How to Manage Online Reputation: 10 Steps for Brands in 2026

Your online reputation is being written whether you take part or not.  

People can scan your reviews, search Reddit, watch a TikTok complaint, and ask ChatGPT whether your business is trustworthy, all before they reach your homepage.  

By the time they arrive, most of the deciding is already done. 

To manage online reputation properly, you need to see that whole picture, fix the causes behind the criticism, and make accurate, credible information easier to find than outdated or damaging content.

Why Your Online Reputation Has More Witnesses Than Ever 

Your business’s reputation among your audience on the internet is crucial when you're trying to grow your business online. You need your customers to trust you and be confident in your services or products. After all, 90% of customers' buying decisions are based on reviews they read online.

Without reputation improvement or management, firms will find it harder to reach their ideal customers and earn profits. If you have a fantastic product or service and make this widely known, your reputation can follow suit.

There are ways that you can use different strategies to help with this process. Here are 10 most efficient methods of managing and boosting your online reputation whilst benefiting your company across the board.

The internet has turned nearly every customer into a part-time investigator and handed them more places to investigate. AI has become a particularly consequential gatekeeper.  

BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found the share of consumers using AI tools to find local businesses climbed from 6% in 2025 to 45% in 2026.  

ChatGPT led the pack at 31%, followed by Google's AI Mode. Over the same period, the share of consumers reading reviews on Google slipped from 83% to 71%. However, AI answers are rarely the final word, though.  

Among people who use AI for recommendations, 88% check whether the reviews it cites are legitimate or trace them to the original source, and only 12% take the answer at face value. 

So, businesses now get evaluated twice, first through the summary, then through the evidence behind it. A customer's path to you now tends to look like this: 

Younger buyers widen the field further. BrightLocal's consumer search behavior research found that 26% of Gen Z consumers use social media as their main way to find local businesses, roughly 12 points above the general population, which gives posts, comments, and creator videos real sway over how a brand comes across. 

Additionally, Edelman's 2026 Trust Barometer Special Report on brands, which surveyed 17,688 people across 15 markets, found 88% of consumers call trusting a brand an important or critical purchase criterion, level with value (88%) and just behind quality (89%). 

Managing your online reputation comes down to keeping one bad experience from becoming the whole story, and managing online reputation well means owning the sources those channels all draw from. 

If you're new to the discipline itself, our guide to what reputation management is covers the fundamentals. 

Step 1. Audit What People Actually Find

You know the context behind an old complaint, an awkward headline, or an outdated profile. A potential customer does not. They see a page of results, form a fast judgment, and decide whether you deserve another click. 

Before you change anything, look at the version of your business that strangers meet, with none of your explanations attached.

Check your first impression with fresh eyes.

Open a private browsing window and search your business name. Then answer honestly: 

• What caught your attention first? 
• Did anything make you hesitate? 
• Would you contact this business, or keep looking? 

Better still, ask someone who doesn't know your history to do it and tell you their unfiltered first impression.

Victoria Marshall, Marketing & Brand Manager at Erase.com, calls this the stranger test: 

"Open an incognito window, search your name, and ask what someone with no background knowledge would think after ten seconds. Even better, ask a friend who doesn't know your history to do it and tell you their honest first impression." 

One thing she's testing for is pattern and volume, not just the severity of any single result. "One bad result surrounded by strong ones looks like an outlier," Marshall says. "Two or three start to look like a theme, even if they have nothing to do with each other." 

That happens because almost nobody reads a results page carefully. "Strangers don't dig into your first page," she says. "They skim it and form a quick opinion." 

A single poor review doesn't necessarily signal a reputation problem. The trouble starts when the same criticism repeats, especially across unrelated platforms or long after the fact. 

Watch for: 

• The same complaint appearing several times 
• Multiple negative results near the top of Google 
• Old articles or forum threads that stay prominent 
• A run of poor recent reviews 
• AI answers compressing separate incidents into a single broader claim 

Marshall treats durability as the clearest of these signals. "If an old story or a dead forum thread has held its spot for months while you've added new content, it's dug in deep," she says. 

