Something False Is Online About Your Business
The first question is not who wrote it or what it is worth. It is whether it can come down at all — and for a great deal of what gets posted, the honest answer is that it cannot. This site says which is which: 12 pages on where it happened and what that operator will actually do, 12 on what can be done about it, and 8 guides. Every page names something that will not work.
Glassdoor publishes this about the vendors who sell review removal: “no user, company or service — paid or free — can remove reviews from Glassdoor.” Yelp says no employee can override the software that decides which reviews are shown. Ripoff Report says it does not remove reports at all. Any quote to remove content from those three is a quote to do something the operator says is impossible.
Two questions, in this order
Where it happened decides what is possible. What you do next decides what it costs. Almost every mistake I am called in to fix came from answering the second question before the first — a demand letter sent to a platform that does not read them, a lawsuit that turned a dead page into a news story, a removal service paid in advance for an outcome no operator permits.
Where It Happened
12 pages on the platforms — reviews, social, publishers and video — each labelled with what that operator will actually do: a published policy route, a case-by-case call, or no removal route at all.
What Can Be Done
12 pages on the responses — removal, suppression, evidence and harm — each labelled with what it can achieve. Some take content down. Some change what people see. Some change nothing and build the record.
The platforms people arrive asking about
Three things that decide how this goes
These are written to be useful to a reader who never makes contact. Evidence that was not preserved before the poster deleted it, a removal request that named the wrong policy, and a search result nobody measured are the three that cost the most and are the cheapest to get right.
How each of these actually runs
In order, with the operator’s own wording quoted and the date it said so.
The eight groupings everything sits in
Review Platforms
4 pagesWhere customers, employees and competitors rate a business in public, and what each operator will actually do about a review.
Social Networks
4 pagesPosts, comments and coordinated campaigns on the networks, and the policies that decide whether any of it comes down.
Publishers and Complaint Sites
2 pagesNews reports, blogs and the sites built specifically to host complaints — the hardest category to move.
Video and Live
2 pagesUploaded video and live broadcast, where the content is heavy, the reach is fast and the record is thin.
Getting Content Removed
3 pagesThe routes that take the content itself down, and the far larger set of situations where none of them applies.
Changing What People See
3 pagesThe content stays. What a search for the business returns does not have to.
Building the Record
3 pagesPreserving what exists and establishing who did it, before either becomes impossible.
Measuring the Damage
3 pagesWhat an attack actually cost, separated from everything else that moved at the same time.
If you want me to look at it
I work with businesses and their counsel on reputation attacks involving reviews, platforms, search results and the record behind them. I am not an attorney and I do not give legal advice. Tell me what you found and where, and I will tell you what is possible before anything else.