How do you handle negative content that appears in Google’s People Also Search For?

People Also Search For is an entity-level feature, not a piece of content you can edit: Google surfaces other entities its users searched for alongside the queried entity, with policy filtering layered on top. That means you influence it indirectly, by reshaping the entity signals Google draws on rather than by manipulating the box itself.

Why the box shows what it shows

The adjacencies are an output of Google’s entity layer – the connected web of references that identifies an organization to the platform and feeds features like the Knowledge Panel. When the displayed adjacencies are accurate and preferred, the box reinforces correct positioning:

• The brand’s genuine peers and competitive set
• Named partner organizations and affiliations
• An executive’s known, current roles

When the adjacencies are unfavorable – competitors you do not want to be grouped with, deprecated affiliations, or hostile entities – the same mechanism reinforces a problematic frame.

How to influence it

Because the output is generated, not editable, the work happens at the sources Google reads:

1. Identify the preferred adjacencies. Decide which peers, partners, and industry leaders you want the brand associated with.
2. Build co-citation patterns. Get the brand named alongside those preferred entities in authoritative, independent content – the kind of credible third-party sourcing engines weight most heavily, not just additional owned pages.
3. Let the associations shift. As those co-citation patterns accumulate, Google’s entity associations move toward them over time.

Direct manipulation of the box is not available. Shaping the sources Google reads is the lever.