Sentinel InsightsAn online reputation strategythat holds up.

An online reputation management strategy is a written plan for what people should find when they look you up, and the steady work that gets them there. It covers search results, reviews, press coverage, owned profiles and the answers AI assistants give about your company or your leaders.

The strategies that hold up share a simple shape: audit what’s out there, set goals you can measure, build routines for reviews and coverage, prepare for a bad day before it comes, and review the plan every month. This guide walks through each part, with the checks we use when we build a plan for a client.

Start with an audit of what people actually see

Every strategy starts with a record of the current picture. Use a private browser window, so your own search history doesn’t skew the results, and write down what you find in a shared sheet.

• Search your brand name, your brand plus “reviews” and your brand plus “complaints”.
• Search the names of your founder and senior leaders.
• Note each first-page result, who controls it and whether it’s positive, neutral or negative.
• Check your profiles on the review sites your customers use, including rating, volume and how recent the reviews are.
• Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity what they know about your company, and save the answers.

That last step is new for many teams. BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 found that 45% of consumers now use ChatGPT or other generative AI tools for local recommendations, so an out-of-date AI answer can cost you customers before they ever reach your website.

Set goals for your online reputation management strategy

Vague goals like “improve our reputation” make it impossible to tell whether the work is paying off. Pick a few signals and decide how often you’ll check them.

Keep the list short. Five goals that someone checks every month will do more for you than twenty that live in a slide deck. Give each goal an owner, too, so it’s clear who replies to reviews, who chases coverage and who updates the profiles when something changes.

Build a review routine you can keep up

Reviews are where most customers meet your reputation first, and they reward consistency more than bursts of effort. The BrightLocal survey found that 80% of consumers are likely to use a business that responds to all of its reviews, while 50% are put off by generic or templated replies.

1. Ask every real customer. Build the request into your process, such as a follow-up email after a job is finished.
2. Reply to every review. Thank people for good ones. For bad ones, acknowledge the problem, give the facts calmly and offer a way to continue the conversation offline.
3. Reply quickly. The same survey found 32% of consumers expect a reply by the following day.
4. Write each reply fresh. A line that names the specific issue reads as care. A copied paragraph reads as a script.
5. Stay inside the rules. The FTC’s rule on fake reviews bans buying reviews, undisclosed insider reviews and suppressing reviews through threats.

Regulated sectors need extra care here. Healthcare providers, law firms and financial firms have rules about what they can say in public, so check replies against those rules before posting.

Earn coverage that deserves page one

You can’t hide fair criticism, and you shouldn’t try. What you can do is earn and publish results that give searchers a fuller, more current picture. Those results tend to come from three places.

The aim is relevance. A search for your company should show what you do today, who leads it and what independent sources say about it. One strong interview in a respected trade title usually does more than a dozen thin posts on sites nobody reads.

Earned media

Interviews, expert commentary in trade titles, podcast appearances and features that quote your team. These carry the most weight with readers because someone else chose to cover you. A digital PR programme is the usual engine for this.

Owned profiles

Your website’s about and team pages, LinkedIn profiles for the company and its leaders, and industry directories. Keep the facts identical everywhere: names, dates, locations and what you do.

Leadership voice

When people search for the founder as often as the company, the founder’s own bylines and interviews matter. Founder and executive PR builds that presence on purpose, so the top results for a leader’s name are things they’d be glad to have seen.

Keep AI answers accurate

AI assistants build their answers from sources they trust, which are mostly credible publications and well-kept profiles. If those sources are thin or out of date, the answer will be too.

• Correct wrong facts at the source: your own site, your profiles and any directory listing that’s out of date.
• Publish clear pages that state what you do, who you serve and where, in plain language.
• Earn mentions in the publications assistants already cite for your field.
• Re-check the same questions every month and keep the answers on file so you can see change over time.

Our AI search visibility service handles this side of the plan for clients who need it.

Prepare for a bad day before it comes

A crisis plan written in advance saves hours when something goes wrong. It doesn’t need to be long, but it does need to be agreed.

Think through the three or four things most likely to go wrong for a business like yours: a product failure, a data issue, a complaint that goes viral, a departing executive. For each one, decide who needs to know first and what you would say in the first hour.

• Who speaks. One named spokesperson and a deputy.
• Who approves. A short chain, with legal review where the issue calls for it.
• Holding statements. Short, factual drafts for the likeliest scenarios, ready to adapt.
• Monitoring. Alerts for your brand and leaders’ names across news, social and review sites. Our guide to monitoring brand mentions covers the setup.

The best time to write a crisis statement is on a quiet Tuesday, long before anyone needs it.

Review the plan every month

Reputation changes slowly, so a monthly review is the right rhythm for most companies. Look at the goals table, note what moved and what didn’t, and decide where to spend the next month’s time. Keep one log of every piece of coverage, labelled earned, placed or paid, so nobody has to guess what came from where.

Expect some months to look flat. Search results and AI answers often move in steps, and a single piece of strong coverage can shift several signals at once. The monthly review is where you spot those steps and decide whether to double down.

If you’d like a team to build and run this plan with you, start with Sentinel’s reputation management service. Every programme begins with the audit described above.