Brand reputation in SEO is nothing new.
When a user searches for a brand, it’s important that it can be easily found and that the related SERPs show the brand in a positive light.
For genuinely good brands, brand reputation isn’t something that needs to be a priority. However, there are negative SEO techniques that can be used to damage the reputation of even the best brands.
Given the growth of AI in search – from ChatGPT to Google’s new AI mode – new tactics of negative SEO have started to be implemented that people should be aware of.
In this guide, we’ll explore exactly what negative SEO is, how it has evolved with the introduction of AI, and how you can monitor your brand’s reputation in the new era of search.
Let’s dive right in.
What Is Negative SEO?
Negative SEO is pretty much what it says on the tin, and is where a person/company actively tries to damage your SEO to lower your rankings and get you penalized.
These attacks are almost always carried out by an offshore third party, making it next to impossible to track down the actual culprit (spoiler – it’s almost always a competitor).
The most common ways this is done are:
- Building spammy backlinks with overoptimized anchor text, which can lead to manual penalties.
- Build lots of spammy backlinks, both do-follow and no-follow, from sources like PBNs, low-quality forums, etc, to lead to an algorithmic penalty and/or manual penalty.
- Smear campaigns (more on this shortly).
We’ll go into more detail about all the types of negative SEO later in this article.
The main thing to know for now is that negative SEO is still very much a thing, and the way it is done is constantly changing.
The Official Stance On Negative SEO
According to Google, they’re quite assured that their systems can ignore negative SEO attacks quite well, especially those that use link building as the main tactic.
However, like most suggestions from Google on SEO, the actual reality is quite different.
I’ve seen many brands suffer from negative SEO attacks, and while it isn’t as prominent as it used to be, new techniques can be very effective at harming a brand’s reputation, as we will see shortly.
The Evolution Of Negative SEO
Negative SEO historically has revolved around link building, specifically building lots of spammy links with overoptimized anchor text to key pages in order to trigger a manual penalty.
These attacks used to be more powerful, and these days, they rarely have an impact if you stay on top of disavowing them.
Other common tactics (which are still used today) include:
- Website hacking – This is where website vulnerabilities are exploited to give access to the backend, which can be used for a range of negative SEO attacks like removing content, hiding links, etc.
- Link removals – This is where people reach out to websites where you are linked from and ask for the link to be removed or changed. Typically, they will act as a representative from your website.
- Content Scraping – Content scraping is where automations are used to scrape and republish your content across other websites, leading to content duplication and deranking of your content (sometimes).
- Review bombing – This is where mass low reviews are bought targeting Google Business Profiles, Trustpilot, and so on.
- Fake user building – Where fake profiles are bought that sign up to your social profiles, inflating the numbers and reducing the audience quality.
Many of these are difficult to deal with when they start to happen, especially on the website security/scraping side of things, so it’s important to have basic website security in place and monitor your reviews/followers across social media.
The New Era Of Negative SEO
With the ever-increasing popularity of AI in search, there are many black hat SEOs who have started to look for angles to abuse the new systems in order to harm a person’s or a brand’s reputation.
As Google AI overviews and AI mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other LLMs are starting to become more understood from a search point of view, it is starting to become clear that they can be influenced by content on the web.
This means a few things:
- Most LLMs rely on content that is indexed on Google or Bing, and will cite it readily if the source appears to be trustworthy (or not, in some cases).
- If you know what you’re doing, you can get certain content cited in AI for specific search terms.
You’re probably starting to see the big picture now.
Negative SEO has a new tool in its arsenal, in the form of negative press releases and guest posts. These are published en masse to damage the reputation of the target, and can be highly effective when done properly.
So, we now not only need to be on the lookout for negative SEO attacks in the form of bulk spam linkbuilding and other methods, but also negative content being published with the goal of being cited in AI.
What To Do About It
So, what should you do if someone decides to use this strategy against you/your brand?
Monitor For Brand Mentions
Obviously, you should be monitoring or at least be aware of brand mentions.
These can be linked or unlinked, so using something like Ahrefs Brand Radar can be a great place to catch both.
If you don’t use software, quickly Googling your brand name and checking the SERPs is a good way to go. Make sure you pay attention to other platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity as well, as they tend to pull information from sources outside the top ten as well.
Monitoring is only one piece of the puzzle though.
Let’s look at what you need to do to prevent this from being an issue in the first place.
Regularly Publish Positive Reviews
I highly recommend publishing positive reviews about your brand as often as you can.
Aim to publish these on niche-relevant, quality websites where the review will actually rank in Google and generate traffic. Articles like this have a much better chance of being cited in AI.
You can get creative here and publish direct brand reviews, listicles, and also target other long tail queries and position your brand in a positive light.
Another angle here is reaching out to existing reviews and asking for a refresh or a rethink of your brand’s placement in the case of listicle-style content. You do need to have a convincing reason for the webmaster to change their initial opinion, however.
Build Your Third-Party Mentions + Brand Reputation
Third-party mentions on places like Reddit and other popular forums are also very helpful to build brand reputation and trust, and are often used by AI when users search for reviews of a particular brand.
Reddit, for example, is still one of the most highly cited websites by ChatGPT, even if that has slowed down in recent months.
These can be harder to build out quickly in the case of an attack, but it is still possible with some effort.
Disavow Spam Links
Disavowing is a hot topic.
Does it actually work? Is it worth the effort?
When it comes to mass spam backlink attacks from negative SEO, I’d always recommend disavowing… Even if the tool is ancient.
I’ve recommended the same to clients and disavowed thousands of links – it’s the easiest way to directly tell Google that these links should not be associated with your site.
Just make sure you check your disavow file closely to make sure you aren’t disavowing useful links.
For Serious Cases – Reach Out To The Websites
If you notice multiple articles going live frequently, the best option is to reach out to the webmasters and ask them to take the content down.
Most reasonable webmasters will take the content down if you reiterate how harmful it is to your brand, and this can obviously be taken further depending on the actual harm done to your brand. That’s probably a bit out of the scope of this article, though, as it starts to get into the legal side of things.
A Quick Recap
Here’s a quick recap of brand reputation management in 2025 and beyond:
- Monitor for third-party brand mentions, and track your key branded keywords (especially in AI Overviews/ChatGPT/Perplexity).
- Make sure to regularly publish positive content about your brand; ideally, most of this should happen organically. Build your reviews on third-party websites, and make sure your brand reputation is positive.
- If you notice a negative SEO attack focused on publishing harmful, branded content, then reach out to the websites and ask them to remove the content. Make sure to disavow spam links, and put steps in place to maintain a solid brand reputation that is resilient against such attacks.
- Don’t forget about the classic negative SEO tactics that can be (and still are) used.
Negative SEO attacks are not super common, but if you are operating in a competitive niche it can happen more often than you would expect, so it pays dividends to be on top of brand reputation and the common methods used listed in this guide.
