Reputation monitoring
Reputation monitoring is the continuous tracking of what is said about an organisation, across every channel where that happens, weighing each mention for sentiment and for relevance. It does not produce an opinion but a picture: who says what, where, when, and whether it matters.
Published
Who it is for
For whoever is accountable for what is said about the organisation. In practice that is the communications or PR lead, and in smaller organisations the director.
It comes up at three moments. When something goes wrong and nobody knows how far it has spread. When a board member asks what is actually being written about us and the answer is a feeling rather than a figure. And when a campaign has to show it produced something.
It is no longer a large-company subject either. A four-person law firm, an installer and a software vendor are all looked up first and called second.
What is said about you takes shape in places nobody reviews systematically: inside a ninety-minute podcast, in the text under a four-star rating, in the answer an assistant gives to someone who types in your name. Which of those places carry weight for you only becomes clear once you have followed them for a while: the trade publication your customers read every week counts for more than the national title that writes about you once a year.
How we do it, step by step
Seven steps, in the order they run.
- 01
It starts with entities. Not one brand name, but the organisation plus the people and parts attached to it: directors, subsidiaries, product lines, and the competitors you measure yourself against. Those are linked, so a mention of your director is also a mention of you.
- 02
The search terms go out across 31 channels. Search results, news sources, eight social platforms (LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Facebook, Bluesky and Snapchat), review platforms such as Google Business Profile, Trustpilot and Glassdoor, podcasts, and the answers of eight AI assistants.
- 03
How often we measure is agreed with you. It depends on the plan and on what you need: for one organisation a daily pass over the search results is enough, for another a new review has to arrive within the hour.
- 04
Per mention we record the source, the link, the date, the text or transcript, the sentiment with its score, and the judgement on whether it is about you. A search result adds the position, a review the star rating, an audio item the programme and the timestamp.
- 05
Every mention goes through two judgements. First relevance: is this actually about this organisation, or about a namesake, or is it the same text syndicated somewhere. Then sentiment, per mention and not per brand. For a video, what is shown and said is assessed, not only the accompanying text.
- 06
The knowledge profile grows with it. It is a set of established facts about the organisation, the people around it and the subjects it deals with. It separates you from your namesakes, and it lets us notice when an AI assistant claims something that is not true.
- 07
What comes out is not a stream of alerts, but a daily summary of what is going on, with a notification the moment something outspokenly negative arrives. That notification goes by email, Slack or WhatsApp, so you do not have to open the dashboard to know there is something.
Sentiment over a period
period figure = sum of scores / number of mentions in the period
- Every mention counts the same; we do not weight by reach.
- The label beside it is the class that occurs most often in that period.
- score of 0.3 or below: outspokenly negative, and that is the alert threshold
Twenty mentions averaging 0.58, with neutral occurring fourteen times, give: 0.58, label neutral.
What counts
counting mentions = mentions found - not relevant
- not relevant: namesakes, quotes lifted from another context, and syndicated copies of the same item
- What falls away stays visible with the reason attached, because a judgement has to be checkable.
- The share the filter holds back differs per organisation and is shown in the dashboard.
- Criticism of working methods in trade press2 hours ago · position 3 in Google0.21
- Mentioned in a podcast episodeyesterday · at 31:080.55
- ChatGPT names Acme on a sector questionweekly measurement · 2 of 9 sources yours0.74
- Search results
- News sources
- Eight social platforms
- Review platforms
- Podcasts
- Seven AI assistants
What the research says
Reputation sits at the top of the executive risk list. In Deloitte's Reputation@Risk survey, covering more than 300 executives worldwide, 87 percent rated reputation risk as more important than any other strategic risk. Of the organisations that suffered damage, 41 percent saw revenue fall, and some of those by more than twenty percent.
Meanwhile the place where that judgement forms is moving faster than most monitoring arrangements. In BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey, run among 1,000 US consumers, the share using an AI assistant to find a local business rose from 6 percent in 2025 to 45 percent in 2026. That is US consumer research and the number does not transfer directly to a business market, but the direction is hard to ignore.
The practical meaning: monitoring that stops at news media and social channels covers a shrinking part of where the judgement is actually formed.
That reputation is worth money has been studied outside the trade press too. Roberts and Dowling analysed the link between corporate reputation and the durability of financial performance in Strategic Management Journal. Their finding is more precise than the usual summary: a good reputation predicts not so much higher profit as holding on to above-average profit for longer. Reputation works as a brake on decline. Noticing early is therefore worth more than reacting hard.
Brand reputation, corporate reputation and personal reputation
The word reputation covers three things that need tracking separately. Brand reputation is what people think of your product or service, and it lives mostly in reviews, social channels and comparison articles. Corporate reputation is about the organisation as a whole: leadership, employment practices, sustainability, reliability as a supplier, and it lives in news media and the trade press.
The personal reputation of a director is the third, and the most often forgotten. A chief executive in the news takes the organisation along, in both directions. For smaller organisations that reputation often simply is the company's.
In practice they run into each other. A complaint about customer service touches the brand, but the moment a trade publication writes about it, it touches the organisation. So we track them in one system and linked to each other, rather than in three separate dashboards.
