Crisis intake is prioritized ahead of all other work. Same day assessment.
Rapid Crisis Response
Reputational crises spread quickly. Our crisis response team works rapidly to assess the situation, monitor online activity, and implement a comprehensive recovery strategy designed to reduce long-term impact and restore confidence.
Tell us what is happening. Our US-based crisis team prioritizes these inquiries and will respond promptly and confidentially.
70%
more likely that a falsehood is retweeted than the truth, and false news travels six times faster
Source: MIT SloanThe Threat
The window in which a reputational event can still be contained is short, and it closes while the response is still being approved. Four things happen at once, and they reinforce each other.
News articles rank.
Established outlets carry enough search authority to reach page one for your name within hours and stay there for years.
Social media amplifies misinformation.
The version that spreads is rarely the accurate one, and each repost adds a new indexable page that repeats it.
Search engines index damaging content.
Once a page is indexed and accumulating links, removing it later is far harder than getting ahead of it now.
Public perception changes overnight.
Customers, partners, investors, and employees all form a view from the same first page, and first impressions harden fast.
When your reputation is at risk, decisive action makes all the difference.
Work started on day one, while the story is still competing for authority instead of holding it, is dramatically more effective. Crisis intake takes priority over everything else.
Who We Help
From executives and corporations to public figures and brands, we deliver discreet, strategic solutions when reputational damage demands immediate action.
Our Response
A crisis engagement runs on a compressed timeline. The first actions happen in hours, not weeks, and the sequence is built to contain the damage before it compounds.
We establish what is out there right now, where it is ranking, how fast it is spreading, and which platforms are driving the amplification.
Continuous tracking across news, search, social platforms, and forums so you know what is developing rather than learning about it from a customer.
A prioritized action plan that separates what can be removed, what must be suppressed, and what should be answered directly rather than escalated.
Rapid development and promotion of authoritative assets that reclaim the first page for your name before the crisis coverage settles into it permanently.
We pursue takedowns where content violates platform policy, contains verifiable factual errors, or is subject to a legal remedy, and we tell you honestly where it does not.
Containment is the first phase, not the whole engagement. We stay through the rebuild so the recovery holds after the news cycle moves on.
Timeline
Speed is the variable you control. This is how a crisis engagement typically unfolds from the first call.
Hours 0 to 4
A confidential call to establish the facts, the exposure, and the immediate risks. We start monitoring while that call is still happening.
Hours 4 to 24
We map everything currently visible, project where it is heading, and deliver a prioritized containment plan with the actions that need approval first.
Days 1 to 3
Removal requests go out where there are grounds, suppression assets go into production, and monitoring escalates to real time on the highest risk channels.
Weeks 1 to 8
Sustained work to displace the damaging results, reinforce accurate information, and return your first page to something that reflects reality.
Ongoing
Continued monitoring and maintenance so a resolved crisis does not resurface the next time someone links back to the original coverage.
Search engines reward pages that accumulate links and engagement quickly. A crisis story does both. Every outlet that picks it up links back to the original, every social post drives traffic to it, and within a day or two that page has more authority for your name than anything you own.
Once that position is established, displacing it is a months long project rather than a days long one. The same work started on day one, while the story is still competing for authority instead of holding it, is dramatically more effective.
This is the single reason we prioritize crisis intake ahead of everything else. The cost of waiting a week is not a week, it is often an additional quarter of recovery work.
Not every burst of negative attention is an attack. Ordinary criticism is scattered, comes from people with a real connection to you, and fades on its own. A smear campaign has a signature: accounts that appear at roughly the same time, wording that repeats across platforms, claims that escalate rather than resolve, reviewers with no transaction history, and a push to move the story onto channels with more reach.
That distinction matters because the correct response is opposite in each case. Ordinary criticism usually calls for a measured public reply. A coordinated attack often gets worse when you engage publicly, because every response feeds the story new material and new reach. Deciding which situation you are in, before responding, is the single most valuable thing you can do in the first day.
We start every attack engagement by establishing which one it is. If the evidence points to a coordinated campaign, that also changes what is available to you: review bombing, fake accounts, and impersonation all violate platform policy in ways that ordinary negative commentary does not, which opens removal paths that would otherwise be closed.
