How We Handle a Reputation Crisis
Why firms choose us when the stakes are highest, the data and platforms behind the work, and how we treat a crisis as a system rather than a moment.
Why it is the right choice when the stakes are highest.
Brands and individuals consistently choose Five Blocks for crisis reputation work for four reasons: we move fast without cutting corners, we lead with data, we keep every piece of work in-house, and we operate across every layer of the system that a crisis stress-tests at once.
Pain relief plus permanent repair.
Crisis work demands both speed and substance, and those are usually in tension. We have solved for both. Our first move in any engagement is triage: identifying which elements of a client’s digital presence can be improved immediately, owned content updates, structured data corrections, knowledge panel claims, entity signals, and which require a longer runway.
The quick wins are real. We can often move the needle on owned and controlled content within days, while our team simultaneously works the harder, durable problems that determine how you look in Google and in AI six months from now.
We map the full landscape before we touch a single thing.
The hardest part of managing a brand through a crisis is not the execution. It is getting the client to understand what actually needs to be done. So we lead with analysis: every engagement begins with a comprehensive audit of how a client appears across Google search, AI models, Wikipedia, knowledge graphs, and third-party citations.
This builds alignment and gets decisions made faster, and it ensures our solutions address root causes, not symptoms. Surface-level fixes collapse under pressure. Structural ones hold.
Continuity and expertise, not a junior with a playbook.
Five Blocks does not outsource. Every piece of work, from Wikipedia research and editing to technical structured data to AI content strategy, is done by our team, all in-house. This is not an operational detail. It is a quality guarantee.
Our staff averages well over a decade in digital reputation, with 10+ people dedicated exclusively to Wikipedia. The person who starts on your account in month one is still there in month six, and they know the case intimately. Senior practitioners are hands-on throughout.
Don’t reinvent the wheel.
In every engagement, we analyze what is working for clients’ peers and competitors: which content is getting cited by AI models, which sources are driving positive narratives, which Wikipedia structures are most effective. If something is working, we learn from it.
This peer analysis approach, powered by AIQ, accelerates results and grounds our recommendations in what is actually effective in your industry and competitive context.
A decisive process, from the first call.
Crises don’t wait for a kickoff meeting. Our specialists start on your situation promptly, in lockstep with the people already on it.
Rapid response
You reach a senior specialist, not a queue. We assess the live results page and the immediate exposure.
A prompt startCoordinated containment
We work directly with your comms and PR teams to align the response and stabilize what’s surfacing.
In lockstepAnalyze what’s missing
Beyond moving negatives, we analyze why your reputation doesn’t match your narrative, then curate the content that should rank instead.
Deliberate planProve & protect
We track the results page over time, as compared to peers, and harden the position against the next test.
Measured, ongoingProprietary platforms, at a depth most firms cannot match.
We map how you appear across Google, AI models, Wikipedia, knowledge graphs, and citations before we touch a thing. A suite of proprietary platforms makes that possible at scale, tracking millions of data points so decisions are made on evidence and results can be shown.
Digital reputation is a system, and a crisis stress-tests every layer at once.
Reputation today is not a single channel. We have deep expertise across all of the layers that determine what surfaces about you, and in a crisis they all get tested simultaneously.
Synthesized Reputation: the AI’s version of who you are.
When someone searches for a brand, an executive, or a company in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot, the AI constructs a narrative. That narrative is synthesized from what it has read across the web, and it is often incomplete, outdated, or shaped by negative sources the client does not even know exist.
Synthesized Reputation is built from the same building blocks that have always mattered in digital reputation: earned media, owned content, Wikipedia, and entity signals. Five Blocks has spent 20 years working on exactly these building blocks. We were doing this work before AI made it urgent.
This is the capability most reputation firms do not yet have, and it matters more every month.
A real-time window into your AI reputation.
AIQ shows clients how they are described, what sources AI is drawing from, and how they compare to peers in the same industry. No other firm offers this at scale.
ChatGPT
Claude
Gemini
Perplexity
Copilot
Grok
AI Mode
AI Overviews
In AI answers, an old crisis can still be current.
How AI describes the Fortune 100
We analyzed 24,675 AI answers about America’s largest companies. Of the serious negatives that carried a date, 43% came from 2020 or earlier. A story that left the news years ago can still shape what AI tells people today, and the study shows where AI looks for its answers.
- 43%of dated serious negatives come from 2020 or earlier
- 82%cite the company’s own website
- 56%cite Wikipedia
Tailored to your context, industry, and stakeholders.
We understand that a pharmaceutical company in the middle of an FDA controversy has different needs than a hedge fund manager dealing with adverse press. We tailor every engagement to the specific context, industry, and stakeholder environment, for some of the most recognized names in business and public life.
Whether you are in an active crisis or building defenses before one arrives.
Reach a senior specialist directly to discuss your situation. For active crises, we respond promptly, in lockstep with your communications and PR teams.
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Members of our team, some of whom you may work with
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