Marko Cvijić / Reputation management
For senior business figures the first page of results is a biography written by strangers, and an AI assistant will now summarise it for anyone who asks. This is search work rather than press work - entities, authority and structured identity - and the boundaries of what I will and will not do are stated on this page before anything else.
The problem
Before an investment, a board appointment, a partnership, a major hire or a regulatory conversation, somebody types your name into a search engine - and increasingly, into a chatbot. What comes back is a summary you did not write, assembled from whatever happens to rank. For most senior business figures that summary is not false. It is thin, dated and unrepresentative: a decade-old article, a directory listing, a company you left, a photograph from a conference, and an AI-generated paragraph confidently stitched together from all of it.
For companies whose name is attached to a founder or an owner, the two searches are the same search. The person carries the company's credibility and the company carries the person's. Neither can be managed in isolation.
This is search work, not press work. The mechanism that decides what surfaces is the same mechanism I have spent fifteen years operating on the commercial side - entities, authority, structured data, and now the retrieval layer that answer engines use to summarise a person.
Boundaries
Stated first, because this field has earned its reputation and you should know where the line is before we talk.
01
No fake reviews, no fake accounts, no paid-for testimonials presented as organic. Ever, in any market, under any budget.
02
No astroturfing, no coordinated inauthentic posting, no networks of sites built to look independent while pointing at one another.
03
No attempts to suppress truthful, lawfully published reporting. If the coverage is accurate, the answer is a response and a record, not a removal campaign.
04
No attacks on competitors, critics or journalists, and no work built on discrediting a person.
05
No manipulation of a platform's ranking systems through schemes I would not describe to you in writing. Anything I build survives being explained out loud.
06
If what you need is a crisis firm, a defamation lawyer or a press office, I will say so and stop. Sometimes the right answer is legal, not technical.
What the work covers
01
What is actually there
Search surface audit
Every result on the pages that matter, for your name and its variants, across markets, languages and scripts - and separately for the company name, since the two sets rarely match.
Answer engine audit
What the major AI assistants say when asked who you are. Where they source it, what they get wrong, and which single weak page is doing most of the damage because it happens to be the most retrievable.
Entity state
Whether the search engines understand you as a distinct entity at all, or have merged you with a namesake. Knowledge panel, structured data, cross-references between profiles, and the disambiguation signals that are missing.
Gap analysis
The distance between what is findable and what is true and material: current role, actual track record, published work, real affiliations, the things a diligence process needs and cannot currently locate.
02
The part you control outright
Authoritative home
A property you own that is unambiguously the primary source on you: role, history, work, positions taken. Technically built to rank for your name and structured so that machines can read it without guessing.
Structured identity
Person and Organization schema, consistent naming across every profile, and explicit links between them so the entity resolves to one person rather than three partial ones.
Profile hygiene
The profiles that rank for a name whether you maintain them or not - professional networks, company registries, industry directories, conference and speaker pages - corrected, current and consistent.
Published point of view
Substantive work published under your name, consistently, over time. This is the only durable mechanism: it does not push anything down, it simply produces better answers than what is currently available.
03
It is a position, not a project
Earned coverage, legitimately
Real commentary, real interviews, real contributions in outlets that matter in your sector. Placed on merit, disclosed where disclosure applies.
Company and person aligned
When a business trades on a name, the two search surfaces are governed as one. Leadership pages, founder narrative and company messaging saying the same thing.
Monitoring
Ongoing watch on the result set, on mentions, and on what the answer engines report - so a change is noticed in days rather than discovered by a counterparty.
Response protocol
Agreed in advance: what warrants a response, who writes it, where it goes, and what gets deliberately ignored. Most reputational damage in this category is self-inflicted by a fast reaction.
How it runs
Step 01
What the search surface looks like now, what is driving it, and an honest statement of what can and cannot be changed. Some results are permanent and you deserve to hear that early.
Step 02
The owned property, the structured identity, the profile corrections. Unglamorous, and the thing everything else depends on.
Step 03
Substantive output under your name on a schedule you can actually sustain, plus legitimate earned coverage. Measured in months, not weeks.
Step 04
Monitoring, quarterly review of the result set and the AI answers, and a response protocol that exists before it is needed.
Fit
Founders, owners, executives and board members whose name is checked as part of a commercial process. Companies whose credibility is attached to an individual. Firms entering a market where nobody knows them and the search result is the first impression. Anyone who has looked at their own name recently and found a thin, dated or wrong summary - including one produced by an AI assistant.
There is accurate reporting you want buried. There is active litigation or a live crisis, where a lawyer and a crisis firm come first and I come after. You want results in weeks - this work compounds over quarters. Or you are unwilling to publish anything under your own name, which removes the only durable mechanism available.