How do you tell fake reviews, campaign spikes and real service issues apart?
Triangulate three clusters: linguistics (duplicates, missing touchpoint details), timing (bursts versus expected volume) and operations (service tickets, NPS changes). Fake: 1 and 2 without 3. Genuine problem: 2 and 3 without 1. Campaign: all three, traceable to customers.
Which Wikipedia rules do brand edits break most often, and how do you stay compliant?
Notability, neutral point of view, conflict of interest and verifiability. The compliant path: independent trade coverage first, then a talk page proposal with a COI disclosure, then a neutral, sourced edit. Shortcuts risk reverts and bans.
How do you measure brand SERP contamination systematically?
Track the top 10 daily for your 5-15 main brand queries, classifying each URL by ownership, sentiment and feature type. Contamination is the share of negative results you do not own; plotted over months, it flags problems early.
How much do author E-E-A-T and organizational trust matter to LLMs?
For YMYL-adjacent queries, author signals carry more weight in our observation. LLMs recognize authors via Person markup, sameAs, worksFor and citations. An anonymous brand blog performs worse than the same text under named experts.
How do you respond to critical content without a Streisand effect?
Never link to it or name it. Publish topic-level content for the same intent, with facts and primary sources. HowTo rich results are long gone and Google retired FAQ rich results on 7 May 2026, so dominance comes from authority assets and citability in AI answers.
What does online reputation management really cover in 2026?
Eleven layers, from brand SERP hygiene, E-E-A-T and author authority to Wikipedia upkeep, review velocity, the Knowledge Panel, AI search reputation, hallucination mitigation, monitoring and crisis readiness. Managing reviews alone leaves most of that surface untouched.
What is the difference between ORM SEO, PR and legal removal?
ORM SEO is structural and lasting. PR works with newsrooms and depends on the narrative. Legal removal (GDPR Art. 17, platform terms) is immediate but only for violations. Crisis comms steers the first hours and days. Good setups combine all four.
How does AI search reputation work, and why is it critical?
LLMs describe brands from training data and live retrieval. With thin sources they hallucinate wrong descriptions, executives or scandals. Mitigation: a consistent entity graph, authoritative primary sources and monthly prompt tests per model. See our entity resolution pilot on AI misattributions.
How does crisis recovery work in practice?
Four phases over 4-12 weeks: damage assessment (days 1-3), quick-win suppression (weeks 1-2), structural trust repair (weeks 3-8), then continuous monitoring. Non-compliant quick fixes make things worse.
Which ORM investment models are there?
An audit (3-4 weeks), a recovery project (8-16 weeks) after a crisis, and a continuous retainer (12+ months). Pricing depends on industry risk, brand size and international scope.
How is personal ORM (CEOs, politicians) different from brand ORM?
It runs on Person markup, uses LinkedIn, ORCID, speaker profiles and Wikipedia biographies, and falls under stricter privacy rules such as the GDPR right to erasure. One negative top-3 result on a name can cost board seats or office, so it is proactive protection.
