Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is the use of software to judge whether a piece of text sounds positive, negative or neutral. Google's Natural Language tool, for one, gives back two numbers: a score from negative to positive, and a magnitude for how much feeling the text holds. It tells positive from negative but doesn't name feelings like anger or sadness.
Source: Google Cloud, Natural Language API Basics: Sentiment analysis, checked October 29, 2026
What Sentiment Analysis means for your business
You'll run into sentiment scores in review tools, social listening tools and some of the tools that track AI answers (our research page on AI answer tracking tools lists which ones). They're handy for sorting a big pile of text fast, and rough on any single review.
Google's documentation says a score near zero might mean the text has little feeling in it, or that strong praise and strong complaints cancelled each other out. Google says the magnitude tells those two apart. It also says where "clearly positive" starts depends on your use, so you should set your own cutoff and adjust it after checking the results.
We'd never report a mood score on its own. We'd read a sample of the text behind it, and check whether a near-zero score comes with a high magnitude, which is Google's sign of mixed feelings rather than none.
If a mood score is the only thing a tool tells you about your customers, what we count instead starts with what they actually do.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview gave the usual positive, negative or neutral definition and cited IBM, AWS, tech publishers, an AI company's blog and YouTube. ChatGPT gave a similar definition with no sources cited, and neither answer explained how to read a score.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
Related terms in measurement
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