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Online reputation management

Search results, Reddit threads, Quora answers, LinkedIn posts and AI assistants all shape the story. I build reputation systems around what people actually see.

Get a free auditYouTube ORM instead
branded search, illustrative
your brand name
  • youOfficial site
  • youLinkedIn profile
  • youGoogle Business Profile
  • themReview aggregator
  • youPress coverage
  • youYouTube channel
  • themForum thread
  • youKnowledge panel

Six of eight owned

0-97%
of consumers read reviews before buying, across surveys

Range across published consumer surveys

~10
slots on page one of a branded search

Google SERP

0
workstreams a real ORM programme covers

ORM framework, 2026

0-12mo
before a one-time cleanup decays without upkeep

Practitioner estimate

Reputation work is not about making criticism disappear. It is about making the information around a brand more accurate, more useful and easier to trust. Brands buy review management and call it reputation management, or buy suppression and wonder why the reviews still say what they said. The five workstreams feed each other. Monitoring sets the responses, responses move review velocity, velocity moves the rating, and owned assets take the slots. That stack is what an assistant reads when someone asks whether you are any good.

  • Most legitimate negative reviews cannot be removed, so response quality and review velocity are the actual levers
  • A branded search is roughly ten slots, and the assets you control are the only ones you can move
  • AI assistants synthesise reputation from the same public sources search engines use
  • A cleanup with no monthly rhythm decays inside a year

How the work actually runs.

Six phases. Each one produces something you can hold, not a status update.

  1. 01

    Audit the branded SERP

    Every result on page one of your brand name, logged and classified as owned, neutral, or hostile, in a logged-out browser so personalisation does not flatter the result.

    • Owned versus earned versus hostile
    • Review profiles and aggregate ratings
    • What ChatGPT and AI Overviews currently say
  2. 02

    Fix the review engine

    A compliant request workflow with a real trigger and timing, plus response templates by complaint type. Velocity beats deletion because deletion mostly is not available.

    • Policy-compliant request flow
    • Response frameworks by complaint category
    • Escalation path for the removable minority
  3. 03

    Build the owned stack

    The assets that can legitimately take page-one slots: the site, profiles, press, video, and structured data that ties the entity together.

    • Entity and Organization schema
    • Profiles that actually rank
    • Video and press as slot-holders
  4. 04

    Run it monthly

    Monitoring, response, and a quarterly re-audit including the AI answers. This is the part every agency quietly drops after the onboarding invoice.

    • Mention monitoring across the niche
    • Monthly SERP diff
    • Quarterly AI answer audit

Branded SERP audit

Every page-one result classified, with the gap between what you own and what you could.

Review operating system

Request workflow, timing, and a response library by complaint type.

Owned-asset roadmap

Which assets to build, in which order, to take the most slots for the least work.

AI answer baseline

What the major assistants say about the brand today, so drift is visible later.

Monthly rhythm

The operating cadence that stops the whole thing decaying.

The shortcuts are what get brands removed. These are the rules the work runs under.

  • Buy or incentivise reviewsEarn velocity with a compliant request flow and a real trigger. Fabricated reviews breach every platform policy and cost the whole profile.
  • Gate reviews by sentimentAsk every customer the same way. Routing happy customers to Google and unhappy ones to a private form breaches Google policy.
  • Promise removalsAppeal only genuine policy breaches, and answer everything else. Most legitimate negatives cannot be removed by anyone.
  • Build thin pages to push results downBuild assets that deserve the slot. Suppression pages do not hold and they make the entity messier for the models.

Reputation metrics are slow and easy to fake, so these are the ones that resist both. Each is measured against a baseline captured before anything changes.

  • Owned share of page one

    Slots you control on a branded search, logged out

  • Review velocity

    New reviews per month, not lifetime total

  • Response rate and time

    Share answered, and how fast

  • AI answer accuracy

    What assistants say, re-checked quarterly

A read of where you stand on ORM right now, what the gap is, and the three things worth doing first. It is free because it is also how I work out whether I can help.

  • Where your brand appears today, and where competitors appear instead
  • The specific threads or questions worth owning first
  • What the first ninety days would actually involve

Get a free ORM audit

Where your brand stands today on ORM, what the gap is, and the three things worth doing first. No charge, no deck.

Every field is required. Goes straight to [email protected], nowhere else.

  • Can you remove a negative Google review?

    Only if it breaches Google's policies, and most legitimate complaints do not. The realistic path is the redressal and appeal process for genuine violations, and response plus velocity for everything else. Anyone promising removal as a service is describing an outcome they do not control.

  • How long does ORM take to show results?

    Review velocity and response metrics move within weeks. Page-one composition usually takes three to six months because it depends on assets ranking. AI answers lag further, since they are downstream of everything else.

  • Is ORM different from SEO?

    It uses the same mechanics on a different target. SEO earns visibility for what you sell; ORM controls what appears for your name. The overlap is the part most agencies charge twice for.

  • Does ORM affect what AI assistants say about us?

    Yes, indirectly, and it is the least covered part of the discipline. Assistants synthesise from reviews, press, and owned content, so the same work that fixes page one changes what gets repeated back.

  • Do we need this if we have no negative reviews?

    The cheapest time to own your branded search is before you need to. Building the owned stack takes months, which is exactly the time you do not have during a crisis.