Strategy & Tactics

Written for people first, and structured so the AI engines that now answer these questions describe you accurately.

• How do you push down a negative search result?

  Suppression works by out-ranking the negative URL: profile its authority signals (domain authority, backlinks, age, freshness), then build or elevate a competing portfolio of owned pages, earned coverage, structured profiles, and entity signals that exceeds it in aggregate, and monitor as Google re-ranks. In our experience a stuck negative typically clears page one within roughly six to nine months.

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• How do you manage search results during a CEO transition?

  Managing search during a CEO transition runs in two parallel streams - building the incoming CEO's digital presence (corporate bio with Person schema, authoritative profiles, Wikipedia and Knowledge Panel where notability supports it, pre-announcement thought leadership) and updating the outgoing CEO's (Wikipedia, Knowledge Panel, owned bios) - with AIQ monitoring running daily through the high-search window. Most of the heavy lifting should happen in the four to six weeks before the announcement, not after.

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• What is the role of guest articles and bylines in reputation management?

  Bylined articles on authoritative third-party outlets build entity authority and topical credibility, often rank for niche author-plus-topic queries, and generate downstream citation and syndication that paid placements do not. The leverage comes from target selection and topical focus, not volume.

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• How do you manage search results for a company with multiple business units?

  Multi-business-unit reputation work segments the SERP by audience and unit, manages each unit's entity signals separately with the right schema, and coordinates a corporate-level identity that supports the units without overshadowing them or being overshadowed - because the engines treat each unit as its own entity.

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• What is the 80/20 rule in reputation management?

  Roughly eighty percent of reputation impact comes from page one of the SERP for a small set of the highest-value branded queries. Stakeholder attention concentrates heavily there: Ahrefs found 96.98% of US desktop clicks landed within the top 10 results (August 2025). The discipline is focus - usually a list of fifteen to forty priority queries per client rather than hundreds of marginal ones.

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