The Job That Sees It: The Reputation Fixer

Part 13 of 14 in the series The Job That Sees It. See every installment →

The Million Dollar Question: In June 2025 a public relations firm filed its agreement with a national tourism ministry at the US Justice Department. On the registration form, it described its own work under seven headings; two of them were “Crisis Communications” and “Reputation Management.” The monthly retainer in the attached contract was how much?

1. A $5,500
2. B $18,000
3. C $55,000
4. D $220,000

Read on for the answer.

Start with the number a reader came for, and then with the reason it is not one number.

The firms that sell reputation management publish ranges. The widest, from NetReputation, is “$500 to $50,000+ per month,” with one-off crisis work priced separately at $8,500 to $25,000 or more. At the software end, Reputation.com publishes its own price list: $80 per location per month for its core product, $115 with its analytics add-on, $150 with surveys, and “Custom Pricing” above that. At the other end, a strategic communications firm’s disclosed retainer for a month of intensive work on one event ran to $750,000.

So the honest answer to what does reputation management cost spans nearly four orders of magnitude, and the spread is the finding. The two ends are not one service at different scales. One is software that watches review sites; the other is a team of people whose job is to make a story smaller. Almost nobody in the first category will say where their numbers come from, and what makes the second legible at all is an accident of law: when the client is a foreign government, the contract has to be filed.

Reputation management cost: the published ranges, and why they fight each other

Four pricing pages, read on 10 November 2026. None discloses a sample size or a method.

Read them side by side and the cracks are immediate. NetReputation says in its introduction that do-it-yourself software costs “less than $100 per month,” and in a table a few screens later that the same category runs $0 to $500. Its “Individual/Personal Brand” and “Small Business” bands are the identical $500–$2,500. To its credit, the page says plainly that the figures “reflect published industry ranges as of 2026” and “are not NetReputation pricing” — a disclaimer that is more honest than most, and that also means the page is not evidence of what anyone charges.

Praising.ai contradicts itself more sharply. Its comparison table tops agency pricing out at $15,000 or more a month; its own frequently-asked-questions section, on the same page, puts large enterprises at $10,000 to $50,000 or more. Mid-market is $1,500–$5,000 in the body and $2,000–$8,000 in the FAQ. Both numbers cannot be the measurement. Neither is sourced.

PrivacyOn’s page states the problem and then does it anyway: Reputation Defender, it says, “does not publish prices publicly” — and then lists seven annual tiers from roughly $1,000 to roughly $25,000, each prefixed “approximately,” drawn from unnamed “vendor comparisons published throughout 2026,” with quoted prices said to vary by 10 to 20 per cent. That is not a price list but a reconstruction of one, by a competitor.

Only the Reputation.com page is a price in the ordinary sense: a seller, publishing what it charges, in public, where a customer can hold it to the figure. And it prices a software subscription per business location, which is a different product from a person trying to move one search result.

The answer is C: $55,000 a month, and the word “reputation” appears once

On 5 June 2025, Finn Partners, Inc. filed an Exhibit B with the Justice Department’s FARA unit, disclosing a two-year agreement with The Bahamas Ministry of Tourism, Investments & Aviation running from 1 June 2025 to 31 May 2027. The agreement specifies “A monthly fee retainer of $55,000 ($50,000 for the US market and $5,000 for the Canada market).”

The seven headings belong to the registration form, not to the contract, and the distinction turns out to be the most useful thing in the document. Asked by Item 9 of the FARA form to describe its activities, the firm wrote: media relations and publicity; press trips for travel media; special events and activations; influencer engagement; crisis communications; reputation management; and partnerships and promotions. Two of those seven are the subject of this post.

Turn to the attached contract and they thin out. The US scope runs to nineteen bullets, of which crisis work is one — bullet seventeen, “Crisis Communications and Mitigation.” The Canadian scope runs to thirteen, with one crisis line. And the phrase “Reputation Management” appears exactly once in the entire filing, in that Item 9 answer, and never in the agreement the parties actually signed.

In the one reputation engagement a member of the public can read end to end, then, reputation management is how the firm describes the relationship to a regulator. It is not a line anybody priced.