Timing tells you something too. A sudden burst of similar reviews from brand-new accounts points to coordinated activity well outside ordinary dissatisfaction, a problem with its own playbook, covered in our small business reputation management guide.

Audit the full first page. Record every page-one result: your own pages, review sites, news coverage, directories, Reddit threads, videos, forums. For each, note:

• Position: where it ranks 
• Sentiment: positive, neutral, mixed, or negative 
• Accuracy: whether it's current and correct 
• Ownership: whether you can edit or update it 
• Action: respond, correct, report, remove, suppress, or monitor 

Then check your average rating and most recent feedback on the platforms your industry actually uses. Recent reviews often reveal shifts that an overall score hides. 

Check search variations and AI answers. Repeat the exercise with the searches your customers really run:

• [business name] reviews 
• [business name] complaints 
• [business name] Reddit 
• [business name] scam 
• [business name] alternatives 
• [founder or executive name] 

Finish by asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google's AI Mode what they say about your business, and note any sources or citations they provide. 

Marshall recommends this as a diagnostic in its own right, not just a coverage check. "These tools compress your whole search page into a few lines," she says, "and three separate bad results often get summed up as 'has faced multiple complaints.'" 

Reddit Ranks for Your Name Whether You Like It or Not

A 2025 survey of in-house marketing teams by agency Smarty Marketing found 73% had Reddit threads ranking in Google for their own brand name. Of those threads, 63% carried negative sentiment and only 9% were clearly positive. In many cases three or four threads surface together inside a single discussions block. 

The cause is structural. Reddit's Google visibility jumped more than 1,300% between mid-2023 and early 2024, according to monitoring tool Sistrix, so the threads rank on Reddit's domain strength no matter what they say about you.  

An audit that checks only your own properties and the major review sites will miss the results that most often shape a stranger's first impression. To catch those as they appear, these AI reputation management tools monitor the whole SERP and flag new threads as they rank. 

Step 2. Decide What "Better" Looks Like

Most reputation efforts stall at this stage well before execution. "Improve our online reputation" gives you nothing to aim at. It has no finish line, so nothing can be prioritized against it and nothing ever gets marked done. 

Turn the audit into specific targets with SMART goals: 

Managing online reputation at this stage is mostly triage, so rank problems by what a stranger hits first. A negative result at position three does far more damage than one at position nine, and a wrong phone number costs you customers today while an old forum thread costs a fraction of that.

Before any work starts, screenshot your current first page and record your ratings, since a baseline is the only way to show progress later. Stay realistic about timelines too: listings and review responses move in weeks, while search results move in months.

Step 3. Fix the Experience Behind the Complaints

Sort recurring complaints by theme, then trace each one back to the decision, process, or product that caused it. A well-written response can acknowledge frustration, but the public conversation keeps circling back until the experience itself changes.

Use repeated criticism to investigate issues like:

• Slow communication
• Unexpected fees
• Missed deadlines
• Poor onboarding
• Unclear refund policies
• Inconsistent product or service quality

Then make the change visible. Update the policy, retrain the team, revise the product, or explain the new process clearly enough that future customers notice the difference.

Case Study: How Rhode Turned a Critical Blush Review Into Two New Shades

Rhode offers a clean example of the alternative. In August 2024, beauty creator Golloria George reviewed the brand's Pocket Blush and found the shades she tested looked ashy on deeper skin tones.

Instead of putting out a statement, founder Hailey Bieber called her personally and brought her into product development alongside Rhode's in-house cosmetic chemist, Ron Robinson.

Two new shades, Date Cake and Plum, followed. George posted a second review, this one positive.

The response worked because the brand treated the review as product feedback rather than an image problem. It listened to the person affected, involved her in the fix, and gave customers something visibly better to judge.

Step 4. Keep Your Business Information Accurate and Consistent

Nothing erodes trust quite like three different opening times, a dead phone number, and an address that leads to an empty storefront.

BrightLocal found that 85% of consumers consider contact details and opening hours important when researching a business, which ranks them above price, proximity, and product availability.

