How do you handle competitor-driven negative reviews?

Competitor-driven negative reviews are a policy violation on most major platforms, which makes reporting the first and often most effective track: a documented report that identifies the review as coming from a competitor, citing the specific rule, has a real chance of removal. Where the review is also defamatory and the source can be attributed, legal escalation may be warranted, but that is a counsel decision weighed against the visibility a lawsuit can create. Running alongside both is the public-facing work: measured, factual responses that let future readers recognize the review as illegitimate without the company sounding paranoid or combative. The discipline is to treat it as a process, not a feud. We monitor for new entries and for whether the AI engines are absorbing the competitor’s content into their summaries with AIQ™, because a coordinated competitor campaign aims precisely at the synthesized answer a buyer reads, and catching it there is as important as removing individual reviews.