How do you handle defamation in search results?

Defamation cases divide cleanly. Legal addresses the underlying claim: cease-and-desist where appropriate, formal demands to publishers, platform takedowns where policies apply, litigation where the facts and the jurisdiction support it. That track is necessary but rarely sufficient for the SERP, because successful legal action against one host often does not remove cached copies, syndicated versions, or quotations on secondary sites. Reputation work runs in parallel: authoritative content building the truthful record, entity work strengthening the subject’s recognized presence across the Knowledge Graph and Wikidata, source-level correction requests on outlets that ran the contested claim, and continuous monitoring through IMPACT and AIQ as the picture moves. Done together the SERP and the AI narrative shift over months. Either alone tends to underperform.