Check that these match everywhere they appear:

• Business name, address, and phone number
• Opening and holiday hours
• Website, booking, and contact links
• Products, services, prices, and policies
• Locations and service areas
• Company descriptions and executive bios
• Logos, photos, and social handles

Start with your website and Google Business Profile, then work outward through review sites, social accounts, maps, and directories. Google assembles Business Profiles from information you supply, public webpages, third-party sources, and user contributions, so one outdated detail can spread into several places at once.

Treat major changes as a coordinated update, not a quick website edit: update every key profile at the same time, then schedule a check afterward.

Multi-location and franchise businesses need one more layer. Listings, review response, and monitoring all have to run from a central point, because a single underperforming location drags down the brand average and surfaces in searches for every other branch.

Audit each location on its own but hold them all to one standard and one response-time target.

Case Study: How Liberty Tax Moved 2,200+ Locations Into the Local 3-Pack

Franchise networks fail at listings at one location at a time. A 500-location brand with a 10% error rate is running 50 broken digital storefronts that send customers to the wrong address or show a closed branch as open, and none of it shows up in a corporate dashboard until the calls stop coming.

Liberty Tax fixed the data layer across its whole network at once. According to SOCi's franchise listings case data, the share of its 2,200-plus locations appearing in Google's local 3-pack rose from 60% to 90%. In the same dataset, dental support organization Affordable Care attributed a 20% lift in patient leads directly to listings improvements.

Listings work is unglamorous and rarely gets budget until something breaks. If you'd rather hand it off, see our list of the best local SEO agencies.

Step 5. Get More Genuine Customer Reviews 

Even happy customers usually need a nudge. Ask soon after a purchase, a completed project, or a resolved support ticket, while the experience is still fresh, and send them straight to the right platform with a direct link or QR code.

Keep the wording neutral: How did we do? Share your honest feedback here.

Steer clear of anything that pushes people toward praise, like "Loved your experience? Leave us five stars."

A steady stream of recent, detailed reviews reads as more credible than a suspiciously flawless profile anyway.

Choose platforms based on where customers already research you: Google, Trustpilot, Yelp, G2, TripAdvisor, or a relevant industry site. And respond to positive reviews too, especially when someone names a specific employee, product, or moment.

Five Stars Shouldn't Come With Terms and Conditions

Review manipulation goes beyond buying fake praise. Hiding real criticism misleads customers just as effectively, and it is now explicitly illegal in the US.

Fashion Nova agreed to pay $4.2 million to settle FTC allegations that it blocked negative reviews from appearing on its site.

According to the agency, the retailer suppressed reviews rated below four stars out of five while presenting its published reviews as representative of all customer feedback.

It was the FTC's first case targeting the concealment of negative reviews, and the agency later sent nearly $2.4 million in refunds to more than 148,000 affected customers.

The FTC's Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule has since set the standard.

It prohibits creating, buying, or selling fake reviews, including AI-generated ones that misrepresent a real customer experience, and it bans rewards tied to a particular sentiment, such as a coupon offered only in exchange for a five-star rating.

You can offer an incentive for an honest review. You cannot make the reward conditional on the review being positive, and the incentive may need disclosing.

Review gating, routing happy customers to a public platform while steering unhappy ones elsewhere, falls into the same category of misleading picture.

Step 6. Managing Online Reputation Through Review Responses

People reading a review response are judging the business as much as the complaint, so the reply needs to sound specific, calm, and useful. This is where online reputation management best practices earn their keep.

A vague apology does almost nothing, while a strong response names what went wrong, explains what's being done about it, and gives a clear next step.

You can put real numbers on speed. BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found 19% of consumers expect a same-day response, 32% expect one by the next day, and 81% expect one within a week.

That turns "respond promptly" into a target you can staff against: next business day as standard, same day for anything that touches safety, billing, or a complaint already picking up traction.

For negative reviews, use the same four-move script every time:

• Acknowledge and apologize for the specific thing that went wrong, not for the customer's feelings about it.
• Offer a solution or explain the change you've made so the problem doesn't recur.
• Invite the reviewer to continue privately, with a named contact and a direct channel.
• Thank them for the feedback, briefly, and close without relitigating details.

In practice, a weak reply reads: "We're sorry you had a bad experience. Please contact our team so we can resolve this."

