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Minimum involvement

• A named primary contact on the communications or executive side
• Biweekly or monthly strategy calls
• Client review of significant content before it is published or submitted
• Review of monthly reporting against program goals

Maximum involvement (active programs in sensitive sectors)

• Weekly check-ins
• Real-time crisis coordination
• Joint working sessions with the client’s PR firm or legal counsel

What the Five Blocks team handles

• Wikipedia edit requests
• Schema markup
• IMPACT™ and AIQ™ monitoring
• Content production
• Entity work

Most clients spend two to four hours per month on the engagement after onboarding completes.

The post How involved do we need to be? appeared first on Five Blocks.

What an in-house team can own

• Social monitoring – tracking brand mentions across social platforms.
• Review responses – replying to reviews on Google, Glassdoor, and industry platforms.
• Corporate blog content – maintaining and publishing owned editorial.
• PR execution – pitching, placement, and executive visibility.

What typically needs a specialist

• Wikipedia editing under disclosed COI rules – paid and affiliated editors are strongly discouraged from editing articles directly and are expected to propose changes through the Talk-page edit-request process, which requires sustained editorial experience and standing with the editor community.
• AI engine source attribution – identifying which sources drive each engine’s answer requires a tool like AIQ and analyst pattern recognition; AIQ tracks how eight major AI models (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Copilot, Google AI Mode, and AI Overview) describe a brand.
• Knowledge Graph and schema markup – deep technical fluency that few in-house teams carry full-time.
• Cross-account learning – knowing which sources move which engines, which tactics survive algorithm changes, and which placements waste budget compounds with a volume of accounts that no single company can generate.

[[FIG:kb-0418]]

The post Why can’t we manage our digital reputation in-house? appeared first on Five Blocks.

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B2B buyers

• B2B buyers spend 70% of their buying journey doing their own research before talking to any vendor. (6sense, 2024)
• 85% of buyers have already established their purchase requirements before reaching out to a seller. (Demand Gen Report citing 6sense 2024 Buyer Experience Report)
• 87% of B2B buyers prefer to research product information on their own before speaking with a sales representative. (Brixon Group citing TrustRadius, 2023)

Journalists

• 94% of journalists always or almost always research a subject before making contact for an interview. (Sense About Science USA, 2016)
• 82% of North American journalists go to previous media coverage first when preparing for a CEO media interview; 58% go to the company website second. (Bianchi PR citing PRGN survey)

Why this matters for reputation work

Reputation work determines whether stakeholders arrive at a conversation with accurate context or with someone else’s framing. By the time a buyer, journalist, or investor makes contact, the first impression has already been set by the search results and AI synthesis they found on their own.

The post How many people actually Google a company or person before doing business? appeared first on Five Blocks.

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Why authority beats volume

Google evaluates sources by signals that take years to accumulate and cannot be manufactured at scale:

• Domain authority: Google’s systems assess whether other prominent websites link to or reference the content. A major news outlet or industry publication has thousands of such signals; a new or thin blog has almost none.
• Entity recognition: Credentialed outlets are recognized entities in Google’s index. Content from them inherits that recognition, and Google weights it accordingly on branded queries.
• Manipulation detection: Google’s spam systems are built to detect and discount attempts to build authority through volume tactics, which reduces or removes any ranking benefit those tactics produce.

The outlet authority spectrum in practice

Knowing where the threshold sits tells you how much effort is worth spending. Sources Google treats as high-authority for reputation purposes typically include:

• Major wire services and national newspapers (Reuters, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press)
• Established trade publications with editorial independence and a long publication history in a specific sector
• Non-commercial domains with consistent editorial standards: government agencies, academic institutions, and bodies in the Google News index

Low-authority sources, newly launched blogs, thin content farms, syndication networks without editorial oversight, and paid placement that discloses its commercial origin, rarely acquire the inbound signals Google uses to judge trustworthiness. Twenty such articles pointing at a branded query have marginal ranking impact at best.

