How I Work on a Reputation Attack

The first conversation

The first conversation is short and mostly me asking questions: what the content is, where it sits, when it appeared, who else is involved, what has already been sent, and what would count as a good outcome. A conflict check comes first, which is why I ask you to describe the parties in general terms rather than sending material.

A meaningful share of these conversations ends with me saying there is nothing here worth paying for — when the content is true, when it is an accurate report of a public proceeding, when the operator publishes that it removes nothing, or when the sensible next call is to an attorney. Hearing that early saves the money spent finding it out slowly.

What I look at first

Two things, in this order: the content itself, and the operator's published policy, read on the day rather than from memory.

That order matters because of a mismatch that decides most of these matters. A business arrives wanting to establish that a statement is false. The operator is asking whether a written rule was broken, and does not decide who is telling the truth. A report arguing falsity answers a question nobody asked, and is refused on that basis.

So the work starts with the rule. Which policy does this content actually breach, in the operator's own words, and what route does that policy provide? Often the answer is a rule nobody expected: a review naming somebody the platform does not permit to be named, or a post that breaks a rule about accounts rather than about content. Those arguments succeed where a falsity argument fails.

What gets established before anything is sent

Nothing goes to a platform, a publisher or anybody else until the record exists, because asking is what most often destroys it. The usual sequence in a matter handled badly: business finds content, sends an angry message, content is edited or deleted, and the business now holds neither the content nor proof of what it said.

• The content is captured properly — the full page with its address visible, the source, the response headers, file hashes, and a log of how and when it was done.
• The dates are fixed — when it was posted, when it started being seen, when the business first learned of it.
• The shape of the problem is established. One item or thirty, one operator or nine, one author or a set of accounts behaving like one hand.
• The traps are checked. Some routine acts — creating an ordinary account on a platform, for instance — carry consequences later that nobody mentions at the time. Whether any of it binds a particular company is a question for its attorney.

What gets measured, and when it starts

Measurement runs alongside the rest from the first week, because the material it needs stops being available almost immediately. Search performance, analytics, sales records and ad spend get exported to dated files before anybody changes a setting, and the results page for the company's own name gets captured, logged out, on a schedule.

What comes out is a description of what happened and what else could explain it — not a loss figure. Anyone can multiply an assumed click rate by an assumed volume by an assumed conversion rate; the total is quick, impressive and invented. A business that recorded nothing beforehand has lost that comparison permanently, and I say so rather than reconstruct it.

The part you will not want to hear

Some of it does not come down. Not slowly, not expensively — at all. That is the sentence most firms in this market leave out, and it decides whether your money goes on something achievable. The clearest statement of it comes from an operator rather than from me:

“Any service or company claiming it can ‘guarantee' the removal of Glassdoor reviews for their clients should not be trusted. If a service claims it will only charge for reviews it can remove, it's important to know that no user, company or service — paid or free — can remove reviews from Glassdoor.”

— Glassdoor Help Center, “Can Paid Services Remove Glassdoor Reviews?”, updated 8 December 2025, read 12 August 2026

Note what it names: the pricing model built to look risk-free is the one the platform singles out. Other operators publish that they remove nothing, that no employee can override an automated system, and that a search engine changes only what it shows.

So no outcome is promised here, in any wording. Removal is decided by someone I do not control, and a firm speaking as though it controls that decision is either mistaken or selling. What I commit to is which route each item has, argued in the operator's terms, with an honest account of the odds.

What makes a matter cheap or expensive

Cost is driven by the facts rather than a price list, and the drivers are worth knowing before you ask anybody for a number:

• How many items, across how many operators. One review on one platform is different work from forty posts over nine services with their own rules and forms.
• Whether a route exists at all. Content with a published policy route is cheap to work; content on a site with no operator who answers is expensive and usually immovable.
• Whether the evidence still exists. Material captured in the first week costs little; material chased through third-party archives afterwards costs far more and is sometimes unrecoverable.
• What was already sent. A demand letter already fired off makes everything afterwards slower, harder and more exposed — the most common way a matter gets expensive before I see it.
• One event or a campaign. A single false statement is finite; somebody posting weekly from new accounts is an ongoing commitment and should be planned as one.

When I say no

I turn work down, and it is better for both sides that the list is public.

I will not try to remove content because it is true and unwelcome. I will not post or arrange reviews, testimonials or accounts pretending to be somebody they are not — that conduct sits inside a federal rule and turns a reputation problem into a regulatory one. I will not help identify an anonymous person in order to retaliate. And I will not give legal advice, draft a demand letter or tell you whether to sue: I am not an attorney and that boundary is not negotiable.

I also decline matters where the money is better spent elsewhere — on the parts of the search result you can influence, on fixing whatever generated the complaints, or on an attorney. Somebody who wants a promise of removal is better served hearing no from me than yes from someone else.

What you end up holding

The deliverable is a written account somebody else can check: every item found and where it sits, the operator's rule that applies to each, which items have no route and why, what has been preserved, what the numbers show and what they cannot support, and what each remaining step would involve.

Some of that is useful immediately. Some exists for the conversation that happens later, with an insurer, a board or an attorney weighing whether anything is worth bringing. And some is the answer nobody sells: that an item is not coming down, and the work available is to make it matter less.