Most Online Content Removal Attempts Fail. Here’s How to Do It Right.

By the time a prospect books a call with your sales team, they have largely made up their mind about you. Most of the buying journey now happens before anyone reaches out. Research from 6sense puts roughly 70% of the B2B process in an anonymous “selection phase” that finishes before a buyer ever contacts a vendor, and the average buyer runs about a dozen searches along the way. Increasingly, they are not just Googling, they are asking ChatGPT and Gemini who to trust.

Here is the part most marketing teams underestimate: a meaningful share of that research is aimed at your people, not just your product. When a prospect types your CEO’s name into a search bar, what they find shapes how they feel about your company before a single demo. Weber Shandwick’s long-running research pegs a CEO’s reputation at roughly 45% of a company’s overall reputation and about 44% of its market value. A separate Forrester study found that nearly three-quarters of people tie their perception of a brand to their perception of its executives.

So executive reputation is not an HR footnote or a crisis-comms problem you dust off when something breaks. It is a conversion problem, and it belongs on the CMO’s radar.

The cost of getting it wrong is concrete. When Papa John’s founder made inflammatory comments, the company shed tens of millions in market value within hours and its stock slid while a direct competitor climbed. You will rarely catch your own version of that on a dashboard. A hostile article or forum thread on the first page of an executive’s name doesn’t announce itself, it quietly removes you from shortlists you never knew you were on.

The good news: this is manageable in most circumstances. Here is the framework we recommend all of our clients follow.

1. Start with a plan and own your obvious real estate

You cannot defend ground you do not hold. Before chasing anything negative, make sure the assets you control are claimed, accurate, and active: LinkedIn profiles, the leadership page on your own site, speaker bios, Crunchbase, professional association listings. Decide who in your leadership speaks publicly and on which topics. Then set up monitoring for name-based Google Alerts at a minimum, plus a quarterly check of what AI assistants say when asked about each executive.

That last check is easy to automate. Our AI & Search Visibility tool that we offer all of our clients runs each name across Google search results, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overview, then scores what comes back, so you can see at a glance where the picture is positive, thin, or simply wrong.

This sounds basic because it is. It is also the step most companies skip, and skipping it means you improvise every time something goes wrong.

2. Build branded PR for your executives

This is the engine of a healthy executive footprint, and it sits squarely in the marketing wheelhouse. The goal is a steady stream of legitimate, authoritative content your leaders genuinely earn: bylined contributions through programs like the Forbes Business Council or the Fast Company Executive Board, expert commentary, guest essays, podcast appearances, and conference panels.

Source-request platforms used to run through HARO, but it was shut down in 2024 before being restarted by Featured and then rebranded back to Connectively in May 2026. The workable replacements today are tools like Qwoted or Connectively. The mechanics changed; the strategy did not. Get your experts quoted in the publications your buyers already read.

There is a search benefit beyond the human one. Authoritative third-party coverage is exactly the kind of source Google ranks and that large language models cite when they summarize a person. You are building the raw material those systems pull from.

3. Clean up the low-level stuff cheaply

A surprising amount of “negative” exposure is not negative content at all, it is data-broker noise. People-search sites publish home addresses, phone numbers, relatives, and estimated net worth, which is both a privacy risk and an easy target for impersonation and spoofing. You do not need a premium agency for this. Subscription services such as Incogni, DeleteMe, Optery, and Aura automate the opt-out process across hundreds of brokers for a modest monthly fee. Put your executives on one of them and treat it as basic hygiene.

4. Tackle the sticky stuff

Then there is the genuinely hard category: negative reviews, Reddit and forum threads, unflattering news coverage, litigation records, and outright defamation. These do not respond to an opt-out form. Some can be addressed directly. Factual corrections with a publisher, removals based on a platform’s own policy violations, de-indexing of content that meets legal thresholds, or resolving the underlying dispute. We publish DIY guides for most of these situations at Erase.com, and plenty of teams handle the straightforward cases themselves. For the rest, our online content removal specialists can escalate through channels you may not have access to and with 15+ years of experience.

Just remember, not everything comes down, and any process worth trusting starts by telling you that. Set expectations accordingly.

Read The CMO’s full Erase.com review here.

5. When you can’t remove it, out-publish it

When content is accurate, newsworthy, or simply immovable, suppression-by-deletion is off the table, and that is fine. The play is to out-publish it. This loops back to step two, but with a sharper target: own the first page of results for each executive’s name and shape what the AI summaries say. That means investing in genuine, indexable, authoritative content until the story people find is the fuller, accurate one. This is where an ORM partner like Erase.com and others in the space earns its keep, not by hiding anything, but by making sure the true picture is also the most visible one.

Red flags worth auditing for

Run this checklist on each executive every quarter:

• Thin, outdated, or negative results on the first page of their name.
• Wrong photos, stale bios, or impersonation and parody accounts.
• Negative reviews or threads gaining traction with no response.
• An AI assistant returning an inaccurate or unflattering summary.
• A vendor red flag: anyone promising guaranteed removal of anything, total secrecy, or anything black hat in nature. Be as skeptical of the provider as of the problem.

A cautionary tale and the Streisand effect

That last red flag matters, because the most expensive reputation mistakes come from doing this badly. In May 2026, The New York Times reported on a reputation firm hired to bury a Goldman Sachs executive’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

The plan was textbook covert suppression: manufacture favorable content engineered to push negative coverage off the first few pages of Google, with an internal target of keeping the top results overwhelmingly positive. The same firm had reportedly been paid millions to do comparable work suppressing reporting about a foreign ambassador.

It did not work. The campaign failed to hold, the executive resigned anyway, and this is the important part, the cover-up itself became national news. The attempt to make a story disappear created a far bigger story.

That is the Streisand effect: trying to suppress information draws more attention to it than the information would have attracted on its own. It is the single most common way reputation work backfires. Aggressive legal threats against a critic, mass takedown demands, or a sudden flood of obviously planted puff pieces can each convert a small problem into a permanent one, because people notice the manipulation, and the manipulation is more interesting than the original complaint.

The lesson for marketers is not “do nothing.” It is “do the legitimate things.” Remove what you have a genuine right to remove. Correct what is false. Build real authority for everything else. Tactics that depend on no one noticing are fragile by design, and when they break, they break loudly.

Where to start

Treat executive reputation like any other revenue input: measure it, budget for it, and review it on a schedule. Audit your leadership’s search results and AI summaries this quarter. Claim what you own, clean up the cheap stuff, invest in earned authority, and bring in help for the genuinely stubborn cases. The goal is simple, when a buyer looks up the people behind your brand, the picture they find should be accurate, current, and yours.

If any of this hit close to home, that's what we do. Erase.com helps businesses and executives remove what they can and build authority around what they can't.