The rest of the economics are there too, in the terms nobody quotes:

• An out-of-pocket expense budget for the 2025–26 fiscal year that, in the contract’s words, “shall not exceed $150,000” without the client’s advance approval — worth roughly 23 per cent of a full year’s fees, though the budget covers a fiscal year and the contract begins partway into one, so the two are not quite like for like.
• A mandatory charge of 5 per cent of fees for “Database and Subscriptions Services.”
• A 10 per cent markup on expenses the agency handles itself, with the option for the client to be billed directly on anything over $500.
• 12 per cent annual interest on invoices past 45 days, and a right to stop work if more than $40,000 goes unpaid for over 60 days.
• Sixty days’ notice to terminate, with the monthly retainer still due in each month of the notice period.

And one clause that suggests how crisis work is actually sold. The Bahamas scope says the agency “will provide crisis counsel and management,” and then, for a major crisis requiring significant resources, that the firm “will flag and determine together with the BMOTIA appropriate agency costs for these services.” Read structurally — and this is a reading of one contract, not a market survey — the retainer buys the relationship and the standing capacity, and the event itself gets costed when it arrives.

If that structure is common, it would explain why the published ranges are so wide: a retainer with a crisis clause in it is a different object from a price for a crisis, and only the first can be quoted in advance.

The only communications contracts you can read were filed under FARA

The Foreign Agents Registration Act does something no market discipline has managed: it forces communications firms to file their contracts, their fees and their receipts. The result is a small, strange public library of what this work costs when the buyer is a state rather than a person. The Finn Partners filing is the lower end of it; the upper end, for now, is Teneo Strategy LLC’s amended agreement with the COP29 Azerbaijan Operations Company, filed 22 November 2024. For the month from 25 October to 25 November 2024, the filing states, “the foreign principal will pay the registrant a total of $750,000 for the aforementioned time period, plus certain expenses.” The amendment’s own wording is that “the Monthly Retainer shall increase to US$750,000” during what it calls the Additional Staff Term, with a travel cap raised to $172,000. A separate “Event Visibility” workstream carried “a monthly fee of US$100,000” for September and October.

What that month’s $750,000 bought was people and hours: additional on-site coverage in Baku rising to roughly fifteen staff, among them an “International Media Relations Lead,” two “International Media Relations Managers,” “Social Media Content Writer(s),” a “Speech/content Writer” and an “Issues Management Lead.” The services are described as providing “counsel and assistance to the foreign principal on communications matters” and engaging “in communications with members of the U.S. media”: tailored pitching to selected trade outlets, and media briefings individually or in groups.

The same registry holds larger numbers that are harder to interpret, and the difficulty is worth naming rather than glossing. DCI Group AZ, LLC’s supplemental statement for the six months to 31 March 2026 reports total receipts of $6,351,325.00 and disbursements of $2,245,785.60, including a single $4,500,000 retainer line recorded for the “Republic of Nigeria through Aster Legal” and $1,500,000 across seven retainer payments for Myanmar’s Ministry of Information. The firm’s own activity descriptions run to “public affairs services” for Myanmar and “communications efforts” for the Republic of Srpska; for Nigeria it describes “communicating its actions.” But FARA receipts are labelled “Retainer,” and the form does not require a firm to attribute a dollar to a service. Those figures tell you what a sovereign paid a communications firm. They do not tell you what reputation management cost.

Smaller registrants show the same work lower down, in two separate contracts GlobalPoint International filed together on 18 September 2026. One, for a Kenyan-registered media company, prices “strategic counsel, media relations and government affairs services” at $80,000 per three-month period, with a “$1000 (One Thousand) USD per a person” daily travel rate and vendor costs at “cost plus the industry standard mark up (17.65%).” The other, for an American aerospace subsidiary, prices “strategic counsel, media relations and outreach services” at $180,000 for 1 May to 31 October 2026 plus “an additional sum of up to $100,000” against receipted expenses — and bills that client’s vendor costs at cost, with no markup. The first states its total as “$160,000.00 (One Hundred and Eighty Thousand) USD,” numerals and words disagreeing, a reminder that a filed document is a primary source and not a correct one.

