How to Own Your Narrative, Remove What Threatens It, and Protect What You've Built
My name is Frankie Lee and since 2017, I have been in the business of protecting reputations, including some of the most high-profile, high-value reputations on the planet. Not as a PR spin doctor. Not as an SEO generalist. As a specialist who understands the full ecosystem: content removal, reputation management, and strategic PR working together as one machine. Our clients range from royal families and sovereign wealth funds to seven, eight, and nine-figure founders, global recording artists, professional athletes, and some of the most recognised personal brands in the world.
This isn't about vanity. It isn't about looking good. It's about the cold commercial reality that your online presence directly determines your ability to close deals, attract talent, command premium pricing, and, when the time comes, exit your business at a number that reflects what you've actually built.
Most seven- to nine-figure business owners have spent years building something extraordinary, only to leave their online narrative completely unprotected. One press hit. One disgruntled ex-employee. One aggressive competitor. One outdated article from five years ago sitting on page one of Google. Any of these can quietly, or catastrophically, erode the brand equity you've spent years constructing.
Your Google results are your first meeting with every investor, partner, journalist, and potential acquirer. Most of the time, it's the only meeting you'll never know you had.
And increasingly, it's not just Google. Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the landscape. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini who you are, what your company does, or whether they should trust you, those systems are drawing from the same pool of indexed content. If your online footprint is weak, negative, or outdated, AI will faithfully report that narrative back to your next potential investor or acquirer.
Before you can protect, reposition, or remove, you need a clear, honest map of where you stand right now. This is the audit phase, and it is non-negotiable. Most people skip it. Most people pay for it later.
You need to audit across several layers: your personal name, your business name, the names of key staff members whose public profiles reflect on your brand, and associated terms, products, or past business ventures that a thorough researcher would be likely to surface.
Search your name and business name directly in Google. Do not search while logged in. Use a private or incognito browser to see results uninfluenced by your own browsing history. Then go through every page of results, not just the first page. Go through all ten pages.
Document every result that:
One of the most damaging, and most frequently overlooked, reputation issues we encounter is outdated pricing models surfacing in search results and AI outputs. A company quoted at £5,000 per package three years ago, now operating at £65,000, is effectively being misrepresented on every search made by a high-value prospect. AI systems like ChatGPT and Perplexity will surface and quote old pricing data with total confidence. This is not a minor inconvenience. It positions you incorrectly in every automated due-diligence process your brand is put through.
The audit does not end with Google. In 2024 and beyond, AI systems have become a primary research surface. When a prospect, investor, or journalist wants to know about you, they are increasingly going to ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini first, or using AI-powered features embedded directly in Google Search.
Run the following searches across all major AI platforms:
Record every AI output verbatim. This becomes your baseline. Any output that misrepresents your brand is a target for correction through strategic content creation, indexed correctly, so that AI systems update their understanding of your narrative over time.
You are not just managing what humans find. You are managing what machines say about you to humans who will never see the search results themselves.
Once your audit is complete and you have a clear catalogue of every piece of content that does not serve your brand, the next phase is straightforward in principle and complex in execution: remove everything that can be removed, using the right method, in the right order.
This is where most people make costly mistakes. They go directly to a website and send a complaint. They get ignored, escalate incorrectly, or tip off the publisher that they are being watched, triggering an archival or a re-publish before anything can be actioned. There is a methodology to this, and doing it out of sequence can permanently close doors.
Not all content can be removed the same way. Before pursuing any route, you must first assess which mechanism applies, and which has the highest probability of success without triggering an unwanted reaction.
If you are dealing with national or international press coverage, high-authority publications, legal-adjacent content such as arrest records or court filings, or any removal attempt that has already been rejected once: stop and engage a specialist. Escalating incorrectly after a failed attempt can entrench content permanently, trigger republication, or create a Streisand Effect that amplifies exactly what you were trying to remove. The cost of professional intervention is a fraction of the cost of getting it wrong.
Content removal solves what exists. Reputation management and PR determine what comes next. These are two distinct disciplines that need to operate in concert, and they do very different things.
Every social platform and directory that ranks on Google's first page is a piece of your narrative. If you don't own it, someone else can define it. Claim everything. Optimise everything. Ensure every indexed property reflects the brand you are building today, not the brand you were five years ago.
The cleanest, most durable way to push unfavourable content off page one is to replace it with genuinely high-authority material. Features in Forbes, Business Insider, Yahoo Finance, and equivalent publications carry domain authority that most negative content cannot compete with. This is long-game infrastructure, not short-term spin.
A Google Knowledge Panel establishes you as a verified, recognised entity in Google's understanding of the world. It signals authority, reduces the impact of any single negative result, and ensures that the first impression Google presents about you is one you have shaped. Getting this right requires a specific sequence of actions across multiple properties.
While professional reputation management is a strategic, ongoing process, there are actions you can take right now that will begin shifting your Google footprint within weeks. These are the foundations. Get them right before doing anything else.
Most people set their LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Facebook, and YouTube to private or semi-private without realising they are preventing Google from indexing them. Go into the settings of every major social profile you own and ensure that search engine indexing is enabled. These platforms carry enormous domain authority. LinkedIn in particular regularly occupies positions 1–3 for personal name searches. If Google can't see it, it can't rank it.
