews on platforms like G2 or Google Reviews. This shows you are responsive and can mitigate the impact of the initial complaint.

   • Create Clarifying Content: If a negative theme is based on misinformation (e.g., a misunderstanding about your pricing), create a clear, comprehensive article on your own site that directly addresses the issue. This creates a positive source for the AI to find and cite.