Someone searches your name, finds a result they don’t like, and the first instinct is almost always the same: bury it. Build a few sites, spin up some profiles, blast out press releases, push the bad link to page two and call the problem solved. That instinct is understandable — and it’s also why so many reputation projects quietly fail six months later. The through-line in the Cory Maki reputation management approach is simple: suppression is a side effect of a strong presence, not a substitute for one.
Over a decade in reputation and search, I’ve watched the same pattern repeat. Suppression-only campaigns win a temporary shuffle of the search results page and lose the moment anything changes — an algorithm update, a news cycle, a competitor’s content, or an AI assistant that summarizes the whole topic instead of listing ten blue links. What survives all of that is earned presence: real assets, real coverage, real substance that search engines and language models can verify.
What suppression actually is (and what it isn’t)
Suppression means increasing the number of strong, relevant results for a query so that a negative result drops lower. On its own, it isn’t unethical — nobody is obligated to leave a decade-old article or a one-off complaint sitting at the top of their name. The problem is when suppression is the entire plan.
Thin suppression usually looks like this:
- A cluster of near-identical bio pages on low-quality directories
- Press releases written to rank, not to inform, syndicated across sites nobody reads
- Social profiles created and abandoned the week after launch
- Blog posts stuffed with the person’s name and little else
- Paid placements dressed up as journalism
Each of these assets is weak in isolation. Together they can temporarily outrank a single negative page because there are simply more of them. But none of them earn links, none of them get cited, none of them accumulate authority, and none of them answer a real question a real person is asking. They’re scaffolding with no building inside.
Why it breaks: three failure modes
1. Search results are not static furniture
Rankings move. A page that was pushed to position eleven can return to position four when a competing asset loses links, when Google refreshes its index, or when a news outlet republishes the story with a new date. If the only thing holding a negative result down is a stack of thin pages, it takes very little pressure to reverse. Durable results come from assets that keep earning — coverage, mentions, links, engagement — not from a one-time push.
2. AI search collapses the page entirely
This is the change most reputation plans haven’t caught up to. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews about you, there is no page one to crowd. There is a synthesized answer built from a handful of sources the model considers credible, with AI citations pointing back to them. Ten mediocre pages don’t dilute anything in that environment — the model picks the sources it trusts and ignores the rest.
What I’m seeing across AI search is that these systems are fairly good at identifying substance. Directory stubs and keyword-padded bios rarely get cited. Detailed original writing, credible media coverage, structured profiles and community discussion do. That’s the heart of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — optimizing for inclusion in generated answers rather than for a position in a list — and it has quietly made suppression-only reputation work obsolete.
3. The underlying question goes unanswered
Someone who finds a negative result about you is trying to resolve a question: Is this person credible? Is this firm safe to hire? Should I take this meeting? Hiding the result doesn’t answer the question — it just makes the search take longer. And motivated searchers, including journalists, investors and opposing counsel, are very good at looking past page one. Thin suppression wastes the opportunity to actually make the case.
Earned presence: what replaces the trick
The way I think about this: your goal isn’t to control what appears, it’s to make the accurate, useful, substantive version of you the easiest thing to find and the easiest thing to cite. That’s a construction project, not a cleanup job.
Earned presence is built from four kinds of assets:
- Owned properties. A personal or firm site you fully control, with a real bio, real depth on what you do, and content that answers the questions people actually search. This is the anchor for an owned search presence that holds page one.
- Earned coverage. Legitimate media, podcasts, industry publications, contributed writing that an editor accepted on merit. Slower than a press release blast, and worth multiples more.
- Structured third-party profiles. Platforms search engines and models already trust — professional networks, author pages, speaker bios, knowledge panels — kept current and consistent.
- Community presence. Forums and discussion platforms where practitioners actually talk. Reddit’s weight in AI search in particular has grown to the point where a thoughtful answer in the right subreddit can outperform a corporate blog post.
Notice what all four have in common: none of them can be faked at scale without degrading fast. That’s the point. Reputation is earned, not bought — and the systems that decide what to show and what to cite have gotten meaningfully better at telling the difference.
How to manage your online reputation without relying on tricks
Here’s the sequence I’d run for most executives, founders and firms. It’s the same logic behind the broader definition of what online reputation management really is: build the record, don’t just hide the gaps.
- Audit both surfaces. Run your name and your firm through Google, then through ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews. Note what each one says and, critically, which sources it cites. The citation list is your real target list.
- Fix the facts first. Inconsistent titles, outdated bios and conflicting company details confuse both crawlers and models. Consistency across properties is unglamorous and disproportionately effective.
- Publish depth, not volume. One genuinely useful 1,500-word explainer on a topic you know cold will out-earn twenty thin posts. Clarity and structure make content citable: clear headings, direct answers near the top, defined terms, specific examples.
- Pursue coverage you’d be proud to cite yourself. If you wouldn’t send the link to a prospective client, it isn’t doing reputation work.
- Address the negative result directly when it warrants it. Sometimes the right move is correction, response or context rather than burial. There’s a process for handling a negative search result the right way that doesn’t involve pretending it doesn’t exist.
- Systematize the maintenance. Monitoring, refreshes and quarterly re-audits should be scheduled, not improvised. Systems and automation are how quality scales past the first burst of effort.
The executive case
For senior leaders the stakes compound, because the search result is often the first meeting. In my work with clients — startups, law firms and public figures — the ones with durable reputations aren’t the ones who spent the most on suppression. They’re the ones with a visible body of work: talks, writing, interviews, case studies, a clear public point of view. When a negative item appears, it lands against a thick record instead of a blank page. That’s the core argument in reputation management for executives, and it applies just as well to a five-person firm as to a public company.
The same logic extends to how AI systems describe you. AI reputation management isn’t a separate discipline so much as the next surface for the same principle: models summarize the most credible available record. Thin content doesn’t make the cut. Earned material does.
The durable principle
Suppression is an outcome, not a method. When you publish genuinely useful work, earn coverage on merit, keep your owned properties current and show up where the answers are formed, negative results move down on their own — and they stay down, because the things holding them there are appreciating assets rather than disposable filler.
One thing that consistently works: stop asking how to hide the result and start asking what the searcher is actually trying to learn. Answer that better than anyone else, in public, with structure and specificity. Rankings will follow, citations will follow, and — the part most people miss — you’ll have built something worth having even on the days nobody is searching your name.