Sentiment drift
Sentiment drift is a slow change in the tone AI answers take about your brand, usually traced to a source that changed or a new one.
Sentiment drift is a slow change in how the AI platforms talk about your brand. Week by week, the answers get a little warmer or a little cooler. There's no single day where it flips, which makes it easy to miss until it's large.
Catching it early matters, because by the time it's obvious, many answers have been repeating the new tone to your customers for weeks.
What causes it
Drift usually has a cause you can find. A new source starts being read, like a critical review, a forum thread or a news story. An old source changes, such as a list article updated to move you down. Your own reviews shift. Or a platform changes its model and starts weighing sources differently.
Because answers lean on a fairly small set of sources for any question, one new page can tilt the tone of many answers.
An example
Over six weeks, the share of negative mentions of Kestrel Roasters creeps up from 3 in 100 to 12 in 100. No week stands out. Kestrel reads the negative answers and finds most of them say the same thing: that its subscriptions are "hard to cancel." They all use the same forum thread, started six weeks ago by an unhappy customer.
Kestrel fixes the cancel button, replies in the thread to say so, and adds a plain "How to cancel" section to its help pages.
How to spot it
Compare tone week by week, since single days are noisy. When it moves, read the answers behind the change and look at the pages they used. Then decide whether the cause is true, which makes it a product matter, or wrong or out of date, which makes it a content and press matter.
In AnswerOrbit
The Sentiment tab in Perception shows how many of your mentions are positive, neutral and negative, by brand or platform, and how that changed day by day. What's said lists the things the answers say about you, with their tone, how often they're said and since when, and the pages behind each one.