What questions should you ask a reputation management firm before hiring them?

The right questions force a reputation firm to reveal whether it does durable, structural work or sells suppression. Six areas of inquiry cover the ground that matters most before signing a contract.

The six questions, and what a credible firm says

1. How do you measure success?
   A credible answer is grounded in search positions, AI narrative quality, and business outcomes, not vague promises or vanity metrics. A firm that cannot name what it tracks and how it reports has no accountability mechanism.
2. What is your Wikipedia methodology?
   A serious firm describes disclosed conflict-of-interest editing and Talk-page work. It declares its relationship to the Wikipedia community as policy requires. The evasive answer, or the absence of any answer, usually means anonymous direct edits, which violate the terms of use, get reversed, and can leave the article in a worse state than before.
3. What is your approach to the AI engines?
   The credible answer is shaping the sources the models draw on, entity signals, authoritative content, structured data, because no one edits a model’s output directly. A firm that implies it can tune the model itself, or that conflates AI search optimization with AI narrative management, does not understand the mechanism.
4. What proprietary technology do you use, and can you show it?
   Purpose-built monitoring platforms that track search results and AI engine answers at scale are what separate firms that actually see the landscape from those operating on assertion. Ask for a demonstration. A firm with real technology will show it.
5. What are your ethical commitments, in concrete terms?
   Concreteness is the test. Disclosed COI editing, not anonymous edits. Legitimate removal channels, not guaranteed suppression. Authoritative content, not fake reviews or link schemes. Vague assurances of “white-hat” practice that lack specifics are not commitments.
6. How do you handle conflicts of interest?
   A firm serving one sector long enough will eventually face competing clients. Ask directly how it manages that: whether it declines conflicting work, whether it has Chinese walls, whether it discloses. A clear, policy-grounded answer is reassuring; deflection is not.

The quality of the answers, and the firm’s willingness to be specific rather than evasive, tells you most of what you need to know before signing. We answer all six directly in a first conversation.