AI Brand Perception shows you the language and themes that AI models use when recommending your brand. Instead of just tracking whether you appear in AI responses, this feature surfaces why you appear and how you're being positioned, so you can align your messaging with what AI is actually saying about you.
Where to Find It
AI Brand Perception is accessible from the left navigation in any report.
What You're Looking At
The main view is called What AI Highlights. Gumshoe analyzes AI responses recommending your brand and extracts the most common themes, attributes, and product associations from that text.
Each product or service in your report gets its own section showing:
- Themes: These are the buying criteria, features, and qualities AI associates with that product when recommending it.
- Top competing products: the brands that appear most often in the same AI responses as your product (co-mentions), giving you a quick read on who AI sees as your competitive set for the product or service.
The number next to each tag and co-mentioned competitive product or service reflects how many times that element appeared across your AI responses in that report run. Higher counts mean AI models are consistently associating that attribute with your product.
Drilling Into the Details
Clicking any theme opens a panel that shows the exact AI model outputs for that theme. You can see which models mentioned it, what they said, and how the language varied across responses. This is the raw evidence behind the summary, which is useful for auditing accuracy, spotting gaps, or identifying messaging you may want to reinforce on your site.
Comparing Products
Click a competitive product to view it alongside your corresponding product. The comparison view shows each product's full attribute list, including mention counts, making it easy to see where AI coverage overlaps and diverges.
This is useful for:
- Understanding how AI differentiates between your product lines
- Benchmarking your brand against a specific competitor
- Identifying attributes your competitor owns that you don't appear for
In the compare view, attributes that appear for both products are flagged with a comparison icon so you can quickly spot shared territory.
Click on any theme to expand and view the detailed AI Model mentions.
How This Differs from Topics
Topics (found under Topics & Prompts) are the subject areas you configure to generate AI queries. They represent the categories (subcategories of the report's focus) that the Personas care about. AI Brand Perception is different: it analyzes what AI says in response to those queries. The themes you see here are extracted directly from model outputs and reflect the narrative AI is shaping around your brand, not the questions you asked.
Using This Data
A few practical ways to act on what you find here:
- Validate your positioning. If AI consistently highlights attributes you consider core to your brand, that's confirmation that your messaging is landing. If important differentiators are missing, that's a content and visibility gap worth addressing.
- Identify unintended associations. If AI is consistently pairing your brand with attributes you don't want to own, you can trace those back to the source responses and investigate what's driving them.
- Benchmark against competitors. The compare view shows you where a competitor has stronger theme coverage and where you have the edge, which can inform content priorities.
- Spot co-mention patterns. The competing products shown under each section indicate which brands you are grouped with. This is the competitive set AI has effectively assigned to you, which may or may not match your own view of the landscape.