Reputation management glossary

How to use this glossary

Definitions here are written to stand on their own, so that a single entry can be quoted without the rest of the page. Where a term has a legal meaning and a looser everyday meaning, both are given and the difference is stated, because the gap between them is where most bad advice lives.

Job titles in this field are inconsistent and none of them are licensed. Reputation manager, online reputation specialist, communications manager and public relations specialist overlap heavily. The Bureau of Labor Statistics profile for public relations specialists describes the closest recognised occupation, which is useful context when you are working out whether somebody's stated credentials mean anything at all.

Three words get used interchangeably in this category and should not be:

Term	What actually happens	Where the content ends up
Removal	The publisher or platform deletes the content at its source	Gone, unless copies exist elsewhere
Deindexing	A search engine drops the address from its results	Still live at its address, much harder to find
Suppression	Other pages outrank it	Still live, still indexed, further down the page

A

Actual malice. The standard a public figure must meet in a United States defamation claim: proof the publisher knew the statement was false, or acted with reckless disregard for whether it was true. It comes from the actual malice standard set in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, and it is the main reason public figures rarely win.

Algorithm. The ranking system a search engine or feed uses to order what it shows. Nobody outside the company knows its full contents, and a provider claiming to know it exactly is overstating.

Anonymous poster. Someone who publishes without using their real identity. Anonymity is a practical obstacle rather than a legal shield: it can sometimes be pierced inside real litigation, but not by a demand letter.

Astroturfing. Coordinated activity made to look like independent grassroots opinion, such as staff or paid writers posting reviews as ordinary customers. It breaches the published rules of every major review platform.

Autocomplete. The predicted queries a search engine offers as you type. Predictions come from real search behaviour and can be reported when they break policy. See Google Autocomplete.

B

Backlink. A link from one website to another. Links remain one of the signals search engines use to judge whether a page deserves its position.

Baseline. A dated record of what a search for your name currently returns. Every later claim of improvement is measured against it.

Blog network. A group of low-quality sites built mainly to link to each other. Used in some suppression schemes, and treated by search engines as manipulation.

Brand reputation. What a market collectively believes about a company, as distinct from what the company says about itself. See brand reputation.

Brand sentiment. Whether the language people use about a brand is positive, negative, or neutral, usually scored in aggregate rather than sentence by sentence. See brand sentiment.

Branded search. Any query containing a name: a person, a company, or a company plus a word such as reviews, complaints, or scam.

C

CCPA. The California Consumer Privacy Act, which gives California residents rights to know what personal information a business holds about them and to request its deletion.

Cease and desist letter. A written demand that somebody stop a specified activity, sent before or instead of litigation. It carries no force by itself. See cease and desist letters.

Content removal. Deletion of material at its source by whoever controls it: a platform, a publisher, or the original author.

Correction. A change to published material that fixes an error while leaving the item in place. Usually easier to obtain than removal, and often the better outcome.

Counter-notice. The reply a person whose content was removed under a copyright notice can file to assert that the material was not infringing. It restores the content unless the claimant sues.

Crawler. The automated program a search engine uses to fetch pages. A page a crawler cannot reach cannot rank.

Crisis communication. The messaging discipline used while an incident is live: who speaks, through which channel, and what is said. See crisis communication.

Crisis management. The wider operational response to an incident, of which communication is one part. See crisis management.

D

Data broker. A company that collects personal information from public and commercial sources and sells or publishes profiles built from it. Most offer an opt-out. See data broker opt-outs.

Defamation. A false statement of fact, published to a third party, that harms someone's reputation. Opinion and true statements are not defamation. See defamation of character.

Defamation per se. A category of statement treated as so obviously damaging that harm does not have to be proved separately. The categories vary by state.

Deindexing. Removing an address from a search engine's index so it stops appearing in results. The page still exists where it always was; only its findability changes. See deindexing.

Delisting. Used interchangeably with deindexing, and specifically for the European right-to-be-forgotten process in which links are dropped from results for a person's name.

Digital footprint. The total record of your activity online, both what you posted and what was recorded about you by others. See digital footprint.

DMCA takedown. A notice under the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act asking a host or search engine to remove material that infringes your copyright. See DMCA takedowns.

Domain authority. A third-party score estimating how likely a domain is to rank. It is a vendor metric, not a search engine one, and search engines do not use it.

Doxxing. Publishing someone's private identifying information, such as a home address or phone number, without consent. It breaches the published policies of every major platform.

