Reputation What a reputation management company actually does all day

Reputation management is four different jobs sold under one phrase. Something comes down, something accurate gets built, something gets outranked, and somebody watches the page afterward. We do all four for $2,488, one time, and the useful thing to work out before you hire anyone is which of the four your situation actually needs, because the firm quoting you a monthly retainer is usually selling you the fourth one forever.

The four jobs, in the order they happen

Remove what will come down. Build what should exist. Outrank what stays. Watch the page after. Almost every engagement in this category is some mix of those four, and the mix is what decides the price and the timeline. A firm that will not tell you which ones it is doing for you is selling the phrase, not the work.

Only one of the four ever finishes

Removal ends. A record comes down or it does not, and once an aggregator has de-indexed a page that page is gone. Building and outranking hold as long as the pages stay up. Monitoring is the only one with no natural end, which is exactly why the industry bills for it monthly and calls the whole bundle a subscription.

Removal is the part with an actual ending

Removal means asking the site holding the page to take it down, in the format that site answers. A court record on eight aggregators is eight separate requests with eight different rules, and we file all of them, chase the copies that repost, and keep going for twelve months on our court record removal work. Our court records guide walks the same procedure if you would rather run it yourself.

What nobody tells you is how much of it is free and how much is refused. Most people-search sites have an opt-out that costs nothing and takes ten minutes, and we publish every one of those procedures in the guides without a form in front of them. What a firm is charging you for is doing it 281 times and noticing when a listing reappears, not access to a secret.

Building is the half most people skip

A search result you do not like usually sits where it does because nothing accurate is competing with it. When there are four pages about you and one of them is a news story from 2019, that story is page one by default. We build the website, the profiles, and the pages that give the search engine something current and true to rank instead, which is the work behind our personal reputation management package.

This is the part that decides whether the result holds. Removal without building leaves a gap that the next piece of old coverage fills.

Outranking is arithmetic, and it is slow

When a page will not come down, the job becomes making ten better pages outrank it. That is ordinary search work applied to a name instead of a product, and it runs on the same clock: pages get indexed, they earn position, and the thing you want buried moves down as the things above it earn their place. Our SEO and AI optimization work is the same discipline pointed at a business instead of a person.

Anyone promising to outrank something in a fortnight is describing a schedule search engines do not run on. Our own fastest documented result was eight days and that was a removal, not an outranking, which is a different job with a different clock.

Monitoring is where the subscription hides

Watching a search result costs almost nothing to run and is billed as the reason for a retainer. We include Search monitoring indefinitely with the personal package rather than renting it back to you, and when somebody wants it on its own we sell monitoring as its own flat monthly thing with no long-term contract.

It is genuinely useful work. An aggregator repost or a new negative result is much cheaper to handle in week one than in month nine. It is just not four figures a month of useful.

Working out which ones you need

If the problem is a public record, you mostly need removal, and that is the cheapest version of this. Our court record removal is $199 and our personal information removal is $399 with a thirty-day money-back guarantee and no conditions on it.

If the problem is that the true version of you is nowhere on page one, you need building and outranking, and that is the whole first two pages as one job at $2,488, one time. A bigger situation gets quoted on its own and you see that number before any work starts.

Have us do all four.

Removal, building, outranking, and somebody watching it afterward. One flat fee, published, and the scope written down next to it.

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

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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.