The shortcut everyone reaches for
You read an answer that sounds lukewarm. It says the company seems reasonable and suggests the person look at a few others. The urge is immediate: change that.
Greg Cummings and the book behind Reputation Intelligence are blunt that this is the wrong move. The summary in the book is one line.
Do not game the prompt. Build the answer.
Chapter 7 of the book Reputation Intelligence
Four responses that do not work
Writing for the machine. Stuffing pages with questions and answers, aiming at the model the way people once aimed at keywords. It treats the answer as a trick to be solved. The answer is not a trick. It is a summary of evidence, and a summary of weak evidence stays weak.
Burying the bad and flooding the good. Pushing reviews down, publishing a wall of positive articles, hunting for friendlier witnesses. The book calls this a company problem dressed up as a messaging problem. If a complaint is true, the credible response is to fix the cause.
Treating one reading as the verdict. A single answer on a single night depends on the platform, the day and the person. Rewriting your whole plan around one screenshot is how companies chase noise.
Waiting for something to go wrong. Reputation management starts after damage is visible. The search already knows your name now, on the quiet days, and a thin answer can come from missing evidence with no bad news anywhere.
What to do instead
Build the evidence the answer would need. That means putting the real proof where it can be found: customers in their own words, employees in theirs, third parties, and your own account of who you are. A weak spot in an answer is a pointer to a gap in that proof.
It also means an uncomfortable fact: a better answer requires a company worth the evidence. Greg Cummings puts the standard in one short line.
AI is the ultimate truth serum.
Greg Cummings, on a June 2026 call
His point is that a bad company cannot be made to look great, and a good one will show up as it is once the proof exists.
And the closely related disciplines
SEO, review management and reputation management each do real work. None of them is a substitute for reading the answer itself. Mixups sets them side by side.
Next For the steady alternative, see How Power100 runs it