What the people doing the work are paid

Having read the sell side, read the pay side; the gap between them is the business. The US federal government has no occupation called reputation fixer, crisis manager or fixer of any kind. The work sits inside two public relations codes.

Medians, employment and the 10th and 90th percentiles are from the two linked BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook pages, carrying May 2025 wage data. The 25th and 75th percentiles come from O*NET’s national wage pages for 27-3031 and 11-2032, which cite the same BLS 2025 wage data; the Handbook does not publish those two columns.

Set the Finn Partners retainer against that table. $55,000 a month is $660,000 a year — this piece’s arithmetic, and a fee rather than a payroll, since it covers a team, overheads and margin. It is nonetheless about 4.5 times the May 2025 median public relations manager’s salary, and more than twice that occupation’s 90th percentile. The Teneo arrangement, at $750,000 for a single month, is roughly 5.1 times what the median manager earns in a year, for thirty-one days of fifteen people’s time.

Two things in that table are easy to misread. The first is that neither headline figure is a mean. BLS publishes means, but its per-occupation OEWS profiles now live in an application at data.bls.gov whose host disallows automated retrieval, so the figures here come from the Occupational Outlook Handbook and ONET — both carrying May 2025 wage data — and the averages are simply absent. ONET compounds this by printing “Workers on average earn $146,910” above a column labelled median; it is the median, and the word “average” there is the website’s, not the survey’s.

The second is the industry split. Among specialists, the best-paying industry by median is not the agency business but government, at $81,350, against $77,480 in advertising and public relations services; among managers, the May 2025 top two are management of companies at $171,250 and professional, scientific and technical services at $169,030. Nothing in the federal data isolates crisis work, because the survey classifies people by occupation and employer, not by what they were doing last Tuesday.

Making a story smaller is a different trade from telling one

Everything above is publicity: getting things said. The other half of the job is getting things unsaid, and it has its own mechanics and, since 2024, its own federal rule. The mechanics rest on one policy. Google’s own guidance on court orders says that if a court “has ruled that web pages in Google’s search results or content in a Google product is unlawful,” the order can be submitted for review, and that Google “may voluntarily remove the content from our services if the order identifies specific URLs” and “indicates that the content violates the law.” The requester must supply a copy of the order, the URL of each page, the exact offending text, and the operative section of the order. One sentence does the load-bearing work: “Please note that we accept only valid court orders signed by a judge.”

Valid and signed by a judge is a test of the document, not of the case behind it, and in 2016 that gap became a business model. Public Citizen’s Paul Alan Levy and the law professor Eugene Volokh identified about twenty-five lawsuits with the same suspicious shape: a plaintiff sues over a negative post, a defendant immediately consents to an injunction declaring the post defamatory, and the injunction goes to Google. Of the fifteen that listed an address for the defendant, a private investigator hired by Volokh could not find a single one of the ostensible defendants at the ostensible address.

The reputation-management operator at the centre of the cases, Richart Ruddie, and his companies agreed in March 2017 to pay $71,000 to settle a claim brought by Myvesta, whose posts had been targeted — a sum reflecting Myvesta’s damages and Public Citizen’s litigation time — and to vacate the orders in three other cases. A Rhode Island federal court had already vacated one consent judgment for “fraud on the Court” and sent the file to the US Attorney. The contemporaneous report describes Ruddie as then in plea negotiations with that office; this piece does not know how that concluded, and nothing here should be read as a statement that it ended in a conviction. A separate claim in the same cluster, by a dentist who says a firm filed suit in his name and forged his signature, is an allegation on the public record, not a finding.

Techdirt reported at the time that the firm’s services “start at $6,000.” The source does not say what that figure buys, and it should not be read as a price for the litigation route.

The lawful version of the same impulse is narrower than people expect. Google’s policy on removing private information from Search covers contact details, government identification and bank or card numbers, images of a signature or ID, medical records, credentials and doxxing content. It does not reach a story for being unflattering: “if the content is about something important or newsworthy, like the news, Google might not take it down.” And removal reaches results only — “Google can only remove things from Google Search results,” while the page stays where it is.

