# Online Reputation Management (ORM)

## Quick answer

Online reputation management (ORM) is the ongoing work of tracking what's said about a brand across reviews, communities, news, social and AI answers, and responding to the negative or inaccurate parts before they shape how prospects see the brand. It is a continuous practice, not a single cleanup project run once and left alone.

## Why it matters

A brand's reputation now forms across sources an in-house team rarely checks every day. A single bad thread or an inaccurate review can get summarized by an AI engine into a confident, repeated answer long after the original post stopped getting direct traffic or ranking anywhere visible. Reputation work increasingly means catching and correcting things that live somewhere other than a brand's own channels, since those are exactly the sources an AI engine or a search snippet is most likely to lift from.

## How to measure it

Track sentiment and any specific negative or inaccurate claims across a brand's monitored sources on a regular schedule, note how long a negative thread or review stays visible before getting a response, and check whether a correction, replying publicly, getting a review updated, fixing a page, actually changed how later mentions or AI answers describe the brand. A correction that never shows up in a later check hasn't worked yet, even if it felt like the right move at the time.

## Example

A one-star review complains about a bug that was fixed a while back, but the review itself is never updated, since most review sites don't let a company edit a customer's words. A new prospect asking an AI engine about the brand gets the bug mentioned as a current issue, pulled straight from that still-visible, outdated review. Replying publicly with the fix, and asking the reviewer to update their post, is the kind of action that changes what a later answer repeats.

## FAQ

### Is ORM only about getting bad reviews deleted?

No, and most review sites won't remove a genuine review anyway. ORM is more about responding publicly, fixing the underlying issue, and making sure a correction is visible wherever the original complaint lives.

### Does ORM now cover AI answers as well as search results?

Yes. An inaccurate or outdated review or thread can get folded into an AI engine's answer well after it stops showing up on the first page of search results, so ORM has to watch both.

### How often should a brand check for new reputation issues?

Often enough that a bad thread or review gets a response before it becomes the oldest, most-cited source on a topic. Daily or near-daily monitoring is typical for an active brand.

### Who should be responsible for ORM inside a company?

Usually a marketing or support lead owns the response, but the underlying fix, correcting a bug, updating a page, often sits with whichever team actually caused the original issue being discussed.

## Related terms

- /glossary/review-management
- /glossary/brand-reputation
- /glossary/competitor-analysis

## Related

- Pricing: /pricing
- Competitor monitoring use case: /use-cases/competitor-monitoring