If I stop paying for ORM, do the results just revert?

If you stop paying for reputation work, the results do not simply revert overnight, because well-built reputation work creates durable assets that persist – but they are not entirely self-maintaining either, so the honest answer is somewhere between permanent and disposable. The durable pieces – a Wikipedia article, owned content holding branded positions, deployed entity signals – generally stay in place after an engagement ends, since they earned their positions and continue to occupy them. What changes is the absence of active maintenance: branded result sets shift, new content emerges, the AI engines evolve, and Wikipedia articles can be edited by others, so without monitoring some erosion can occur and new issues go unnoticed until they have grown. This is why we recommend ongoing light-touch monitoring after an active program ends, rather than going fully dark – it is far cheaper to catch and address a change early than to rebuild after it has compounded. The durable work persists; the vigilance is what lapses, and that is the gap worth covering.