The law now prices suppression

Two federal instruments now sit on the suppression side of the trade. The FTC’s Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, 16 CFR Part 465, took effect on 21 October 2024. Its § 465.7 covers review suppression, and the Commission’s own summary of the rule describes it as prohibiting a business from using “unfounded or groundless legal threats, physical threats, intimidation, or certain false public accusations” to prevent or remove a negative review, and from misrepresenting that displayed reviews are all or most of those submitted “when reviews have been suppressed based upon their ratings or negative sentiment.” A separate section, § 465.5, reaches insider reviews that fail to disclose a material connection. During the rulemaking the Commission narrowed its own standard from “unjustified” legal threats to “unfounded or groundless” ones — a tighter test, deliberately chosen.

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The penalty attaches through the FTC Act. 16 CFR 1.98 sets the maximum civil penalty under sections 5(l) and 5(m) at $53,088 per violation, as adjusted for inflation in January 2025 and applicable to penalties assessed after the 17th of that month. The Commission adjusts the figure annually, so a reader checking later should expect it to have moved.

Older and blunter is the Consumer Review Fairness Act, 15 U.S.C. § 45b, enacted in December 2016, which makes a provision of a form contract “void from the inception of such contract” where it restricts a customer’s ability to review a business, penalises them for doing so, or demands the copyright in what they write — and provides that “it shall be unlawful for a person to offer a form contract containing a provision described as void in subsection (b).” State attorneys general may sue over it “as parens patriae.” The statute names no dollar figure of its own; it borrows the FTC Act’s.

What people get wrong

That there is a price for crisis PR. The one contract here that spells out the mechanism prices standing capacity and leaves the event open: for a major crisis, the Bahamas scope says the firm “will flag and determine together with the BMOTIA appropriate agency costs for these services.” On that structure, a published figure for “crisis management” is a quote for a retainer with a crisis clause in it, not a quote for a crisis. Whether every engagement works that way, no public source shows.

That the big numbers in the FARA registry are reputation budgets. They are receipts labelled “Retainer.” The form does not require a firm to say which dollar bought which service, and a $4,500,000 line for a sovereign client covers advocacy, events, travel, subcontractors and media work in proportions the filing does not disclose. The only figures here that come with a scope of work attached are the ones where the contract itself lists the services — Finn Partners’ $55,000 a month, Teneo’s $750,000 month — and even those bundle crisis work in with publicity, events and travel.

That “deleted from Google” means deleted. Google removes URLs from its index. The page survives, as do other search engines, archives and the original publisher. The court-order route is not Google adjudicating the truth of a story; it is Google checking that a judge signed something, which is precisely the gap the fake-defendant cases walked through.

That suppression is cheaper than publicity. The reported starting price for the firm’s services was $6,000. The cost of the delisting cases, once they unravelled, included a $71,000 settlement, four vacated orders, a judicial finding of fraud on the court and a referral to a US Attorney — all of it on the public record, permanently. Making a story smaller carries a tail risk that making a story is largely free of.

That the pay matches the billing. The median public relations manager earned $146,910 in May 2025, on BLS figures. The retainer on one mid-size national tourism account is about four and a half times that, annually, for a team. The margin is not the point; the point is that the person in the room when the story breaks is, by federal wage data, a six-figure professional, not the owner of the fee.

Bottom line

Reputation management costs $80 a month if what you want is software that watches review sites, and it costs $55,000 a month if what you want is a firm that knows your file before anything happens, with the crisis itself billed when it comes. Between them lies a market that publishes ranges it cannot source and contradicts itself inside a single page, because almost nobody in it has to disclose anything.

The exceptions are instructive about what disclosure does. When a communications firm takes a foreign principal, the contract is filed, and you can read the retainer, the expense cap, the markup on vendors and the interest rate on a late invoice. When the method is forged litigation, the court file is public, and you can read the price of entry and the cost of being caught. When the worker is an employee, the federal wage survey counts them, and you can read the median. Everywhere else — which is to say, in almost every private engagement a wealthy individual actually signs — there is no filing, no docket and no survey, and the number is whatever the two parties agreed not to mention.

