Your reputation in search is what people find the moment they decide whether to trust you — before a meeting, a deal, a hire, or a purchase. One negative result on page 1 can cost more business than an entire marketing campaign earns. We shape that narrative: suppressing what should not rank, building what should, and ensuring your story is the one that defines you in search and AI systems.
Understanding how search results acquire and hold page-1 positions is what separates effective ORM from reputation management theatre. Most negative results are not there because they are true — they are there because they are optimised, linked to, and on authoritative platforms.
The goal of ORM is not just to remove negative results — it is to build such dense, authoritative positive presence that there is no space left on page 1 for anything you do not control or trust.
A fully built branded SERP for a company will typically show: your website in positions 1–2, your LinkedIn company page in 3–4, a positive press feature in 5–6, a Crunchbase or similar profile in 7–8, and your founders' profiles filling the remaining positions. No negative result survives when every position is occupied by something you have influenced.
When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overview about your brand — they get a synthesised narrative drawn from whatever the AI has indexed and weighted. That narrative needs to be shaped before it shapes you.
Most businesses have never seen a deliberately engineered SERP for their name. Here is the target state — and why each position matters.
Results vary by brand, search volume, and existing digital footprint. This is a representative target state.
ORM is not one strategy — it is a coordinated effort across every platform that ranks for your brand name.
A negative article, review bombing, a PR incident, or a damaging result on page 1 for your brand name. Every day it stays visible, it costs you business.
Crisis ORM is intensive. We audit your full search footprint, prioritise by damage severity, and deploy positive content across the highest-authority platforms immediately. First visible SERP shift typically within 8–12 weeks.
We take on crisis cases selectively — we need to believe the situation is genuine and that the negative content is not an accurate representation of ongoing behaviour.
The best time to do ORM is when you don't need it. A brand with ten strong, authoritative page-1 results has almost no surface area for a negative story to land on.
Proactive ORM builds your digital footprint deliberately — LinkedIn, press features, industry profiles, YouTube presence, Wikipedia where applicable — so that page 1 becomes a curated portfolio of positive, authoritative content.
This is significantly less expensive than crisis ORM and produces a more durable result. Many of our longest-running ORM engagements are proactive builds for executives and growth-stage businesses.
In most cases, no — and any ORM firm claiming they can should be treated with scepticism. What we can do is push that content off page 1 by outranking it with authoritative positive content. In specific circumstances — factual errors, GDPR right to erasure, demonstrable defamation — legal avenues may exist and we can refer you to appropriate counsel. We will tell you upfront which situation you are in.
First visible SERP shifts typically appear within 8–12 weeks. Full page 1 transformation usually takes 4–8 months depending on the authority of what is being displaced and the size of the brand's existing positive digital footprint. Individuals with thin digital presence typically see faster movement than established businesses with deeply rooted negative results.
Yes. All ORM engagements are treated as strictly confidential. We do not reference ORM clients in any marketing materials, case studies, or client lists — ever, without explicit written permission. Our partnership agreement includes confidentiality provisions that cover the engagement itself.
Yes. Individual name ORM is one of our most common engagements — particularly for executives, founders, professionals, and public figures whose personal search results directly affect business outcomes. The strategy differs from business ORM: the target assets are personal profiles, byline content, and press features tied to the individual name.
AI systems like ChatGPT and Perplexity summarise brand narratives from the content they crawl. If the most authoritative content about your brand is negative, AI systems may surface negative summaries to users who never click through to the original. We include AI entity management in all ORM engagements — building positive content in the formats and contexts that AI systems reference when discussing your brand.
Traditional PR focuses on generating positive coverage. ORM focuses on the SERP — which results appear when someone Googles you, in which order, and what signals they carry. Both are complementary but distinct. PR that does not consider search placement may generate positive coverage that ranks below the negative result it was trying to counteract.
Tell us your situation in confidence. We will give you an honest assessment of what can be done and a realistic timeline for when you will see results.