By Nicholas Lonski
Publication Date: 2026-08-10 05:00:00
This post was sponsored by Erase. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
Picture it. A client forwards you a link and asks if you can get it taken down.
Can you remove a negative news article from Google search results?
What about a mugshot, an old court record, or a data broker page listing their home address?
The answers are different for every one of those, and getting the category wrong wastes months.
In This Article
Marketers and agencies increasingly field these requests, because reputation is now adjacent to search and clients assume whoever handles their SEO handles this too. The instinct is usually to promise suppression and start building content. Sometimes that is correct. Often there is a faster path that nobody checked for, and occasionally the content is legally removable and the client spent a year burying it instead.
The urgency is not hypothetical. BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found that 45% of consumers now use AI…