That is not incidental to the trade. A reputation fixer sells discretion, and a published price list is a disclosure — which is the thing the product exists to prevent.

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Methods and sources.

Federal wage data. All wage figures are May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics wage data, read on 10 November 2026. A retrieval note, because it limits what this piece can say: the data.bls.gov OEWS profile application, which carries the mean wages, employment counts and relative standard errors, is disallowed to automated retrieval by that host’s robots.txt and was not read; the static bls.gov/oes/current/ and bls.gov/oes/2025/may/ per-occupation URLs now return the generic OEWS index rather than occupation tables; and the May 2025 national bulk file was not opened. This piece states no mean wage of its own for either occupation, because none was obtained; the only “average” in the text is a quotation of O*NET’s own mislabelling, corrected in the same sentence. The medians, percentiles and employment counts for Public Relations Specialists (SOC 27-3031) come from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook page (median $74,750 in May 2025; about 314,500 jobs in 2025) and from O*NET’s national wages page for 27-3031, which cites BLS 2025 wage data (annual 10th $44,110, 25th $56,260, 50th $74,750, 75th $100,370, 90th $135,150; hourly median $35.94). Those for Public Relations Managers (SOC 11-2032) come from the Occupational Outlook Handbook (median $146,910; 10th $82,410; 90th $284,990; 80,800 jobs in 2025) and O*NET (25th $106,580, 75th $204,520; hourly median $70.63). O*NET’s phrasing “Workers on average earn $146,910” reproduces the median, not a mean, and is treated as the median here. The Handbook’s Quick Facts figure of $136,470 is for the combined public relations and fundraising managers group (11-2030) and is deliberately not used as an 11-2032 figure. Industry medians ($81,350 government and $77,480 advertising and public relations services for specialists; $171,250 management of companies and $169,030 professional, scientific and technical services for managers) are the Handbook’s May 2025 figures. Nothing here claims that any individual counted in these occupations does crisis or reputation work; the federal survey classifies by occupation and employer and does not isolate that activity.

FARA filings. All four were read in full on the Justice Department’s e-file system. Finn Partners, Inc. (registration 6212), Exhibit B received 5 June 2025, foreign principal The Bahamas Ministry of Tourism, Investments & Aviation, contract dated 1 June 2025 for a term to 31 May 2027: the $55,000 monthly retainer and its $50,000/$5,000 US-Canada split, the $150,000 fiscal-year out-of-pocket cap, the 5 per cent database-and-subscriptions charge, the 10 per cent expense markup and $500 direct-billing threshold, the 12 per cent annual interest after 45 days, the $40,000-for-60-days stop-work right, the 60-day notice with retainer still payable, and the crisis-counsel language are all verbatim or exact from that filing. The seven service headings are the registrant’s answer to Item 9 of the Exhibit B registration form, which asks it to describe its activities; they are not contract terms. The attached contract’s own scope runs to nineteen US bullets, of which bullet 17 is “Crisis Communications and Mitigation,” and thirteen Canadian bullets with one crisis line; the phrase “Reputation Management” occurs once in the whole document, in that Item 9 answer, and nowhere in the agreement. The quoted expense language “shall not exceed $150,000” is the contract’s; the advance-approval condition continues in a separate clause and is paraphrased rather than quoted inside the same sentence. The “will flag and determine together with the BMOTIA appropriate agency costs” language is verbatim; the characterisation of the retainer as buying standing capacity, with the event costed later, is this piece’s reading of that clause and is flagged as such in the text. The filing states no hourly rate; out-of-scope work is to be billed “either on an hourly basis or at a set amount agreed to by both Agency and Client,” with no rate given. Teneo Strategy LLC (6698), Exhibit B received 22 November 2024, foreign principal named in Item 3 as the COP29 Azerbaijan Operations Company (the attached amendment says Operating Company) and contract dated 28 October 2024: the $750,000 total for 25 October to 25 November 2024, the amendment’s “Monthly Retainer shall increase to US$750,000,” the additional $100,000 monthly fee for September and October 2024 event-visibility work, the $172,000 travel cap, the quoted staffing titles and the approximately fifteen on-site staff are verbatim or exact. The $750,000 is the monthly retainer as increased for the one-month Additional Staff Term, not a standing rate across the engagement. The base retainer under the original April 2024 agreement is not stated in the filing and is not stated here. DCI Group AZ, LLC (6278), supplemental statement for the six months ending 31 March 2026: the $6,351,325.00 receipts total, the $2,245,785.60 disbursements total, the $4,500,000 line recorded for the “Republic of Nigeria through Aster Legal” and the seven Myanmar retainer payments totalling $1,500,000 are as printed; the quoted activity descriptions are attributed in the text to the principals they actually describe. No dollar amount in that filing is attached to a service description, and the caution in the text about not reading those totals as reputation budgets is this piece’s point, not the filing’s. GlobalPoint International (7518), filings received 18 September 2026, which contains two separate contracts whose terms are kept apart in the text above. The Dabaiwa Media Network Limited agreement (a Kenyan-registered company; the filing’s Item 11 calls it Sudanese, an inconsistency on the document) carries the $80,000 per three-month payment, the “$1000 (One Thousand) USD per a person” travel day rate, the 17.65 per cent vendor markup and the internally inconsistent “$160,000.00 (One Hundred and Eighty Thousand) USD” total. The Stark Aerospace Inc. agreement carries the $180,000 fee for 1 May to 31 October 2026 and the “additional sum of up to $100,000” for receipted expenses, and charges vendor expenses at cost with no markup. All as printed.