Where volume still helps

Volume is not useless. It supports an authority-first program in three ways:

• Building topical depth on owned properties that supply structured data and entity signals
• Supporting long-tail branded queries where lower-authority content faces less competition
• Providing the underlying content base that credentialed outlets can reference and link to

But volume without authority at the head of the program is an expensive way to produce no movement on the results that matter.

The post If I publish 20 new articles about my company, will that push the bad one down? appeared first on Five Blocks.

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What the client provides

Priority keywords and topics

The searches that matter to the audiences you care about, the terms your investors, journalists, or candidate pools are likely to run.

Current executive bios

The company’s own version of each executive’s biography, used to cross-check what search and AI engines currently surface against what the company intends.

Prior PR or comms materials

Any press releases, briefing documents, or backgrounders worth reusing or factoring into the source-layer picture.

Current reputation concerns

A candid description of existing issues, including anything sensitive or off-limits, so the diagnostic is scoped to the real risk picture and not a sanitised one.

Target audience definitions

Which investors, which journalist pools, which candidate markets, because the right keyword set and channel priorities depend on who is actually doing the searching.

Technical access to owned properties

Credentials or authorised access needed to implement changes on the company’s own web properties once the strategy is set.

What Five Blocks produces independently

Everything outside that list comes from Five Blocks’ own diagnostic: the IMPACT™ and AIQ baselines, the Wikipedia and Knowledge Panel review, the entity audit, the peer landscape, and the source-layer assessment. Most clients are surprised by how little they need to assemble before kickoff.

The post What does an ORM firm need from us to actually start moving the needle? appeared first on Five Blocks.

[[FIG:kb-0425]]

The questions a reputation audit answers

• What does the branded SERP actually look like? The page-one and priority-query results for the brand or executive, including AI Overviews and the Knowledge Panel.
• Where does the entity sit in Wikipedia, Wikidata, and the Knowledge Graph, and is the data accurate? These are the primary sources that populate the Knowledge Panel, and AI engines weight them heavily. Errors here reach everything they feed.
• How do the major AI engines describe the brand or executive, and which sources drive each answer? AIQ covers eight major AI engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode) and shows which sources each engine is drawing on.
• How does all of this compare to named peers and competitors? The same picture, run against a defined peer set, so absolute findings become a competitive position.
• Where are the entity signals weak or missing? Schema markup, structured data, and sameAs links: the connected web of references that identifies the entity to search and AI engines.
• What content gaps exist, and which would have the most impact if filled? The places where new authoritative content would move the most.

The deliverable

The audit produces a written report with the underlying data attached and a recommended scope. It typically runs two to four weeks and gives you something usable internally even if no further engagement follows: a defensible read of the current state and a prioritized list of interventions.

The post What is a digital reputation audit, and what should it reveal? appeared first on Five Blocks.

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Two timescales

Why durability is the goal

Google weights authority signals heavily: other prominent websites linking or referring to content is one of the primary signals Google uses to assess trustworthiness. A program that publishes only for the freshness boost, without building long-term authority, produces rankings that decay. A structured ORM program publishes for durability instead: authoritative sources, consistent citation patterns, clean entity data, and content that gives Google a reason to rank it beyond the day it was published.

How IMPACT captures both timescales

The two timescales look different in the data, so IMPACT tracks both. Daily readings show the short-term movement as new content enters the index; the monthly trend line shows whether that movement is holding and compounding into durable repositioning. Clients see the trajectory against the objectives set at kickoff. That is the only way to set realistic timing expectations when Google does not publish a schedule.

The post How often does Google re-rank search results after an ORM campaign starts? appeared first on Five Blocks.

