The search audit baseline
Search your name, company name, brand + "review," brand + "scam," executives by name. Do it logged out, in incognito, from multiple locations if you serve multiple markets. Personalization hides results you'll never see but customers will.
Document positions weekly. A URL at position 15 today can be position 4 in a month if it picks up links. Velocity matters as much as current rank.
Beyond Google
Harmful content online lives on platforms Google barely indexes — Telegram channels, Discord servers, niche forums. But most business damage still comes from indexed pages: reviews, complaints sites, news, Reddit, YouTube.
Set Google Alerts for brand variants, but supplement with dedicated reputation monitoring. Alerts miss a lot of long-tail queries where buying decisions actually happen.
Classify before you panic
Not everything you find needs removal. Old negative reviews from real customers, critical journalism, forum opinions — annoying, often legal. Fabricated reports, policy violations, private data leaks — actionable.
Run your audit results through our negative content removal services intake for a no-cost classification pass. Knowing what's removable saves more money than removing everything you dislike.