Your reputation is not your star rating. It is everything a buyer, a search engine and an AI can find about you — and most of it nobody is looking after.
Online reputation management used to mean watching the reviews. It now means managing the whole body of evidence that people and machines use to decide whether to trust you. We call the machine half of that work AI Trust Engineering. This page explains what it is, what we do, and what we will not do.
A buyer deciding between you and two competitors does not read your website first. They search your name. They read what comes back: the reviews, the map listing, a news mention, a forum thread, and increasingly a generated answer that has already summarised all of it for them. Every one of those surfaces is part of your reputation. Most businesses actively manage one of them.
The first screen of a branded search is your reputation as most people meet it. What sits there — your site, your profile, a review site, an old news item, a complaint — decides whether the buyer goes further or goes elsewhere.
On Google and on whichever review sites your trade uses. Not the average: the volume, the recency, the substance, and whether anyone from the business ever replied.
The directories and data sources that tell search engines and AI what you are, where you are, and whether the facts about you agree with each other.
Articles, releases, interviews and awards — the third-party record that says somebody other than you thought you were worth writing about.
Reddit, forums, LinkedIn, local groups. The conversations about you that you do not control and usually do not see.
What ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Perplexity and Google's own AI say when somebody asks whether you are any good. Assembled from everything above.
A growing share of buyers now ask an AI before they search at all. The questions are the ones they used to ask a friend:
The answer is assembled from the same evidence a person would find, but faster, with no patience for a thin record, and with a habit of stating a summary as a fact. If the reviews are old, the listings disagree, and the only third-party mention is a complaint, that is the reputation the AI reports — politely, confidently, and to every buyer who asks.
The Part Most Reputation Firms Are Not Built For
Managing a reputation now means managing what humans and machines believe about your business. The human half is a mature discipline. The machine half is new, and it rewards a different kind of work: consistent facts, corroborated claims, structured data, and a body of evidence large enough that no single bad item defines the summary.
We do that work: the reviews, the listings, the branded search, the response to negative content. It is what a buyer types into a search box when they have a problem, and it is where most of the work on this page begins.
We make the evidence about your business consistent, corroborated and machine-readable, so the systems summarising you have something accurate to summarise — and we measure what they say, before and after.
Reputation firms manage reviews. SEO firms manage rankings. PR firms manage coverage. The evidence an AI reads is fed by all three, and it is rarely anybody's job to manage the whole. That is the job this page describes.
See what the market sees. Branded search, the review record, the listings, the media and community record, the AI answers, and the same read on your closest competitors. We baseline before anything is touched, and you keep the baseline whatever you decide next.
Fix what is wrong. Business facts that disagree between sources, duplicate profiles, services that are missing or misnamed, reviews that break a platform's rules, and factual errors the AI has picked up from somewhere and keeps repeating.
Build the proof buyers trust. A review process that asks consistently, case studies and testimonials that name the outcome, structured data on your own site, and credentials and proof points that can be checked.
Earn independent confirmation. Press, trade media, associations, interviews and partner mentions — the record of somebody other than you saying it.
Make the proof discoverable. Distribution, internal linking, entity signals, local search, and the content that connects the evidence together so it is found rather than filed.
Know when the narrative moves. Sentiment, ratings, citations, mentions, alerts, and your share of the answers against competitors — re-measured on a schedule, against the baseline.
The reputation trade has a dishonest end, and buyers have learned to suspect the whole of it. So the boundary is stated here, in full.
This is not only a preference. Selectively soliciting positive reviews is against Google's own content rules,2, and fabricated, bought or AI-generated reviews and testimonials are prohibited in the United States by a federal rule that came into force in October 2024.1 A firm that offers them is offering you a liability with your name on it.
Right after the job, the delivery, the visit — when the outcome is fresh and the customer knows what they think.
One link, one tap, the right platform for your trade. Every extra step loses a review.
Positive and negative, within a business day. Future customers read the reply, and so do the systems summarising your reviews.
A pattern in complaints is operational information, and fixing the pattern is worth more than any reply.
What customers praise, what they mention, which services and towns they name. That substance is what a generated summary is built from.
A customer who got the result is a case study, a testimonial and a citation, waiting to be asked.
Correct it at the source, then reinforce the accurate version everywhere else it appears, so the wrong one is outnumbered.
Document the violation and report it through the platform's own process. Some are removed, most are not, and we say which first.
Respond professionally, fix what it describes if it is true, and keep building the larger body of genuine evidence around it.