E

Earned media. Coverage you did not pay for and do not control: news articles, reviews, mentions, and posts by other people.

E-E-A-T. Google's shorthand for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, used in its guidelines for human quality raters. It describes what the system tries to reward, not a score you can look up.

Entity. A person, organisation, or thing that a search engine treats as a distinct item with attributes, rather than as a string of characters. Reputation work is largely entity work.

Expungement. A court process that seals or erases a criminal record. It changes the official record. It does not delete news coverage of the case or private database copies of it.

F

Fake review. A review written by somebody with no genuine customer experience, whether positive or negative. Reportable on every major platform. See reporting a fake Google review.

Featured snippet. The extracted answer a search engine displays above the standard results. Whichever page it is pulled from effectively speaks for that query.

First Amendment. The United States constitutional protection for speech. It restrains government action, not private platforms, which is why a platform may remove content freely.

FTC Review Rule. The Federal Trade Commission rule addressing fake reviews and testimonials, review suppression, and undisclosed insider reviews. See the FTC review rule.

G

GDPR. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, which governs how personal data about people in the EU may be handled. See GDPR Article 17.

Generative engine optimization. The practice of shaping how AI answer systems describe a person or business. See generative engine optimization.

Google Business Profile. The free listing a business manages that produces its map result, hours, photos, and review stream.

Grounding. The step in which an AI system retrieves live sources before answering, instead of relying only on what it absorbed in training. Ungrounded answers are the ones that go stale.

Results about you. Google's own tool for requesting removal of results containing your personal contact details, and for monitoring when new ones appear. See Google Results about you.

H

Hallucination. A confident, fluent, false statement produced by a language model. It is a property of how the system generates text, not a mistake it can be argued out of. See how AI answers are built.

Host. The company whose servers a website sits on. Some removal routes reach the host directly when the site owner does not respond.

I

Impersonation. Presenting yourself as somebody else online. Prohibited by platform policy and, in many contexts, unlawful. It is also a tactic some disreputable providers use, and it is never legitimate.

Index. The searchable database a search engine builds from the pages it has crawled. Being indexed and being ranked are different things.

Injunction. A court order requiring somebody to do or stop doing something. In this field it is usually sought against an author rather than a platform.

Interactive computer service. The statutory term for the intermediaries protected by Section 230: search engines, review sites, social networks, forums, and hosts.

Issues management. The practice of tracking slow-moving problems before they turn into incidents. See issues management.

J

Judgment. A court's final decision in a case. A defamation judgment against an author does not by itself require a platform to remove the content.

K

Knowledge panel. The information box a search engine shows beside results for an entity it recognises. See knowledge panels.

L

Libel. Defamation in fixed form: written, printed, or published online. Nearly all online defamation is libel. See libel and slander compared.

Link building. Acquiring links to a page in order to improve its position. Legitimate when the link is earned, a policy violation when it is bought or manufactured at scale.

LLM visibility. How often, and how accurately, a person or business appears in the answers of large language model assistants. See LLM visibility.

Local pack. The map result with three business listings that appears for local searches. It is often the first thing a searcher sees about a local business.

M

Moderation. The enforcement of a platform's content rules by its own staff or systems. Most removals in practice are moderation decisions, not legal ones.

Monitoring. Watching for new mentions across search, reviews, social platforms, news, and AI answers. See reputation monitoring.

Mugshot site. A website that republishes police booking photographs, often charging for removal. Several jurisdictions restrict the practice. See removing a mugshot.

N

Negative SEO. Deliberately attacking somebody else's search visibility, for example with spam links or false copyright complaints. It is a policy violation and can be unlawful.

Net promoter score. A single-question survey metric: the share of promoters minus the share of detractors. See net promoter score.

Noindex. An instruction in a page's code telling search engines not to include it in results. It works only if the page owner sets it.

Notice and takedown. The general pattern for content removal: an affected person or rights holder files a notice, the intermediary acts, and the poster may respond.

O

Online reputation management. Reputation management applied to what search engines, review platforms, social networks, and AI systems return. See online reputation management.

Opt-out. A request to a data broker to remove your profile. Most publish a process, and many require it to be repeated periodically.

Organic result. A standard, unpaid search result, as distinct from an advertisement.

Owned media. Channels you control: your website, your profiles, your email list. The raw material of suppression.