Online reputation: where the picture forms now
Your online reputation is the picture someone gets when they look you up knowing nothing else about you. That picture is no longer formed in one place. It is the sum of the first page of Google, the stars under your name, a thread on a forum and an article from 2019 that keeps ranking. Lately the answer an assistant gives to someone typing in your name is added to that.
What makes that hard is not the volume but the spread. Each of those places has its own audience and its own shelf life. A news item leaves the timeline within a week but sits in search results for years. A three-line review stays until someone writes over it. An AI answer exists exactly once, at the moment someone asks, and then it is gone without a trace.
So monitoring means not only collecting but holding on: what was there, when, and what has happened to it since.
How it differs from reputation management, and which part we do
Reputation monitoring is establishing what is there. Reputation management is the umbrella above it, covering three kinds of work that get mixed up constantly in conversation. The first is knowing what is going on: monitoring, weighing, alerting. The second is influencing: publishing, talking to a journalist, making sure the right sources are easier to find. The third is repairing: asking for a correction, getting an unfair piece amended, in the last resort a removal request or a legal step.
The order is fixed: you cannot manage what you cannot see. Start influencing without measuring and you will not know afterwards whether it helped. That is how reputation work ends in an argument about impressions.
Those three differ in kind. The first is a system that runs continuously. The second is work by people with expertise and contacts. The third is occasional, legally loaded and usually expensive.
We do the first, completely, and we do not sell the other two alongside it. That is deliberate: software promising to manage your reputation is promising something only people can do. What software can do is look continuously in more places than a person can manage, and weigh the result in a way that works the same every week.
For the second and third you work with an agency or a lawyer. We supply what those parties need to start: what is there, where, since when, and what it is doing.
| What it is | Who does it | Do we do this? | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monitoring | Continuously establishing what is there, where, and whether it matters | Software, the same way every day | Yes, in full |
| Influencing | Publishing, talking to journalists, making better sources findable | People with expertise and contacts | No, that is agency work |
| Repairing | Asking for a correction, having a publication amended, a removal request | Occasional, and often a lawyer | No, we supply the file |
What to look for in reputation monitoring software
Four questions separate usable software from an inbox full of alerts, and none of them is answered by a nice chart in a demo.
- 01
How is it decided whether a mention is about you? Without a profile of your organisation a system cannot tell a namesake from you, and then you are measuring noise.
- 02
How does the sentiment figure come about, and can you check it? A figure without a formula is an opinion with a decimal on the end.
- 03
Which channels are genuinely covered, and which are merely listed? Ask about podcasts and about the answers of AI assistants, because that is usually where the difference sits.
- 04
What happens after the alert? This is the question most often skipped. Software that only signals creates work rather than calm. A daily summary of what is going on is more usable than a hundred separate notifications someone has to work through.
About the figures
Everything on this page is calculated over mentions that passed the relevance filter. What that filter does, what falls away and why, and how sentiment is scored and summed, is set out in the measurement protocol.
How we calculateSources
The research this page refers to, with its scope attached. A figure from a US consumer survey is not the same as a figure about a business market, and that belongs on the page.
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What Reptor offers here
Questions about the offering on this subject: what you get, what it costs, and where we stop.
What do I get when I start?
A dashboard with every mention from the recent period, weighed for relevance and sentiment, a daily summary by email, and alerts the moment something outspokenly negative arrives. Alongside that a knowledge profile of your organisation that keeps growing as long as the monitoring runs.
How quickly does it run?
The account is there immediately and the first scans run the same day. The picture fills out over the following weeks, as the knowledge profile builds and we see which sources genuinely recur for you.
What does it cost?
Essential is 129 euro per month and Professional is 299 euro per month, both cancellable monthly. Every account starts with seven days free, with no payment details required up front.
We already have a monitoring tool. What does this add?
Usually the channels your current tool does not cover: podcasts and the answers of AI assistants. It is worth establishing that rather than assuming it, so we run a scan of your organisation and you can see what comes into view that you are not seeing now.
Can my agency offer this under its own name?
Yes. Communications and PR agencies can offer the monitoring white label to their own clients, with their own brand in the dashboard and in the reporting.
Do new channels get added?
Continuously. We adjust coverage to what clients need: a review platform that matters in your sector, an AI assistant that appears, a channel that grows. Spotting something we miss is the fastest route to an addition.
Where is the data held?
On European servers. European AI processing is available. Reptor is based in Amsterdam.
Frequently asked questions
Which channels does it cover?
News media, social channels, review platforms, podcasts, search results and the answers of AI assistants. Which of those carry weight differs per organisation: for a retail chain it is reviews, for a director it is the news media.
How often should you measure?
Continuously. A story you find a week later has already done its work. Reptor scans search results and news sources daily and the AI assistants weekly.
What is online reputation management?
The whole of knowing what is said about you, influencing that picture, and repairing it where needed. Those three differ in kind: the first is a system, the second is expert human work, the third is occasional and often legal. We do the first.
What should I look for when choosing reputation software?
Four questions. How does it decide whether a mention is about you? How is the sentiment figure produced, and can you check it? Which channels are genuinely covered, and which merely listed? And what happens after the alert? That last one decides whether it delivers calm or work.
Is monitoring not just a Google Alert?
An alert tells you a word appeared somewhere. Monitoring judges whether that mention is about you, what the tone is, and whether it matters. That difference is the work: without it you get an inbox full of namesakes and syndicated copies.