A serious reputational event usually already involves attorneys, and often a communications team or agency. We are not a replacement for either, and we do not try to be.
Our role is the search and platform layer: what ranks, what spreads, what can be removed, and what has to be outranked. We coordinate with counsel so that nothing we publish creates a legal problem, and with communications so that public statements and search strategy point in the same direction rather than working against each other.
If you do not have counsel involved and the situation may warrant it, we will say so.
We do not remove legitimate journalism, and we do not promise that we can. Established outlets are not going to unpublish accurate reporting, and any firm claiming otherwise is selling a fiction that will cost you time you do not have.
We do not fabricate positive coverage, post fake reviews, or manufacture content designed to look like independent commentary. Beyond the ethics, it does not work: those tactics are detectable, they get penalized, and when they are discovered they become a second story worse than the first.
What we do is legitimate, durable, and defensible if anyone examines it. That is the only kind of recovery worth paying for.
We can begin assessment and monitoring today. Everything you tell us is strictly confidential, and the initial assessment costs nothing.
FAQ
A reputation crisis is any event that produces damaging content spreading faster than you can respond to it. Common triggers include negative press coverage, a lawsuit becoming public, a viral social media accusation, a leaked document, an employee or customer allegation gaining traction, or coordinated attacks across review platforms. The defining feature is velocity: ordinary reputation problems sit still, a crisis compounds while you decide what to do.
Crisis intake takes priority over all other work. We can begin assessment and monitoring the same day you contact us, and in most cases within hours. The first 24 hours are spent establishing what is visible, projecting where it is heading, and getting a containment plan in front of you for approval.
Rarely, and we will not pretend otherwise. Established news outlets do not unpublish accurate reporting. Removal becomes realistic only when an article contains verifiable factual errors, violates a publisher's own standards, or is subject to a legal remedy. In every other case the effective strategy is suppression: building and ranking stronger assets that move the article off the page where people actually look.
Containment typically shows results within the first two to four weeks. Full recovery, meaning the damaging coverage no longer occupies the results people see for your name, usually runs 3 to 6 months and can run longer when major outlets are involved. The single largest factor is how quickly work started after the story broke.
In most cases, not publicly and not immediately. Engaging directly with a coordinated attack gives it new material, new reach, and a reason for more outlets to cover it. The productive work happens elsewhere: documenting and preserving evidence, reporting policy-violating accounts and content to the platforms, correcting the record on assets you control, and building the search results that will define the story once attention moves on. If a public statement is warranted, it should come once, be accurate, and be coordinated with counsel.
Sometimes. Defamation claims require a false statement of fact, published to others, that caused harm, and public figures additionally have to prove actual malice, which is a materially higher bar. Opinion, however harsh, is generally not actionable. We are a reputation firm and not a law firm, so we do not give legal advice, but we work regularly alongside defamation counsel and can tell you whether what you are facing looks like it may warrant that conversation.
Coordinated review attacks usually violate the platform's own policies, which is what makes them removable when organic negative reviews are not. Reviews from accounts with no transaction history, clusters posted in a short window, duplicated wording, and reviews left on the wrong business all give grounds for a report. We document the pattern, file the reports with the evidence platforms actually require, and run review generation in parallel so the average recovers while the removals are being processed.
Completely. We do not disclose client identities, we do not publish case studies, and we do not reference engagements in our marketing. In a crisis this matters more than usual, because the fact that a reputation firm was retained can itself become part of the story if it gets out.
Yes, and we prefer it. Counsel handles legal exposure, communications handles public statements, and we handle what ranks and spreads online. Coordinating the three keeps a public statement from contradicting a legal position, and keeps our search work from creating a problem for either. We are comfortable operating as one workstream inside a larger response.
Get Help
If something is developing right now, call us. Crisis intake takes priority over all other work and we can begin assessment and monitoring today. Everything you tell us is strictly confidential, and the initial assessment costs nothing.
Tell us what is happening. Our US-based crisis team prioritizes these inquiries and will respond promptly and confidentially.