A strong one reads: "You shouldn't have had to wait nine days for an update. We've changed how overdue orders get escalated. Send your order number to [email] and our support lead will look into your case directly, and thank you for flagging it."

Three rules round out the approach:

• Correct inaccuracies briefly and without heat.
• Move refunds and account details offline.
• Document and report fake reviews, threats, and platform violations instead of arguing in public.

The stakes are the ones Edelman's 2026 Trust Barometer Special Report on brands measures, with 88% of consumers calling brand trust an important or critical purchase criterion. Every public response is a small, cheap demonstration of whether that trust is warranted, and future customers base purchasing decisions on them.

Case Study: How KFC Turned a Chicken Shortage Into a Brand Win

In February 2018, a distribution failure left KFC's UK operation without chicken, closing hundreds of restaurants and turning the brand into a running joke. The obvious move was a lawyered statement, but KFC and agency Mother London went the other way.

They ran a full-page newspaper ad showing an empty bucket with the letters rearranged to read "FCK," alongside a plain apology and a link to a microsite listing which branches were open.

The ad generated roughly 797 million global impressions and appeared in more than 700 press articles and TV discussions. YouGov BrandIndex tracked the rest: public awareness climbed from 7% before the crisis to 29% after the ad, and the brand's impression score recovered to near pre-crisis levels within weeks.

Two details are worth copying: The response landed within days rather than weeks, (matching the response-time expectations above at national scale) and it took full accountability without blaming the logistics partner.

Step 7. Publish Proof That Backs Up Your Claims 

Publishing proof is one of the online reputation management best practices that compounds. Keep in mind that customers have seen trusted, experienced, and results-driven on thousands of websites, so give them something they can actually check.

Useful proof takes several forms:

• Case studies with clear outcomes
• Customer success stories
• Original research
• Detailed project pages
• Expert articles and leadership interviews
• Product demonstrations
• Service and location pages
• Public updates showing what changed after criticism

Whatever the format, give a reader enough to verify the claim: the challenge, the work, the timeline, the outcome, or a first-hand insight they can't get anywhere else. Google's own guidance rewards original reporting, clear sourcing, and content that shows real experience.

There's a limit, though. The material you publish about yourself does less work than the material others publish about you. Edelman's 2026 research found that among consumers with an insular mindset, unpaid voices carry roughly five times the trust-building power of paid brand messaging.

That gap matters most when you're pushing a negative result down. Earned media, meaning bylined articles, op-eds, Q&As, and industry interviews on sites you don't own, tends to outrank and outlast owned content, since it carries third-party domain authority and reads as independent verification.

Case Study: How Zoom Published a 90-Day Security Plan and Then Reported on It

In early 2020, Zoom jumped from roughly 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to more than 300 million by April, and the security scrutiny scaled just as fast. CEO Eric Yuan skipped the reassurances and published an open letter on April 1 that announced a 90-day feature freeze, with all engineering resources redirected to privacy and security under seven named commitments.

Zoom brought in former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos as an outside advisor, launched a CISO Council, ran a weekly public security webinar taking live questions, and shipped Zoom 5.0 with AES 256-bit GCM encryption. At the end of the window it published a report documenting what got delivered against each commitment.

What the program changed was the search record: a dated, checkable account of the response now sits permanently alongside the original criticism, which is a useful model for how to do online reputation management.

Step 8. Strengthen the Full Search Page

At some point, an audit turns up results you cannot respond your way out of: a complaint site, an old news article, a forum thread that outranks everything you've published. Removal is sometimes possible, though often it isn't, especially when the content is accurate or hosted somewhere with no real takedown path.

What's left is displacement, publishing credible assets strong enough to take those positions.

Before you start, work through the page as a whole:

• Which negative results hold the most prominent positions
• Why each one ranks: domain strength, backlinks, age, or platform preference
• Which credible assets could realistically replace them
• Whether removal is possible for any of them
• Whether suppression is the better route
• What the page should look like once the campaign succeeds

The distinction between removal and suppression matters more than most businesses realize, and it drives both timeline and budget. Our breakdown of reputation management costs covers how that scoping decision gets made.