The following platforms carry domain authority high enough to rank consistently on the first page of Google for personal name searches. Register and fully complete a profile on every one:
Data brokers and business directories aggregate your information automatically, often incorrectly, and those listings rank. Google My Business / Google Maps is the most critical for any brand with a local or national presence. Beyond that, ensure you have claimed and corrected your entries on Yelp, Trustpilot, Companies House (UK), and any industry-specific directories relevant to your sector.
Your main website should be appearing in the top three results for your business name and ideally your personal name. If it isn't, the fundamental SEO infrastructure is broken. Ensure your website is indexed, your Google Search Console is set up and verified, your sitemap is submitted, and your key pages, particularly your About and Team pages, are keyword-optimised for your name and key terms.
A Google Knowledge Panel appears on the right-hand side of search results and establishes you as a known entity in Google's Knowledge Graph. For founders and executives operating at scale, this is not optional. The process requires having a critical mass of indexed content referencing you consistently across multiple authoritative domains, which is why the profile-building steps above are prerequisites, not alternatives.
Not every piece of unfavourable content can be removed. Press coverage, editorial pieces, and content published on major platforms with strong legal teams around them may simply not be removable in the short to medium term. This does not mean you are powerless. It means the strategy shifts from removal to displacement.
The objective is straightforward: fill the first page of Google, and the first five results of every relevant search, with content that you control, that reflects your current brand positioning, and that provides an incoming researcher with an overwhelmingly positive and authoritative first impression.
The most powerful displacement tool available is a feature in a genuinely high-authority publication. A Forbes contributor piece, a Business Insider profile, a Yahoo Finance feature: these carry domain authority in the high 90s and will routinely outrank the vast majority of negative content on page one.
The key word here is genuine. Paid-for press releases on wire services with no editorial oversight carry little to no SEO weight and will not rank for competitive searches. The publications that move the needle are those with real editorial standards, real audiences, and real domain authority, and they require either a genuine story, a respected contributor relationship, or a PR agency that has existing relationships at the editorial level.
We place clients in Forbes, Business Insider, Yahoo Finance, and equivalents specifically because these placements do the dual work of positioning and displacement simultaneously. One well-placed feature in a top-tier publication will do more for your search result landscape than six months of blog content.
In parallel with PR placement, you need a sustained output of high-quality, well-optimised owned content: thought leadership articles on your own website, interview content, podcast appearances, and video content, all properly indexed and structured so that Google recognises you as an active, authoritative entity. This is not a quick win. It is the long-game that ensures no single negative result can ever dominate your first page permanently.
The brands that are never touched by a reputation crisis are not lucky. They are protected. They built the wall before it rained.
Every seven- to nine-figure brand owner reading this is, whether they've articulated it yet or not, building toward an exit. A sale, a raise, a merger, an IPO. And in every single one of those processes, the very first thing the other side does is search your name and your company name online.
What they find in those results either validates the multiple you're asking for or quietly erodes it. Lawyers, investors, acquirers, and institutional funds all have due diligence processes that now include digital reputation assessment as a standard component. If your online profile does not match the brand you're presenting in the room, if it contradicts, confuses, or undermines your positioning, it creates friction in the deal. Friction costs money.
Beyond exits, think about protection against the unpredictable. A staff member who leaves under difficult circumstances and decides to take their grievances public. A competitor who launches a coordinated negative review campaign. A journalist working a story they've already decided the angle on. A social media moment that spirals overnight.
The brands that come through these situations unscathed are not those that react fastest. They are those that already owned their first page of Google before anything happened, so that when someone searches their name the day after the incident, what they find is fifteen years of authority content, not one bad news cycle.
The PR firm that places features in Sunday supplements cannot remove a defamatory article from a niche industry blog. The SEO agency that ranks your website for commercial keywords does not know how to deploy a GDPR erasure request against a data broker. These are different disciplines requiring different expertise and different relationships. A genuine reputation management firm operates across all three: content removal, SEO-driven reputation management, and strategic PR. If your current agency cannot do all three, you are leaving significant vulnerability on the table.
Personal name. Business name. Key staff. Associated brands. Conduct this audit across Google (all 10 pages, incognito), Bing, and every major AI platform. Document every result that misrepresents, contradicts, or undermines your brand. This is your starting inventory.
Assess each piece of unwanted content for its removal mechanism: DMCA, GDPR, defamation, direct outreach, platform policy, Google de-indexing. Execute in the correct order, with correct framing. Where professional intervention is needed, engage it early, not after a failed attempt has locked the door.
LinkedIn, YouTube, Crunchbase, Medium, Quora, Reddit, About.me, Pinterest, AngelList and beyond. Every platform that Google trusts should carry your name, your correct information, and your current brand narrative. Enable indexing. Complete every field. Link back to your main web presence.
Place high-authority PR in Forbes, Business Insider, Yahoo Finance, and sector-relevant top-tier media. Create owned content that targets your name as a keyword. Build your Google Knowledge Panel. Ensure your website ranks top three for your brand name. Stack authoritative content until nothing negative can breathe on page one.
Reputation is not a project. It is infrastructure. The brands that operate at the highest level monitor their digital footprint continuously, update their owned properties regularly, and respond to emerging threats before they compound. Build a review cadence into your operations: monthly monitoring, quarterly audits, annual strategic review with your specialist agency.
Work directly with Frankie Lee and the ContentRemoval.com team
We handle the entire system: removal, management, and PR as one integrated protection service for founders and brands operating at scale.
Enquire NowOr email us directly: team@contentremoval.com