What is online reputation management?

Online reputation management is the discipline of shaping how a brand, executive, or organization appears across the digital layers where decisions get made about them: Google search, the AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode), Wikipedia, the Knowledge Graph, and the press, structured-data, and third-party sources those engines synthesize from. The discipline is structural rather than promotional. It is not about generating positive content; it is about ensuring the authoritative sources, entity signals, and content infrastructure that engines weight most heavily reflect the company or person accurately. Done well, it is largely invisible: stakeholders simply find what they need to find when they search.