What is online reputation management?

Online reputation management is the discipline of shaping how a brand, executive, or organization appears across the digital layers where decisions get made about them: Google search, the AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode), Wikipedia, the Knowledge Graph (Google’s database of entities and facts), and the press, structured-data, and third-party sources those engines synthesize from. The discipline is structural rather than promotional. It is not about generating positive content; it is about ensuring the authoritative sources, entity signals, and content infrastructure that engines weight most heavily reflect the company or person accurately. Done well, it is largely invisible: stakeholders simply find what they need to find when they search.