Strengthen newer, more authoritative material so it earns the position instead, then keep it maintained so it holds.
Preserve the evidence, follow the platform's procedures, and where needed coordinate with legal counsel you choose. We are not lawyers.
Build stronger legitimate assets that compete for the same branded search — slow, honest work, and the only kind that lasts.
Removal And Suppression Are Different
Removal is rare, is decided by the platform or a court, and cannot be promised by anyone. Suppression — pushing a result down by out-ranking it with better material — is real, conditional and slow, and it holds only as long as the material is maintained. We will tell you which of the two your situation allows before you spend anything.
Whether reviews arrive at a steady rate, or arrived in a burst two years ago.
The average, and what the words actually say — read, not skimmed.
What occupies the first page for your name, and how much of it you control.
Who else has written about you, and whether it can be found.
Whether the facts about your business agree everywhere they appear.
When a buyer asks the question your customers ask, how often you are named at all.
How often you are named as the recommendation, rather than merely listed.
Which sites the AI draws on when describing you, and which it uses for competitors.
What share of reviews and questions carries a reply from the business.
Your presence across all of the above, measured against your closest competitors.
Every measure is taken before work begins and re-taken on a schedule, same questions, same method. A number that moves is the report. A number that does not move is also the report.
Most businesses call a reputation firm the week something goes wrong, and the week something goes wrong is the most expensive week to start. There is no body of evidence for the bad item to be outweighed by, so the bad item is the record.
The alternative is to build the moat while nothing is wrong:
A business with that record can absorb a bad review, a bad article or a bad month. A business without it cannot, and finds out at the worst possible time.
Reputation strategy, AI visibility engineering, local search, technical work on your own site, review operations, entity optimisation, digital PR, content and competitive measurement are, in most agencies, separate departments or separate vendors. The evidence an AI reads does not respect those boundaries. It reads the whole record, and a gap in any one part is a gap in the summary.
Doing the work under one roof means the review process, the listing corrections, the structured data, the press and the measurement are built to agree with each other — which is the whole point, because agreement between sources is what the machine half of your reputation is made of.
Platforms and courts decide that, not agencies. We use the processes, document everything, and tell you the odds honestly before you spend.
We can make the evidence it reads accurate, consistent and abundant, and we can measure what it says before and after. The answer itself is generated by somebody else's system, and anyone who claims control over it is selling something they do not have.
It breaks the platforms' rules and, in the United States, a federal rule;¹ it is detectable; and the penalty lands on you, not on the firm that wrote them.
Corrections to facts and listings move quickly. Review substance, third-party coverage and search authority accumulate over months, and the mix depends on what we find.
What this costs depends on the state of the record: how many surfaces disagree, whether there is a live problem to respond to, how many locations, and how much evidence already exists to build on.
If nobody searches your name before buying — if you sell entirely through a channel that does the trusting for you — this is not your lever and we will say so. If your record is already consistent, well-reviewed, corroborated and monitored, the assessment will tell you that too, and we would rather lose the sale than take money for a moat you have already built.
If you want reviews written, results made to vanish, or a competitor's reputation damaged, we are not the firm. No reputable one is.
The work of finding, correcting, building and monitoring what appears about a business across search, reviews, listings, media, community and now AI answers, so that what a buyer finds is accurate, current and credible. Done honestly, it is evidence management. Done badly, it is review buying with a nicer name.
Only when they break Google's own content rules — spam, a conflict of interest, off-topic content, harassment and the like.2 A truthful negative review from a real customer does not qualify and will not be removed, whatever a salesperson tells you. What can be done is to reply well, fix what it describes, and build the record around it.
Rarely, and never by us alone. Removal is a decision of the site hosting the content, the search engine, or a court. Where content is unlawful there are processes, and we use them. Where it is merely unwelcome, the honest work is to out-rank it with better material, and we will tell you that is slow before you start.
No. We build the process that asks real customers at the right moment and makes it easy for them to answer. The reviews are theirs, and so are the words.
The extension of reputation work to the systems that now answer buyers' questions directly. It means making the facts about your business consistent and corroborated wherever the AI reads them, building enough evidence that no single item defines the summary, and measuring what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot actually say about you against your competitors. We call the engineering half of that AI Trust Engineering.
Corrections to facts and listings show within weeks. Review substance and third-party coverage accumulate over months. Recovering a branded search page from a serious negative item is measured in quarters. We baseline first so the difference between those timescales is visible rather than argued about.
No, and the businesses that need it least are the ones that started early. A record built before anything goes wrong is what lets a business absorb it when something does.