Case Study: How Erase.com Displaced Three Negative Results on One Attorney's First Page in Four Months

An attorney had three negative results ranking at the same time for their name: a complaint site, a news article, and a forum thread.

Marshall says the decision to move all three simultaneously came down to how people actually read a results page.

"Nobody reads a search page one result at a time. A prospective client or referral partner skims page 1, forms an opinion, and moves on."

Partial clearance therefore returns almost nothing. "If we cleared one bad result and left two standing, the page still fails that test," Marshall says. "The attorney wouldn't get a third of the benefit for a third of the work. They'd get almost nothing, because the overall read of the page hasn't changed."

That reframed the objective from link-level to page-level.

"The goal was never to remove one specific result. The goal was to change what a stranger thinks after ten seconds on the page. That's a page-level problem. Page-level problems don't get fixed one link at a time."

Marshall describes the engagement as one campaign with three separate fights inside it, because each result held its position for a different reason. The complaint site had built up its own backlinks over time and sat at position four, so it needed the strongest push.

The news article ranked on the publisher's domain strength rather than because the story still mattered, since the underlying matter had been resolved long ago.

The forum thread was old but still stuck in place, largely because of how Google has prioritized forum and UGC content like Reddit over the past couple of years.

Each result got its own content plan and its own link priorities from day one. The unified layer was the strategy around them: 54 pieces of content published over four months, one monitoring schedule, one goal.

Practice area shaped which content types were even viable. "Attorneys also face a tougher playing field," Marshall says. "Bar profiles, legal directories, and court records already crowd the page. So you don't pick content types based on preference. You pick them based on what can actually take each open spot."

Step 9. Earn Credibility You Cannot Publish Yourself

The most durable reputation assets are the ones you don't control, and they rank well precisely because they carry authority you can't manufacture on your own domain.

Worth pursuing:

• Media coverage and trade publication mentions
• Expert citations and commentary
• Industry awards
• Professional association memberships
• Speaking appearances and conference listings
• Partner and client recommendations
• Creator or customer advocacy
• Genuine participation in relevant Reddit and community discussions
• Third-party profiles with real authority in your sector

None of them slot into a calendar the way a blog post does, yet a single trade feature or a well-earned award listing often outranks anything on your own site.

Employee advocacy earns its own line here, apart from customer advocacy. Encourage your team to share company content on their personal profiles under clear guidelines that spell out what they can post, what stays internal, and how to disclose the relationship.

The return runs two ways: employee posts reach networks your brand handle can't touch, and they shape how the company reads to future job candidates.

Most teams underinvest here, since the return is slow and hard to forecast. If this is where your gaps sit, public relations firms handle earned coverage as a core service, from pitching to placement.

Case Study: How Dell Turned 10,000 Employees Into a Reputation Channel

Dell has run a training program for this since 2009. Its Social Media and Communities University, or SMaC U inside the company, teaches an eight-hour certification course, and Dell's published social media policy makes that course mandatory for anyone who posts as part of their job or talks publicly about Dell's products or competitors.

The policy states that if you post about Dell, you have to tag it #IWork4Dell somewhere obvious. That's how you run advocacy at scale and stay clear of disclosure trouble. A listening and triage system sits alongside the policy and flags where advocates are needed.

By 2012, more than 10,000 employees had been through it. A later interview with Dell's head of social media training put the cumulative number past 50,000, with roughly 18,000 holding active certification.

The payoff showed up in 2018. Employees shared over 150,000 pieces of content that year. Those posts reached 1.2 million people and sent 45,000 clicks to Dell properties.

Numbers like that need something to share. Dell's recruiting team on its own was turning out close to 300 pieces of content in a single month, up from almost nothing five years before. Starve your advocates of material and the program dies after the first enthusiastic week.

A 2009 setup that people still cite tells you the design held up. Training plus a written policy with disclosure rules you can actually enforce turns an occasional favor into a channel you can count on. That's what separates durable reputation management tips from advice with a two-week shelf life.

Step 10. Build an Early-Warning System for Managing Online Reputation

Everything above is a project. This step keeps it from unravelling.

