Your reputation now lives in search and AI, not just the press

Traditional crisis PR was built for a world where a story ran for two days and then went into an archive nobody read. Deal with the press, wait it out, move on.

That world no longer exists, and a great deal of crisis advice has not caught up.

A story now has three afterlives

Search. An article published once can rank for a name indefinitely. Someone who has spent fifteen years building a career can find that a single piece is the first thing anyone sees, above their own website, their work and everything else they have done.

Social. Content circulates long after the original context has gone. Screenshots outlive corrections. A clip resurfaces years later because a platform's recommendation system decided it should. Nothing about this is chronological.

AI. This is the newest layer and the least understood. When someone asks an AI assistant about a person or a company, the answer is assembled from whatever sources the model considers authoritative. A single unbalanced article can become the summary that a journalist, an investor or an employer reads first, without them ever visiting a search results page.

Traditional PR touches none of these. A statement issued to the press does not change what ranks, what circulates or what an AI model repeats.

SEO and GEO are not the same job

Search engine optimisation determines which pages rank when someone searches a name. It is about relevance, authority, links and technical structure, and it is reasonably well understood.

Generative engine optimisation, usually shortened to GEO, is about which sources large language models draw on when they answer a question about you. These systems weight authority, structure and apparent consensus differently to a search ranking. A page can sit on the third page of Google and still be a source an AI model quotes, because it is written in a way the model finds easy to extract and treats as reliable.

The two are related but they are not interchangeable, and most agencies are not addressing the second at all. That matters more each year, because for a growing number of people the AI summary is now the first thing they read, and often the only thing.

What can actually be done

More than most people assume, and less than they hope.

Corrections and amendments. Where an article contains factual errors, publications will often correct or amend them. This is unglamorous, requires evidence, and works more often than people expect.

Removal and de-indexing. Some content can be removed at source. Some can be de-indexed so it no longer appears in search results for a name, including under the right to be forgotten in certain circumstances. Not everything qualifies, and anyone promising guaranteed removal should be treated with caution.

Displacement. Where content cannot be removed, it can frequently be pushed down by building accurate, authoritative material that ranks above it. This is slow and it works.

Platform action. Where content breaches a platform's rules, it can be reported and removed. Success rates vary enormously by platform and by category, and knowing which arguments succeed where saves a great deal of wasted effort.

AI visibility. Influencing what models retrieve and repeat means creating and structuring accurate, well-sourced material about a subject in the places these systems draw on.

How long it takes

Longer than anyone wants. Corrections can happen in days. Search results move over weeks and months. AI outputs shift as models are updated and as sources change, which is not something anyone controls directly.

Anyone offering to clear your search results in a week is selling something that does not exist.

Why this matters more than the coverage

Coverage is a moment. Search results and AI summaries are the permanent record, and they are what someone encounters when they look you up in three years to decide whether to work with you.

Most of the crisis work that genuinely changes an outcome happens in this layer, months after everyone else has stopped paying attention.

If something is following you around online, or you would like to understand what is currently there, our first call is free and confidential.