P

Paid media. Advertising. Useful for occupying space at the top of a results page, and it stops the moment you stop paying.

Personally identifiable information. Data that identifies a specific person, such as a home address, phone number, or government identifier. Several removal routes exist specifically for it.

Platform policy. The published rules a site enforces about what may be posted. The fastest removal route, and the one that costs nothing.

Press release. A statement issued to media outlets. It creates a page you control, which is why it is sometimes used in building work as well as in public relations.

Public figure. Somebody who has assumed prominence or entered a public controversy. Public figures must meet the actual malice standard to win a defamation claim.

Public record. Information a government body publishes or makes available, including court filings, property records, and licensing data. Rarely removable, sometimes correctable.

Q

Query. The words typed into a search box. Reputation work targets a small and predictable set of them, mostly names.

R

Reputation audit. A structured review of what is currently published about a person or business, classified by what can be removed, what can be corrected, and what can only be suppressed. See reputation audits.

Reputation manager. The person responsible for the work described in this glossary. The title is unregulated, so what it means in practice varies between an in-house communications role and an external specialist. See what a reputation manager does.

Reputation score. A single number some tools publish to summarise reputation. Every tool uses a different method, so the number means nothing without the formula beside it. See online reputation scores.

Reputational risk. The exposure an organisation carries to events that could damage how it is regarded. See reputational risk.

Retraction. A publisher's formal withdrawal or correction of something it published. Usually a better outcome than removal, because it is itself on the record.

Review gating. Filtering customers so that only the satisfied ones are invited to leave a public review. Prohibited by major platforms and addressed by the FTC rule. See review gating.

Right to be forgotten. The European right to have search results for your name delisted in defined circumstances. See the right to be forgotten.

Robots.txt. A file telling crawlers which parts of a site not to fetch. It does not remove a page, and it does not reliably keep one out of results.

S

Schema markup. Structured code added to a page that tells search engines what the page is about and which entity it refers to.

Search suppression. Improving the position of accurate pages until an unwanted result falls out of view. See search suppression.

Section 230. The United States statute providing that a service is not treated as the publisher of what its users post. See Section 230.

Sentiment analysis. Automated classification of text as positive, negative, or neutral. Useful in aggregate, unreliable on any single sentence. See sentiment analysis.

SERP. Search engine results page. The specific page of results returned for one query.

Share of voice. Your share of the total conversation or coverage within a defined category and period. See share of voice.

Slander. Defamation in spoken form. Rare online, and frequently confused with libel.

Stakeholder management. Identifying the groups an organisation answers to and maintaining the relationships with each. See stakeholder management.

Streisand effect. The pattern in which trying to suppress information causes it to spread further than it otherwise would.

Subpoena. A legal demand for information, sometimes used inside litigation to identify an anonymous poster. It requires a filed case, not just a lawyer's letter.

T

Takedown. Any request that content be removed. The word is used loosely, and the specific mechanism behind it matters far more than the word does.

Testimonial. An endorsement presented as a customer's own experience. Fabricated or undisclosed testimonials are an advertising violation, not a grey area.

Trust and safety. The team inside a platform that writes and enforces content policy. It, rather than a legal department, decides most removals.

Truth defence. The complete answer to a defamation claim in the United States: a statement that is substantially true cannot be defamatory, however damaging it is.

U

URL removal tool. A search engine feature that temporarily hides a page from results, normally available only to the verified owner of the site.

User-generated content. Anything posted by users rather than by the site operator: reviews, comments, forum threads, uploads. Most reputation problems live here.

V

Verification. Proving to a platform that you are who you say you are, or that you control a business listing. It is the precondition for most self-service controls.

W

Wayback Machine. A public archive that stores copies of web pages over time. Removal at the source does not remove an archived copy.

White hat. Tactics that comply with published platform rules. The opposite, black hat, describes tactics that do not, and that carry the risk of losing the visibility they were meant to build.

Z

Zero-click search. A search where the answer appears on the results page and the searcher never visits a site. It raises the stakes on what the results page itself says about you.

If you cannot find the word for it

The commonest situation is knowing exactly what happened and having no idea what it is called. If that is you, start from the thing itself. Content that breaks a rule is a policy complaint. Content that is wrong is a correction. Content that is lawful and true is a suppression problem. Content about a person's private details usually has a dedicated route of its own.

Sorting your own situation into one of those four is what a reputation audit does first, and it is the step that decides everything after it.