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What drives the timeline

• Source authority. A Wall Street Journal article from this month is harder to displace than a regional blog from 2019. Higher domain authority means more durable ranking, and Google’s own systems weight authority and entity recognition heavily when ranking results about a specific subject. An unaddressed major-outlet negative article can hold a page-one position for years without active remediation.
• Freshness signal decay. Google runs freshness systems that favor newer content for news-type queries. Over time, the freshness component of a negative article’s ranking fades. New authoritative positive content speeds that up by competing for the same query with stronger recency signals.
• Factual contestability. Clear inaccuracies can be corrected at the source (most major publications have correction policies) or addressed through entity-layer fixes (Wikidata, schema, Knowledge Graph). Unflattering but accurate coverage has to be displaced rather than corrected, which takes longer.
• Remediation structure and continuity. Programs that hold up run long enough for the work to build on itself. A single content push rarely moves a high-authority negative result; a sustained authority-building program does. The IMPACT platform tracks page-level SERP position changes daily across keywords, so the trajectory shows up in real data rather than an estimate.

How “meaningful improvement” is measured

Meaningful improvement is concrete, not impressionistic. The main signal is SERP composition: does the negative result drop from a top-three position to a lower spot on page one, or off page one entirely? This matters because over 96% of organic clicks go to positions one through ten (page one) and less than 1% reach page two. A result moving from position 2 to position 8 is a real reduction in stakeholder exposure even before it leaves the page. Secondary signals: the negative result’s share of a branded SERP narrowing as more positive or neutral results accumulate; correction status at the source outlet; and, where AI engine narratives are tracked (via AIQ), whether the content still appears in AI-generated summaries about the subject.

What the evidence supports on timing

The industry commonly cites a 6 to 12 month improvement window, and that range reflects real field experience across remediation programs. But no published third-party study provides a controlled baseline for the figure; it is an observed range, not a clinical measurement. The honest version: lower-authority negative sources and contestable facts often show SERP composition shifts in weeks to a few months, while high-authority outlets, ongoing news cycles, or accurate rather than contestable content can take much longer. Severity, authority, and remediation investment each move the curve on their own.

The post How long until the reputational damage subsides? appeared first on Five Blocks.

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What the diagnostic covers

1. IMPACT audit across the branded SERP, a structured read of what appears when audiences search for the client, across the results where reputation is built or damaged.
2. AIQ audit across the eight AI engines AIQ currently tracks, how the client is represented in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Copilot, Google AI Mode, and AI Overview, and which sources drive those representations.
3. Wikipedia and Knowledge Panel review, the accuracy, completeness, and consistency of the encyclopedia article and the entity card Google surfaces in branded searches.
4. Entity audit, whether the client entity is correctly resolved across structured data signals, Wikidata, and the knowledge graph.
5. Peer comparison, how the client compares to named peers or sector benchmarks, to calibrate what “good” looks like and find competitive gaps.

What the client receives

• A written assessment of the current reputation picture
• A prioritized list of interventions ranked by expected impact
• A defensible internal case for where to focus budget and effort

How to think about commitment

The diagnostic is a fixed-fee project and stands on its own. Many ongoing engagements grow out of it, but there is no obligation to continue. Clients describe it as the closest thing to a free trial in this category, and it usually saves time on both sides by replacing scope-definition conversations with actual data.

The post What if we’re not sure what we need? appeared first on Five Blocks.

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What a typical diagnostic covers

IMPACT™ SERP audit

A full audit of the branded SERP and priority keywords.

AIQ snapshot

What the eight AI engines AIQ™ tracks say about the brand and its named peers.

Wikipedia & Knowledge Panel review

An assessment of the Wikipedia article and Google Knowledge Panel.

Entity & schema audit

A review of the entity and structured-data markup across owned properties.

Written assessment

A documented read of the current state with prioritized recommendations.

How it is priced and scoped

• Structure: typically a fixed-fee project.
• Duration: usually two to four weeks.
• Commitment: stands alone; no obligation to continue into a full program.

How clients use the diagnostic

• To brief their board.
• To validate scope internally before committing.
• To compare proposals from multiple firms.

The post Can we do a short-term project or audit? appeared first on Five Blocks.