Crisis & Reputation Glossary
The vocabulary of high-stakes reputation work.
Plain-English definitions for the crisis-management, reputation-protection, and AI-search terms our team uses. Each entry is the canonical answer to a question we get asked weekly.
Narrative Control
The strategic discipline of shaping how a story about a person, brand, or company is told across press, social media, search results, and influencer channels — particularly during a crisis.
Read the definition →Crisis Management
The discipline of containing reputational damage in the first hours and days of a high-stakes incident — through coordinated press, legal, social, and stakeholder action.
Read the definition →Reputation Management
The long-term practice of shaping how a person, brand, or institution is perceived across all public surfaces — before, during, and after specific incidents.
Read the definition →Viral Pile-On
A coordinated or organic social-media phenomenon where a single incident becomes a magnet for thousands of public criticisms, often amplified by quote-tweets, screenshots, and creator commentary.
Read the definition →Suppression SEO
Strategic search-engine work that pushes negative results off the first page of Google by promoting positive, neutral, or owned content above them.
Read the definition →Containment
The first phase of a crisis response — slowing the spread of an incident before it reaches saturation across press, social, and search.
Read the definition →Online Reputation
The aggregate impression of a person, brand, or institution generated by every public-facing digital surface — search results, social media, press coverage, Wikipedia, AI summaries, and review sites.
Read the definition →AI Reputation
The portion of a subject's online reputation that AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot) generate when summarising the subject — driven by the training-data signals the AI was exposed to.
Read the definition →Rapid Response
Crisis-management work executed inside the first hour of an incident — when the public narrative is most malleable.
Read the definition →Doxxing
The malicious public release of a private individual's identifying information — home address, phone number, family details — typically to enable harassment.
Read the definition →Deepfake
AI-generated synthetic media (video, image, or audio) designed to depict a real person saying or doing something they did not.
Read the definition →Gag Order Strategy
The legal-aligned approach to managing a public crisis when court-ordered restrictions limit what the subject can say.
Read the definition →Controlled Leak
The strategic release of information to a chosen journalist or platform on terms that benefit the subject — typically to pre-empt a hostile leak.
Read the definition →The First Hour
The first 60 minutes after a crisis breaks publicly — the most leveraged window in any reputation defence.
Read the definition →Schema Markup
Structured-data tags (typically JSON-LD) embedded on web pages that tell Google and AI engines what the page is about — used heavily in reputation work to control how a subject is summarised.
Read the definition →GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)
The discipline of optimising content so that AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini) cite a subject favourably and accurately when answering relevant queries.
Read the definition →llms.txt
A markdown file at the root of a domain that tells AI crawlers what the site is about, who runs it, and how to cite it — analogous to robots.txt for LLMs.
Read the definition →IndexNow
An open protocol, supported by Bing, Yandex and others, that lets a website notify search engines instantly when content changes — eliminating the wait for a crawl.
Read the definition →Physical Security Coordination
Reputation-incident work that crosses into protecting the principal's physical safety — increasingly common when crises trigger doxxing or threats.
Read the definition →Family Office Protection
Reputation, security, and information-management services tailored to ultra-high-net-worth families — protecting principals, heirs, and their portfolio entities together.
Read the definition →