Monitor:

• Brand and executive-name alerts
• Review notifications across every platform you're listed on
• Social listening for unlinked mentions
• AI-answer spot checks: ask the major tools about your business monthly
• Sentiment trends across time rather than a single snapshot
• Sudden review spikes, which often signal coordinated activity

Decide in advance:

• Who owns responses on each channel
• Response-time targets by severity
• Escalation rules for legal threats, fake reviews, press inquiries, and coordinated attacks
• A simple crisis-response chain (our crisis communication plan guide covers how to build one before you need it)

Google Alerts and free social listening tools cover the basics. Paid platforms add sentiment tracking and AI-answer visibility, which matter more now than they did even a year ago.

Tracking sentiment over time, rather than incident by incident, pays off because patterns show up in the data well before they surface in your inbox.

Marshall's advice is to measure the mix rather than react incident by incident. Run your name through a sentiment analysis tool: "Most tag each result as positive, negative, or neutral, and some track that mix over time," she says. "If the negative share holds steady or climbs across separate, unrelated events, that's a pattern showing up in the data, not just a hunch."

Erase.com built its own tool for exactly this. "We watch how a name shows up across search and AI results over the length of a campaign," Marshall says, "so we can see a pattern building before the client even feels it."

Finally, know where your ceiling is. Coordinated review attacks, defamatory content, entrenched search results, and legal exposure are all points where in-house effort stops scaling.

How to Improve Online Reputation Takeaways

Reputation work rewards sequence. Audit first, since you cannot fix what you haven't seen. Fix the underlying experience next, since everything else stays cosmetic until you do. Then build the review base, the response habits, and the published proof that give people something better to find.

Displacement work makes sense only after that, since you need credible assets before you can outrank anything with them.

The one thing that has genuinely changed is the number of places forming the impression. Search results, review platforms, social feeds, and AI summaries now read from the same underlying content, which cuts both ways.

Neglect it and one bad result echoes everywhere. Improve it and the same amplification works in your favor.

Our team ranks agencies worldwide to help you find a qualified partner. Visit our Agency Directory for the top reputation management agencies, as well as:

1. Top Reputation Management Agencies in Miami
2. Top Public Relations Firms
3. Top Business Consulting Firms
4. Top Branding Companies
5. Top Digital Strategy Agencies

Online Reputation Management: FAQs

1. What is the fastest way to improve an online reputation?

Fix inaccurate business information and respond to recent reviews. Both sit within your direct control, cost nothing, and change what customers see right away. Search-result changes take months by comparison.

2. How long does it take to improve an online reputation?

Review profiles and business listings can improve within weeks. Displacing entrenched search results usually takes months; the law firm campaign above ran four months for three results. Anyone promising page-one changes in days is describing something other than reputation work.

3. How do you know whether one bad review is hurting your business?

Run the stranger test. Search your name in a private window and ask what someone with no background knowledge would conclude in ten seconds. One negative result surrounded by strong ones reads as an outlier. Two or three start reading as a theme, even when they're unrelated.

4. Can negative search results be removed?

Sometimes. It depends on whether the content breaks a platform rule, is factually false, or sits on a site with a genuine takedown path. Accurate coverage from a major publisher usually can't be removed. Our reputation management cost guide covers how that assessment gets made.

5. What is the difference between removal and suppression?

Removal deletes the content at the source, so it disappears from search entirely. Suppression leaves it in place and publishes stronger content to push it down the page. Removal is faster and more permanent where it's available, and suppression is the fallback when it isn't.

6. Should businesses respond to every negative review?

Respond to legitimate criticism, since future customers read the responses as closely as the reviews. Document and report fake reviews, threats, and platform violations instead of arguing with them in public.

7. Can AI-generated answers hurt a company's reputation?

Yes. AI tools compress a full search page into a few sentences, so three unrelated negative results can come out as a pattern of complaints. Those answers are built from indexed web content, so fixing what's indexed is what changes what the models say. See our guide to combating online misinformation.

8. How often should a business audit its online reputation?

Run a full audit quarterly, with continuous monitoring in between. Businesses in litigation, in the middle of a funding round, or recovering from a public incident should check monthly, including what AI tools say about them.