How often should you check your online reputation?
Frequency should track how fast you could act, not how anxious you feel.
Weekly for search results and review profiles, monthly for AI assistant answers, and daily during or immediately after any incident. Checking more often than you can act on creates anxiety without reducing risk, and the value of monitoring comes entirely from the response it enables.
A workable baseline
- Weekly, fifteen minutes. Search the business name and each executive name. Check review profiles for anything new. Scan alerts.
- Monthly, thirty minutes. Ask two or three assistants a fixed set of questions and record the answers and sources. Check page two of results, where next quarter's problem is currently sitting.
- Quarterly, an hour. Full audit: all platforms, all named people, data broker profiles, image results.
- During an incident. Daily or more, with a written log.
Why weekly is the right default
Most reputational items are visible for days before they matter. A weekly check catches almost everything while it is still small.
Daily checking rarely changes an outcome for a business that cannot mobilise a same-day response, and it consistently produces the wrong emotional relationship with the work: constant low-level alarm, and eventual abandonment of the routine altogether.
Monitor at the speed you can actually respond. Anything faster is anxiety with a spreadsheet.
The check that matters most is page two
Page one is where you already look. Page two is where the item that will be on page one next quarter currently sits, and almost nobody looks there.
A forum thread at position fourteen that is slowly gaining links is far easier to address now than when it reaches position six. Early is the whole advantage of monitoring, and it is squandered by only ever checking the first ten results.
Common questions
Should I check every review platform weekly?
Check the ones that actually rank for your name. A profile nobody sees does not need weekly attention.
What if I find something old I never noticed?
Assess whether it still ranks and whether it is removable. Age does not prevent removal, and it sometimes helps with publisher requests.
Is this worth outsourcing?
Once you have several named executives or locations, yes. Below that the routine is manageable in-house if someone owns it.
Find out if it can come down.
The scan is free and confidential. You get a viability answer on each item, a fixed price, and a timeline. Anything accepted and still published at 14 days is refunded in full.
Run a free scanMore on monitoring and prevention
Working through this for a business? See Continuous monitoring.