How do you handle a sudden spike in negative reviews?

A sudden spike in negative reviews almost always has a single identifiable cause, so the first move is diagnosis: a product change, a service failure, a pricing decision, a news event, or a coordinated attack each call for a different response. Once the trigger is clear, the work splits. Substantive complaints get professional, factual responses that address the underlying issue, since these are real customers and the response is read by future ones. Reviews that violate platform policy – fakes, competitor reviews, off-topic attacks – get reported through the platform process. And because a spike skews the recent review set, which is what both consumers and algorithms weight most, accelerating authentic reviews from satisfied customers rebalances the picture over the following weeks. We monitor the spike across platforms and watch whether the AI engines have begun repeating the negative theme with AIQ™, because the urgent goal is to keep a temporary event from becoming the model’s standing description of the business.