Sentiment
Sentiment is a rating of the tone used about your brand. It separates praise from a neutral description and from criticism, instead of treating every mention as equally good.
What the three ratings mean
A positive statement points out a strength of your brand. A neutral one describes it without a clear judgment. A negative one highlights a weakness or a caveat. Simply being included in a list of companies isn’t necessarily praise.
How Heuriso uses it
Sentiment is one component of mention quality in Visibility Score: positive gives 3 points, neutral 2 and negative 1. An answer that doesn’t mention your brand scores 0 overall.
The rating concerns tone, not accuracy. A flattering sentence can contain a false fact, and a critical one can be fair.
Why tone needs context
One statement can praise one feature and point out a limitation of another. A sentence about a high price isn’t always criticism; in a comparison of premium services, it may simply describe how the offer is positioned. Read the passage together with the user’s question and the surrounding sentences. An automatic label simplifies what was said, so for important decisions go back to the full text.
Compare the topics the caveats are about, too. A recurring remark about unclear pricing calls for a different response than a note that the product doesn’t suit large companies. The first may come from a lack of specifics on your website; the second from what you actually offer. Not every negative rating is something to remove or correct.
When an answer describes several companies, make sure the rating applies to the right brand. Praise for a competitor isn’t automatically criticism of you. It helps to point to the exact sentence behind the label and check that it doesn’t refer to another product.
Common mistake: treating criticism as falsehood
An unfavorable opinion doesn’t become an error just because it hurts your image. First separate the opinion from any checkable claim. If an answer mentions a fee that doesn’t exist, you can verify it against your price list. If it says your offer is expensive, you need to understand what it is being compared with. Treating both cases the same makes it harder to choose a sensible fix and can lead to removing useful information.
Example
“Alpha offers web hosting” is a neutral description. “Alpha stands out for its helpful support” is positive. “Alpha’s support can be hard to reach” expresses a caveat.
Key takeaway
Sentiment helps you understand the tone of an answer. Whether specific facts are correct needs to be checked separately.
Sources and methodology
The external source explains the concept of sentiment. The three labels and the 3/2/1 points described above are Heuriso’s rules, not the Google Cloud scale.