38.5% of Brand Mentions on News Pages Are Negative vs 26.2% on Other Websites

A marketing team sets up alerts for its brand name and watches the mentions roll in: a product review on a blog, a listing on a retailer's site, a news story about the industry. Some are glowing, some are neutral, and some are complaints. The question every team eventually asks is how much negative coverage is normal, and whether its own industry is different.

The answer matters because tone shapes what people read when they search a brand, and what AI answers and journalists pick up when they describe it. Without a benchmark, a brand has no way to judge whether 30% negative coverage is a crisis or an ordinary month, or where its negative mentions are most likely to come from.

Across 300 US brands, 30.7% of recent online mentions are mainly negative and 35.4% mainly positive. Where a brand is mentioned makes a clear difference: 38.5% of mentions on news pages are negative, against 26.2% everywhere else, and online stores are the mildest place of all. Insurance, an industry people write about both when they shop and when they claim, shows the same shape: an even 33% negative and 33% positive, and 39.2% negative on news pages.

On September 23, 2026 we collected the 1,000 most recent online mentions of each of 300 well-known US brands, 296,171 mentions in all, from news sites, blogs, online stores, organization websites and other pages. We collected the same for 30 well-known US insurance brands, 29,998 mentions in all, and counted every web page that mentions each insurer to measure its total coverage. Each mention comes with three tone scores, for positive, negative and neutral, based on the text around the brand name. We grouped mentions by the type of page they appear on; a page can count as more than one type, such as a blog on a news site.

A mention is negative when its negative score is the highest of the three, and strongly negative when its negative score is above 0.5 on a scale of 0 to 1. 5.4% of mentions have no tone score. For brand-level figures we used the 252 brands with at least 200 mentions whose names are not everyday words, and a brand is majority negative when more than half its mentions are negative.

Negative coverage is a large, ordinary part of every brand's footprint. Of the 296,171 mentions, 30.7% are mainly negative, 35.4% mainly positive and 28.6% neutral, with the remaining 5.4% unscored. Positive still edges out negative, but not by much: for every ten positive mentions, a brand can expect about nine negative ones.

19.3% of mentions are strongly negative, about one in five: pages where the brand appears next to clearly critical language. Location makes no real difference. 30.4% of mentions on US pages are negative, against 30.8% on pages from elsewhere.

News pages carry 36.3% of all brand mentions, and 38.5% of those mentions are negative, against 26.2% on other page types. News is where recalls, lawsuits, outages, layoffs and complaints get reported, so a brand's news coverage leans harsher than its coverage anywhere else. Positive mentions are also scarcer on news pages, at 32%.

Online stores are the mildest place to be mentioned: 24.9% of mentions on ecommerce pages are negative and 41.3% positive, the only page type where positive mentions clearly lead. Product listings, deal pages and retailer descriptions talk about brands in selling language, which pulls the tone up.

Insurance gets written about at two moments: when people shop for a policy and when they make a claim. Price comparisons, bundling guides and safe-driver discounts generate a steady flow of positive mentions, while claims, premiums and cancellations generate the negative ones. The result sits slightly above the all-brand average on negativity, and the news gap is the same: news pages carry 34.9% of insurance mentions, and 39.2% of those are negative, against 29.7% elsewhere.

Among eight industries compared in this series, insurance sits in the middle: its 33% negative share is lower than banks, airlines and telecom and higher than retail, streaming, fast food and hotels. Heavy coverage does not have to mean harsh coverage. State Farm is the most-mentioned insurer, on 11.3 million web pages, 30% of the total for 25 insurers ranked by coverage and more than twice The Hartford's 4.7 million, and both have a milder tone than the insurance average, at 24% and 24.3% negative.

The median brand, the one in the middle of all 300, has 28% negative mentions. Among the 252 brands with at least 200 mentions, 37 are majority negative, with more than half of their recent mentions negative, and 26 keep negative mentions to 10% or less.

The most common range is 20% to 30% negative, which holds 63 brands. A brand with 30% negative mentions is therefore close to typical, and the more useful benchmarks are its own trend over time and the gap between it and its direct competitors.

Tone varies widely by industry. Credit reporting brands have the most negative coverage of any group, with more than 95% of recent mentions negative. The next most negative categories are auto parts retail, stock photography and insurance comparison, each with a brand where between 77.2% and 89.9% of recent mentions are negative.

At the other end, appliance makers, real estate brands and a fashion retailer draw almost no negative coverage. The pattern follows the reason a brand gets written about: a brand that comes up mainly when something has gone wrong, such as a disputed credit report or a denied claim, scores far more negative than one that appears mainly in product listings, home guides and property pages.

The same spread runs inside a single industry. Travelers Insurance has the least negative coverage of the 30 insurance brands, with 11.8% of recent mentions negative, followed by Northwestern Mutual (21.8%), Mercury Insurance (22%), Farmers Insurance (23.4%) and State Farm (24%), while four insurers have more than half of their recent mentions negative. Industry alone does not set the tone.

Treat 30% negative mentions as normal, not as a crisis. The median brand sits at 28%, so the numbers worth acting on are a rising trend or a gap against direct competitors, not the raw share. Benchmark within your own industry: a credit or insurance brand and an appliance maker start from very different baselines, and even within insurance the mildest and harshest brands sit far apart.

Watch news coverage most closely. It carries more than a third of all brand mentions and the harshest tone, for insurers as for everyone else, and it is what journalists and AI answers draw on when they describe a brand. The most reliable way to shift it is to give reporters positive stories with substance: original data, useful guidance, clear expert comment and, for service brands, visible good news such as claims paid after a local disaster.

Track tone by page type as well as by volume, so you can see whether a spike comes from the news or from reviews and forums. Our media monitoring service tracks brand mentions and tone by source and flags negative news coverage early.

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