Arithmetic. $55,000 × 12 = $660,000 is this piece’s. The ratios 4.5x ($660,000 ÷ $146,910 = 4.49), 2.3x against the manager 90th percentile ($660,000 ÷ $284,990 = 2.32, described in the text as “more than twice”) and 5.1x ($750,000 ÷ $146,910 = 5.11) are this piece’s, and compare a firm’s fee against an individual’s salary — deliberately, to show the gap, not to suggest the fee is anyone’s pay.

Commercial pricing pages. Four pages read on 10 November 2026. NetReputation prints “Published September 10, 2026” and carries the disclaimer that its figures “reflect published industry ranges as of 2026” and “are not NetReputation pricing”; its $500–$50,000+ monthly range, $8,500–$25,000+ crisis-project range, five-row tier table and the internal conflict between “less than $100 per month” and “$0 to $500” for DIY software are on the page as printed. NetReputation and PrivacyOn each gesture at a source — “published industry ranges” and “vendor comparisons published throughout 2026” — without naming one; neither that nor any other page gives a sample size or a method, which is the narrower claim made in the text. Reputation.com’s pricing page shows $80, $115 and $150 per location per month and “Custom Pricing” for enterprise, and prints no date beyond a 2026 copyright line; these are vendor self-prices for a software subscription. Praising.ai prints “June 26, 2026”; the conflict between its $500–$15,000+ agency table and its $10,000–$50,000+ FAQ figure, and between $1,500–$5,000 and $2,000–$8,000 for mid-market, is on the page. PrivacyOn prints “Updated August 30, 2026,” states that Reputation Defender “does not publish prices publicly,” and then lists seven approximate annual tiers from about $1,000 to about $25,000 with a stated 10–20 per cent variance; PrivacyOn sells a competing service, which is disclosed here because it bears on the figures. None of the four discloses a sample size or a method. No figure from any of them is treated in the text as a measurement.

