Reputation How to tell a real reputation management company from a bad one

Almost every list of the best reputation management companies is written by somebody who is on it, or paid to be. We are not going to publish another one. What is actually useful is knowing which questions produce answers that cannot be faked, because this category hides pricing, scope and method by default, and the firms worth hiring are the ones willing to be specific before you have paid anything.

The two answers that should end it

“We have a relationship with Google” and “we can remove that news article.” Nobody has a relationship with Google that removes results, and a true, lawfully published news story does not come down. A firm that says either one is describing something it cannot do, and you should assume the rest of the pitch is built the same way.

What we found when we checked

We looked at seven of the largest names in this category and not one of them prints a dollar figure anywhere. Six of the seven return a 404 on their own pricing page. Every route to a number runs through a form or a phone call, which is a deliberate design and not an oversight.

Ask what it costs, before anything else

A firm that will not give you a number until it has your phone number is telling you something about how it sells. Pricing that only exists on a call is pricing that varies by how worried you sounded, and there is no way to compare two vendors when neither will put a figure in writing first.

Use a published number as your control. Ours is $2,488, one time, for the standard personal package, and it sits on the pricing page with the scope next to it. Whether or not you hire us, having one real figure in hand changes every other conversation you have.

Ask what specifically arrives, and get it in writing

“Reputation management” is four different jobs and a proposal that does not say which ones it covers is not a proposal. Removal, building, outranking and monitoring have different costs and different timelines, and our breakdown of the four explains why lumping them together suits the seller.

Ask for the itemized scope and compare it to one that exists. Ours is written out in the scope guide, line by line, including what is deliberately not in it.

Ask what happens in month seven

If the answer to a monthly fee is “monitoring and a report,” you are paying four figures a month for something that costs almost nothing to run. The heavy work in this category is front-loaded into the first six weeks and then it tapers, while a retainer invoice stays the same size the whole way.

Ask what the fee becomes once the build is finished. A firm with a good answer has thought about it. Our guide to the retainer model lays out what actually recurs and what does not.

Ask who owns the website when you leave

This is the question that catches the most people and it takes one sentence to ask. If the site they build sits on their domain or their platform, cancelling means losing the asset that was doing the ranking, and the monthly fee was never really a service fee.

A website you own is the only surface in the whole engagement nobody can reprice, deplatform or take back. If the answer is anything other than a domain in your name, you are renting your own search results.

Ask what they will not be able to do

A firm that has no list of things it cannot move has not looked at your situation. Published news coverage stays. A court opinion stays. Some aggregators suppress rather than delete and the listing returns. Any honest assessment of a first page comes back with a not-removable pile in it.

We publish the procedures for the removable parts for free, in the guides, with no form in front of them. What you are paying a firm for is doing it several hundred times and noticing when something reappears, not for access to a secret.

Ask what the guarantee actually covers

“Satisfaction guaranteed” is not a term, it is a mood. A real guarantee names the condition, the window and what you get back. Ours are specific and they are different per service: personal information removal carries a thirty-day money-back guarantee with no conditions, press placements mean you do not pay if we cannot place the story, and Wikipedia work is refunded if the research says you do not qualify.

Ask what happens if the result does not move at all. The answer tells you whether the risk sits with them or entirely with you.

Then check the firm the way you would check yourself

Search the company name and read the second page. A reputation firm is the one kind of vendor that should be able to demonstrate the service on itself, and a first page made entirely of its own marketing with nothing independent on it is worth noticing either way.

Ask for a case study with numbers in it, not adjectives. Ours are anonymized and carry the figures: six page-one results to zero in three months, nine to zero in six months, one top result gone in eight days. A firm that cannot produce that shape of proof is asking you to take the outcome on faith.

Hold us to the same list.

Published price, itemized scope, a website you own, and case studies with real numbers in them. Ask us the eight questions and see what comes back.

Have us do it.

See the scope, price, and next steps for the help this guide describes.

See the service

You should have a say in what the internet says about you.

One result may be the immediate problem. If you need help with the wider picture, explore our work for creators, professionals, and justice-impacted people. You can start with one service.

See how we help people manage what comes up online

Explore your options

Every guide we publish is free and ungated. Browse all of them, see what we do and what it costs, or read why we built this company.

Written by Drew Chapin, who ran all of this on his own name first.

© The Discoverability Company Privacy Terms