📌 Overview
The AI Visibility report in Search Atlas tracks how your brand appears across AI-generated responses. Inside the Sentiment tab, you will find several metrics that together describe the tone and frequency of your brand mentions. One metric that customers frequently ask about is Occurrences. This article explains exactly what it means and how to use it.
🔍 What Does 'Occurrences' Mean?
Occurrences is the total count of times a specific sentiment category — Positive, Neutral, or Negative — was recorded for your brand across all tracked AI responses within the selected date range and query set.
In simple terms: every time an AI model responded to a tracked prompt and that response contained a mention of your brand with a detectable sentiment, that counts as one occurrence. The Sentiment tab groups those counts by sentiment type so you can see how often your brand is being described positively, neutrally, or negatively.
📐 How Occurrences Are Calculated
Search Atlas processes each AI-generated response that mentions your brand and runs sentiment analysis on the surrounding context. Each analysed mention produces exactly one sentiment label. The platform then tallies those labels:
- Positive occurrences — mentions where the surrounding context reflects a favourable tone toward your brand.
- Neutral occurrences — mentions that are factual or descriptive with no clear positive or negative tone.
- Negative occurrences — mentions where the surrounding context reflects an unfavourable tone toward your brand.
The total of all three sentiment categories combined equals the total number of brand mentions analysed in that reporting period. If you see 80 Positive, 15 Neutral, and 5 Negative occurrences, that means 100 brand mentions were processed and scored.
🔗 How Occurrences Relate to Sentiment Score
The Sentiment Score shown in the same tab is a weighted percentage derived from your occurrences data. It reflects the proportion of positive mentions relative to all analysed mentions. A higher share of Positive occurrences drives a higher Sentiment Score.
Occurrences are the raw counts behind that score. Monitoring occurrences over time helps you understand whether a shift in your Sentiment Score is driven by a rise in negative mentions, a drop in positive ones, or a change in overall mention volume.
📋 How to View Occurrences in the Sentiment Tab
- In the left sidebar, navigate to AI Visibility.
- Open the report for the brand or project you want to review.
- Click the Sentiment tab at the top of the report.
- The Occurrences column displays the count for each sentiment category — Positive, Neutral, and Negative.
- Use the date range selector to compare occurrences across different time periods.
💡 Tips for Using Occurrences Effectively
- Track trends over time — a sudden spike in Negative occurrences may signal a new AI model is describing your brand unfavourably in response to specific queries.
- Compare competitors — if competitor tracking is enabled, you can benchmark their occurrence distribution against yours to understand relative sentiment positioning.
- Cross-reference with Mentions — the Mentions metric counts how many AI responses included your brand at all, while Occurrences counts how many of those mentions carried a scoreable sentiment signal. A large gap between the two indicates some mentions lacked enough context for sentiment classification.
- Filter by query or topic — narrowing the report to a specific query cluster helps identify which topics are generating negative sentiment, so you can adjust your content or brand messaging accordingly.
📖 Related Metrics in AI Visibility Reports
To get the full picture of your AI Visibility performance, use Occurrences alongside these other metrics available in the report:
- Rank — the average position at which your brand appears in AI-generated responses.
- Citations — the number of times your domain is cited as a source in AI responses.
- Share of Voice — the percentage of AI responses in your tracked query set that mention your brand compared to all brands mentioned.
- Mentions — the raw count of AI responses that included at least one reference to your brand.
- Sentiment Score — the weighted positive sentiment percentage calculated from your Occurrences data.
🆘 Need Help?
If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.