Delisting and the fake-defendant cases. The scheme’s shape, the count of about twenty-five suspicious cases, the fifteen with listed defendant addresses, and the private investigator’s inability to find any of the ostensible defendants are from Techdirt’s 11 October 2016 account, which credits the underlying work to Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen and Eugene Volokh; the “start at $6,000” figure is that page’s statement about the firm’s services generally; the source does not say which service it covers, and the text says so. The $71,000 settlement of Myvesta’s claim, paid by the operator and his companies, its composition (Myvesta’s damages plus Public Citizen’s litigation time), the agreement to vacate orders in three other cases, the January 2017 vacatur of a consent judgment for “fraud on the Court,” the referral of the file to the US Attorney and the description of plea negotiations with the US Attorney for the District of Rhode Island are from Eugene Volokh’s 14 March 2017 post. Both are secondary accounts by the lawyer and the academic who did the work; the underlying dockets were not retrieved, and neither source gives case numbers, so no case number is stated here. Two deliberate limits on what the text asserts: the plea negotiation reported in March 2017 is a negotiation, and this piece makes no claim about its outcome or about any conviction; and the dentist’s account of a forged signature is reported in the sources as his allegation and appears here as one. An earlier draft stated flatly that $6,000 was “the entry price for the delisting scheme” and that a search for the firm’s name now returns the episode first; neither is supported by the sources, and both were removed. The entity names differ between the two sources (RIR1984 LLC and SEO Profile Defender Network LLC in one, SEO Profile Defense LLC and “Profile Defenders” in the other), so the text refers to the operator rather than resolving the corporate names.

Platform policy. Google’s court-order language, including “we accept only valid court orders signed by a judge” and “may voluntarily remove the content from our services if the order identifies specific URLs,” and the four items a submitter must provide, are verbatim from Circumvention, counterfeit, and court orders. The removable categories, the newsworthiness carve-out and “Google can only remove things from Google Search results” are verbatim from Remove my private info from Google Search; that page describes what may be removed on request rather than what Google undertakes to remove, and the text is worded accordingly. Both were read on 10 November 2026. Google’s general legal removal page contains no court-order procedure and is not cited for one.

Regulation and statute. The effective date of 16 CFR Part 465 — “This rule is effective October 21, 2024” — and the Commission’s narrowing of “unjustified” to “unfounded or groundless” legal threats are verbatim from the Federal Register notice, 89 FR 68034, published 22 August 2024. That notice carries the preamble, not the codified rule text; the section headings (§ 465.5 insider reviews, § 465.7 review suppression) come from it, but the codified text of §§ 465.5 and 465.7 was not retrieved — the eCFR Part 465 page is robots-disallowed to automated retrieval — so the description of what the rule prohibits is quoted from the Commission’s own press release of 14 August 2024 rather than from the regulation, and is flagged as the Commission’s summary in the text. The quoted list of prohibited conduct is given as that release prints it, including the closing clause “or certain false public accusations.” The $53,088 per-violation maximum under FTC Act §§ 5(l) and 5(m), applicable to penalties assessed after 17 January 2025, is verbatim from 16 CFR 1.98 as it stood in the eCFR snapshot read for this piece, which prints “up to date as of 7/13/2026” and cites 90 FR 5581 (17 January 2025); a 2026 inflation adjustment, if one has been published since, was not located, so the figure is given with its own effective date rather than as a current-year figure. The Consumer Review Fairness Act voids three kinds of provision — those restricting a covered communication, those imposing a penalty or fee for one, and those requiring transfer of intellectual property in review content — and the text describes all three rather than only non-disparagement clauses. Its quotations — “void from the inception of such contract,” “It shall be unlawful for a person to offer a form contract containing a provision described as void in subsection (b),” and the parens patriae provision — are from 15 U.S.C. § 45b; the Act was enacted 14 December 2016, with subsections (d) and (e) applying one year later, and it sets no dollar penalty of its own.

Not verified. Mean (as opposed to median) wages and employment relative standard errors for either public relations occupation. The codified text of 16 CFR §§ 465.5 and 465.7. Whether a 2026 inflation adjustment to the FTC Act civil penalty maximum has been published. The outcome of the 2017 plea negotiation described above. Any sample size behind any commercial pricing page, none of which publishes one. What share of any disclosed FARA retainer was spent on crisis or reputation work rather than on advocacy, events or travel. Reputation Defender’s actual prices, which the company does not publish. Any figure for the number of people working in crisis communications or reputation management in the United States, which no source consulted provides. Whether any specific negative search result has ever been removed as a result of a particular reputation-management engagement, which the trade has no reason to disclose and did not.

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