Search your own name, or your company name, right now. Go on. What comes up on the first page is not a neutral list of facts. It is the story Google has decided to tell about you, and it is being read by every prospect, every recruiter, and every journalist before they have spoken to you directly.
Most business owners only think about this when something has already gone wrong: a court case that has long since been resolved, a disgruntled former client with a platform, a review site that ranks higher than the company website itself. By then, the instinct is usually panic, followed by an expensive agency promising to “bury” the problem within thirty days.
There is a better way to think about this, and it starts with understanding why the negative result is sitting where it is in the first place.
Why the damaging result outranks everything else
Google is not punishing you personally. A negative page ranks well for the same reasons any page ranks well:
- The domain carries more weight than yours. News publishers, regulatory bodies, court record sites, and review platforms are crawled constantly and trusted heavily. A five-year-old business website with a handful of backlinks is not competing on equal terms.
- It matches the search intent almost perfectly. If someone’s name appears in the headline, the URL, and the body copy of an article, that page is doing exactly what Google wants a result to do for a name-based search.
- People click on it and stay. Negative content tends to hold attention. That behaviour reinforces the ranking rather than weakening it.
- The rest of the search results page is thin. This is the part most people miss. The negative article is rarely an unusually strong piece of content. It is simply surrounded by weak or non-existent competition.
That last point is the one worth sitting with, because it points directly at the fix. A reputation problem is very often a content gap dressed up as a crisis.
The order of operations
There is a hierarchy here, and working through it in the wrong order wastes time and money. Start at the top and only move down when a step genuinely does not apply.
1. Ask for it to come down
This is the only step that removes the problem permanently rather than pushing it out of view. If a publisher deletes or unpublishes a page, there is nothing left to rank, monitor, or manage.
The person who can action this is rarely the journalist who wrote it. For larger publishers, look for a standards or corrections desk. For smaller sites, start with the contact page and work back through WHOIS records if needed.
A request with no evidence behind it goes nowhere. Bring something concrete: the case was dismissed, the record has since been spent under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, the information is factually outdated, or the content breaches the publisher’s own editorial policy. If outright deletion is refused, ask whether the publisher will anonymise the piece or add a noindex tag instead. A noindexed page still exists, but it disappears from search, which is the part that actually matters to your client or prospect.
Be honest with anyone you are advising on this: publisher outreach is slow, often taking weeks rather than days, and there is no guarantee of success.
2. Use Google’s own removal tools, where they genuinely apply
These tools deindex content. They do not delete it, and it is worth being upfront about that distinction with clients, because expectations set incorrectly here cause real frustration later.
- Results about you is Google’s self-service request tool, and its scope has widened considerably. It now covers home addresses, phone numbers, personal email addresses, financial and medical details, government ID numbers, and non-consensual explicit imagery, including AI-generated fakes. For anything involving exposed personal data, this is the first port of call.
- The Out-dated Content tool does not remove live pages. It forces a recrawl once something has already changed at the source, clearing stale snippets and cached versions that would otherwise linger.
- The personal content removal form covers a narrower, more manual set of circumstances, largely doxxing and non-consensual imagery hosted on third-party sites.
None of this touches content that is accurate, lawful, and simply unflattering. That is what the remaining steps are for.
3. Know your legal position, particularly if you are UK-based
This is where a UK audience has options that do not always translate directly from US-focused advice.
- Defamation. Under the Defamation Act 2013, a claim needs to show serious harm, and truth is a complete defence. Genuine opinion, clearly presented as such, is protected. Where a false statement of fact can be demonstrated, however, this becomes real leverage with both the publisher and with Google directly.
- UK GDPR and the right to erasure. Individuals can request that Google delist results that are inadequate, irrelevant, or excessive in relation to a search on their name. This sits with the Information Commissioner’s Office rather than a European regulator post-Brexit, and delisting applies to name-based searches on relevant search properties rather than removing the underlying page.
- Copyright. A DMCA-style takedown remains the fastest legal route where photography, video, or written material has been used without permission or licence.
- Court orders. Most platforms will honour a properly obtained order, though litigation has a habit of drawing more attention to the very content someone is trying to suppress. Weigh that risk before filing.
Legal routes are slower and less certain than source removal, but for genuine defamation, exposed personal data, or spent convictions, they are sometimes the only path to a permanent result.
4. Where removal is not realistic, outrank it instead
Most negative content will not come down. It is accurate, lawfully published, and hosted somewhere with no obligation to remove it. At that point, the objective changes from removal to displacement, and this is standard SEO work rather than reputation management as a separate discipline.
What actually moves the needle:
- Build a proper entity, not just a website. A domain matched to the name in question, Person or Organisation schema markup, a consistent bio across every platform, and profiles that link back to one another rather than existing in isolation.
- Claim the platforms Google already trusts. LinkedIn, Crunchbase, relevant industry directories, and trade press. A personal blog post is not going to outrank a national newspaper on its own; borrowing authority from platforms that already rank does the heavy lifting.
- Keep publishing. Google rewards freshness on name-based searches specifically. A single well-placed article fades over months. A maintained publishing cadence holds its position.
- Earn coverage rather than manufacturing it. A genuine contributed piece, interview, or press mention ranks on its own merit and strengthens the entity around it, which is worth more long term than a stack of low-quality profile pages.
This takes roughly two to six months to reshape a page one result set, and it needs upkeep. Stop the work and positions tend to drift back.
5. Do not forget AI search
This barely featured in reputation planning two years ago. It cannot be ignored now.
AI Overviews and assistants are increasingly the first answer someone gets to “is this company legitimate” or “who is [name]”, and they are synthesising an answer from across the open web, including content that may never have shown up prominently in a traditional search result.
Two things follow from that. First, source removal matters more than it used to, because content that has been deindexed from Google’s results can still be picked up by an AI system crawling the wider web, whereas content that has actually been taken down cannot. Second, thin or missing information about a business becomes an invitation for an AI system to fill the gap with whatever it can find, which is rarely the version a business would choose for itself.
A proper reputation audit in 2026 includes re-running the branded prompts a prospect might actually type into an AI assistant, on a monthly basis, and noting which sources get cited. Those citations tell you exactly where to focus the suppression work described above.
Working through it in practice
When a negative result appears, work through these questions in order rather than jumping straight to the most dramatic option:
- Can this be removed at the publisher? Try this first, always.
- Does it involve personal data or imagery that Google’s own tools cover?
- Is there a genuine legal basis, whether defamation, copyright, or a data protection right?
- If none of the above applies, this is a suppression project, not a removal one.
- Whatever the outcome, check what AI assistants are saying, not just what Google is showing.
A branded search result is not a one-off task to tick off. It is the front door to a business or a career, and it needs the same on-going attention as any other piece of marketing. The businesses that treat it that way spend far less money, far less often, than the ones who only think about it once a journalist has already called.
Graig Upton
Graig Upton is a UK SEO and Google Ads consultant with 23 years of hands-on digital marketing experience. Google certified in Ads, Analytics and Conversions, he has helped businesses ranging from local providers to national brands — including Nando's and Investors Chronicle — dominate search and scale their leads. Based in Preston, working with clients across the UK.