Reputation
Reputation management, minus the parts that are quietly illegal.
Most of this industry sells two things: burying results using assets nobody would publish for any other reason, and reviews that were never left by a customer. One collapses, the other is now explicitly unlawful in the UK. What is left is genuinely worth doing, and it is mostly the same discipline as the rest of this site pointed at your own name: what a search for you returns, whether the facts are right where they get copied from, and what an AI assistant says when somebody asks about you.
First, the refusals
What we will not do, said before the sales pitch.
Worth putting at the top rather than the bottom, because if one of these is what you are shopping for, you can stop reading and save us both a call.
Declined
- Fake, incentivised or written for you reviews
- Review gating, where only happy customers get asked
- Networks of thin sites built to occupy page one
- Paid placements dressed as editorial coverage
- Promises to delete a result somebody else published
- Legal threats sent to a publisher on your behalf
Done instead
- An audit of what a stranger actually sees
- Your own results ranking for your own name
- Facts corrected at the sources that get cited
- Entity and knowledge panel accuracy
- A review process that asks everybody, honestly
- An answer to the question the bad result raises
Why the first column is not squeamishness
Fake and incentivised reviews are explicitly unlawful under UK consumer protection law and the CMA can act on them directly, which puts the risk on your business rather than on the agency that supplied them. Review gating is treated the same way. Suppression networks are the same scheme pattern that gets sites into manual actions, and when they unwind you are left with the original problem plus a damaged domain. Declining these is commercial advice as much as it is principle.
The actual object
Your brand SERP is the thing being managed.
Search your own business name in a private window. That page, in that order, is what a customer, a journalist and a prospective hire all see before they decide anything. It is the most viewed page about you that you did not design.
What you already control
Your own site, your profiles, your press page, your structured data. On most brand searches this is the majority of page one and it is frequently the part nobody has bothered to optimise, because the effort went into product terms instead.
What you influence
Directories, review platforms, industry listings and press. You cannot edit these at will, but most of them have a correction route, and factual errors are usually fixable by asking with evidence rather than by outranking them.
What you do not control
Genuine criticism, journalism and other people's opinions. The honest answer for this category is usually to respond well in public, or to leave it alone, and to be worth searching for on the other results.
The knowledge panel and the entity behind it
If Google shows a panel for your business, it is assembling it from sources it trusts rather than from your homepage. When those sources disagree about your name, address, ownership or what you actually do, you get a panel that is wrong or absent, and no amount of editing your own site alone fixes it. Making one consistent entity out of scattered claims is technical work, and it is the same job as the schema consolidation described on technical SEO.
The new part
What an AI assistant says about you is now part of this.
A growing share of first impressions never touch a search result page at all. Somebody asks an assistant whether you are any good, and it answers from sources you may never have looked at.
And it is fixable in a way people assume it is not
When a model describes a business wrongly, the cause is almost never the business's own website. It is the third party sources the model was trained on or is citing: an out of date directory entry, a listing with the wrong ownership, a review aggregator with a stale summary, an article that got a fact wrong and was never corrected. Editing your own about page does not touch any of that.
The work is to find out what is actually being said, read the citations rather than only the answer, and correct the specific sources it is drawn from. The method is written up in full and free to run yourself in how to check whether AI assistants recommend your business, and the underlying discipline is on LLM SEO.
The same honesty applies here as everywhere else on this site: nobody can guarantee what a non deterministic model will say next month, and anybody selling a guaranteed AI reputation is selling a mechanism that has not been demonstrated.
Scope
What the work actually is.
Audit what is there
Your brand SERP captured properly, from a clean session and from the markets you sell in, plus the assistants. Recording what appears, in what order, and where each result draws from.
Fix the facts
Wrong details corrected at source across the profiles and directories that feed everything downstream. Dull, unglamorous, and the highest return item on this list almost every time.
Own your own name
Making sure the pages you would want a searcher to land on actually rank for your brand terms, including the ones aggregators and delivery platforms tend to take from you.
One consistent entity
Structured data that resolves as a single organisation across your site and matches what the trusted third party sources say, which is what a knowledge panel is assembled from.
An honest review habit
Asking every customer at the right moment, replying to the negative ones like an adult, and treating a run of similar complaints as product feedback rather than a search problem.
Answer the question
Where a bad result raises a fair question, the durable fix is usually a page that answers it properly rather than an attempt to hide the question was asked.
Worth saying
When this is the wrong purchase.
The criticism is accurate. If the reviews describe a real and repeated problem, search work is putting a nicer sign on it. The cheapest reputation fix available is fixing the thing, and we would rather say that than take a retainer for the alternative.
It is a legal matter. Defamation, impersonation, a fraudulent listing or harassment need a solicitor and a platform complaint, and they have powers no consultant does. We will point you there, and we will not send legal threats on your behalf.
Nobody is searching for you. A brand SERP matters in proportion to how many people look at it. For a new business with no brand demand, the money belongs in becoming worth searching for, not in managing a page nobody loads.
You want it gone by Friday. Correcting sources takes as long as the slowest third party takes to respond, and ranking your own assets takes months. Anyone promising a week is either lying or planning to do something you would not sign off on.
FAQ
Questions about reputation
Can you remove a bad result from Google?
Almost never, and anybody promising it should worry you. Google indexes pages it finds; it does not host most of them. A result disappears when the page itself changes or is taken down at source, which means the person who published it decides, not us and not Google.
There are narrow exceptions. Genuinely unlawful content can be removed through a legal route, and UK and EU residents have limited rights around personal information that is inaccurate or no longer relevant. Those are worth pursuing when they apply. They are not a general delete button and they do not cover a review you disagree with.
What about burying results on page two?
This is the honest heart of the industry and it deserves a straight answer. Pushing a result down means ranking other things above it, which works only if those other things genuinely deserve to rank. Your own pages, real profiles, genuine coverage, actual interviews.
Where it becomes something we will not do is when the assets are manufactured: networks of thin sites, fake profiles, spun articles placed to occupy space. That is the same scheme pattern we decline on link building, it tends to collapse, and it leaves a client worse off than the single bad result they started with.
Can you get us more positive reviews?
We can help you ask real customers properly, at the right moment, without filtering who gets asked. That is it, and the limit is not squeamishness.
Fake and incentivised reviews are explicitly unlawful under UK consumer law, and the CMA can act on them. Review gating, where you survey first and only send happy customers to the public form, is also treated as misleading. Beyond the law, platforms detect the patterns and the penalty lands on your listing rather than on whoever sold you the service.
Is this just SEO with a different name?
Largely, yes, and we would rather say so. The mechanics are entity clarity, structured data, content that deserves to rank and earned coverage, which is the same toolkit as the rest of the site. The difference is the target: you are ranking for your own name rather than for what you sell, and the competing results are often outside your control.
The genuinely distinct parts are auditing what a stranger sees when they search you, correcting facts at the third party sources models and search engines trust, and deciding what is worth answering versus what is best left alone.
Someone is publishing something untrue about us. What now?
That is a legal question before it is a search one, and the order matters. If a statement is defamatory or a listing is fraudulent, a solicitor and the platform complaint route will do more than any amount of content work, and they can compel what we cannot.
Where we help is everything around it: making sure the accurate version of you is what a search returns, that your own pages answer the question a worried customer actually has, and that the facts are right at the sources that get cited. We will tell you plainly when the answer is a lawyer rather than us.
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Send the business name. You get a straight read on your brand SERP, what the assistants currently say, which of it is fixable and which of it is a lawyer or a product problem rather than a search one.