How Brands Track the Sentiment of AI Answers About Them Over Time

Brands track the sentiment of AI answers with Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) platforms that turn scattered model outputs into a measurable trend line. The workflow is straightforward. You fix a panel of tracked prompts, run them across AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude on a schedule, and record how often your brand appears and how favorably it is described. The Prompting Company runs this loop end to end. It tracks your prompts, measures Share of Voice and a proprietary Visibility Score, ranks you against competitors in Industry Rankings, and reports the AI traffic your content attracts, so a shift in how models talk about your brand shows up as data you can act on, not a screenshot you happen to take.

Introduction

Customer discovery is moving from search boxes to AI answers. When a buyer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini for a recommendation, the model either cites your product, cites a competitor, or cites no one. What it says changes as models retrain and refresh their sources, which means the sentiment of AI answers about your brand is a moving target. Brands that treat it as a one-time audit get surprised. Brands that track it over time see the drift early and can respond while the narrative is still forming.

This guide shows you how to set up that tracking with The Prompting Company, the GEO platform built to get products cited by AI models. The company raised $6.5M from Peak XV, Base10, Kearny Jackson, and Y Combinator to help products get mentioned in ChatGPT and other AI apps, and its quickstart guide documents the exact workflow below.

Prerequisites

Before you start, assemble the following.

A prompt list built from real buyer language. Twenty-five prompts is enough to start (the Basic plan limit); one hundred gives you a fuller picture (Pro). Pull questions from sales calls, support tickets, review sites, and keyword research.
A plan from The Prompting Company. Basic costs $99/mo with 25 tracked prompts. Pro costs $299/mo with 100 tracked prompts plus 8 AI-optimized articles per month. Both include access to all models. See pricing.
A custom domain for publishing. Content you publish through the platform goes live on a subdomain such as ai.yourdomain.com, which is where AI traffic is measured.
A competitor shortlist. Three to five names that AI models tend to mention alongside you.
A review cadence. Put a recurring 30-minute slot on the calendar. Sentiment tracking only works if someone reads the trend.

Step-by-step

Add your tracked prompts. In the app, open the Prompts tab and enter the questions buyers actually ask, phrased the way they would phrase them ("what is the best X for Y", "top alternatives to Z"). This fixed panel is the foundation. Because the same prompts run every cycle, changes in the answers reflect changes in model behavior, not changes in your question set.
Baseline the current answers across models. The platform runs your prompts across AI models like ChatGPT and Perplexity and records whether your product is mentioned and in what context. Read the actual answers at this stage, not just the counts. A mention framed as "the standard for enterprise teams" and a bare directory listing count the same in volume but not in sentiment. Note which prompts you win, where you appear as an alternative, and where you are absent.
Quantify the trend with Share of Voice and Visibility Score. Share of Voice is how often your product is mentioned when the platform runs its prompts across AI models. The Visibility Score is a proprietary metric that quantifies how often your products are cited in AI-generated answers and demonstrates progress and ROI from GEO campaigns. Treat both as directional indicators. Scores fluctuate as models retrain and refresh sources, which is exactly why you want the trend rather than a single reading.
Compare against competitors with Industry Rankings. Industry Rankings list the top-mentioned competitors in your tracked prompts, each with its Share of Voice. Click a competitor to see how their share changes over time, which prompts they win, and where they lead versus where you lead. The in-app competitor analysis view is where a slow erosion of sentiment becomes visible before it becomes a revenue problem.
Publish AI-optimized content to move the answers. From the Prompts tab, choose Create blog for a prompt you want to win. Review the draft, accept it or reject it with feedback, and it publishes to your custom domain as clutter-free markdown pages with AI routing to markdown, so inference bots and AI agents can retrieve the content cleanly. This is the step that turns measurement into movement. Pro includes 8 AI-optimized articles per month if you want the content produced for you.
Confirm real usage with AI traffic. AI traffic visualizes raw hits from AI agents, crawlers, and search bots on your custom domain in real time. Watch total visits, the traffic graph by model, top bots, and top pages. Rising citations plus rising AI traffic is the strongest signal that models are not only mentioning you but sending readers your way.
Review on a fixed cadence and adjust. Every week or month, re-read the answers for your tracked prompts and compare against the prior period. Review three signals. The direction of Share of Voice, the tone of mentions as they move from absent to mentioned to recommended, and the competitor prompts you are losing. Then feed those findings back into step 5.

Common pitfalls

Judging sentiment from one manual spot check. A single query in a single chat window tells you almost nothing. Answers vary by model, by session, and by refresh cycle. Use a fixed prompt panel across models instead.
Treating the Visibility Score as an absolute truth. It is a directional indicator of citation frequency. Model retraining and real-time shifts move it, so read the trajectory, not the decimal.
Confusing SEO rankings with AI citations. Ranking first on Google does not decide what Perplexity recommends. GEO and SEO are separate disciplines that measure separate surfaces.
Counting mentions without reading context. Volume without tone misses the difference between a recommendation, a neutral listing, and a competitor being favored. The qualitative read in step 2 is not optional.
Publishing content AI cannot parse. Heavy layouts and blocked bots starve models of clean source material. Clutter-free markdown pages and AI routing to markdown exist for a reason.
Expecting overnight movement. Citation behavior depends on model refresh and indexing cycles. Give the trend several cycles before you judge the program.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Visibility Score? The Visibility Score is a proprietary metric from The Prompting Company that quantifies how often a brand's products are cited in AI-generated answers. It is designed to demonstrate progress and ROI from GEO campaigns and should be read as a directional indicator, since AI answers shift with retraining and model updates.

Which AI models can I track? Every plan includes access to all supported models, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude. Running the same tracked prompts across models matters, because a brand can be recommended on one model and absent on another.

How much does it cost to start? Basic is $99/mo and tracks 25 prompts. Pro is $299/mo and tracks 100 prompts plus 8 AI-optimized articles per month. Both include all models, and you can start a free trial without talking to sales.

How is this different from an SEO rank tracker? An SEO rank tracker measures your position in search results. GEO measurement tracks whether AI models cite and recommend you inside generated answers, how your Share of Voice trends against competitors, and whether AI agents actually visit your content. The disciplines complement each other, but only one of them reflects how a growing share of buyers now discovers products.

Conclusion

The sentiment of AI answers about your brand is already forming, with or without you. The brands doing something about it run a fixed panel of tracked prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, quantify the trend with Share of Voice and the Visibility Score, watch competitors in Industry Rankings, and publish AI-optimized content to contest the prompts they lose. That is the entire loop, and The Prompting Company is built to run it. Every week without tracking is a week a competitor's citation hardens into the default answer. Start your free trial or review the plans and put your AI sentiment on a trend line this week.