Reputation recovery RFP: the pack for fixing a review or listing crisis

Scope this as recovering from a specific reputation problem: a cluster of new negative reviews, a rating drop, a duplicate or incorrect Google Business Profile listing, or all of the above. Name the specific trigger if you know it, a bad experience that went public, a competitor issue, or an unexplained rating drop, since the right response differs depending on the cause.

Be explicit that this engagement does not include removing genuine negative reviews simply because they are negative; it includes correctly identifying which reviews, if any, violate Google's policies and can legitimately be flagged, and building review volume and response quality around the rest.

If a duplicate listing or an incorrect business category is part of the problem, name that as its own defined task, since merging listings is a technical process distinct from review management.

Grant manager access to your Google Business Profile so the vendor can respond to reviews, request the merge of any duplicate listing, and correct business information directly rather than working around limited access. Provide a list of every physical location or service area listing if you operate more than one, since duplicates and rating problems often need to be diagnosed location by location.

Share your actual customer contact list or CRM so review requests can go to real, recent customers rather than a generic, untargeted blast that either annoys people or reaches nobody relevant.

Provide any documentation you already have of the reviews you believe violate Google's policies, screenshots, account names, timing patterns, since a well documented flag request is far more likely to succeed than a vague one.

Your Google Business Profile remains under your own verified ownership throughout, with the vendor holding manager access only, never primary ownership, so control of the listing itself is never at risk if the relationship ends.

Ask for a written record of every action taken during the engagement: which reviews were flagged and their outcome, what listing corrections were made, and what the review request process looked like, so a future vendor or your own team can continue the same approach without starting from a blank page.

Confirm that any review request system or automation set up during the engagement, whether a simple email sequence or a dedicated tool, is either owned by you directly or clearly documented well enough to rebuild elsewhere if you change providers.

Set an early milestone around diagnosis: a written assessment of which existing negative reviews, if any, plausibly violate Google's policies versus which are genuine and should be addressed through response and volume rather than removal attempts. This distinction should be made before any flagging requests go to Google, not guessed at case by case.

Set a milestone for listing accuracy, correcting business information and resolving a duplicate listing if one exists, since an inaccurate or duplicate profile undermines every other part of the recovery effort.

Measure ongoing success by review velocity and average rating trend over ninety days, not a single snapshot, since a rating problem built up over months is not solved by a short burst of activity that fades once the contract's first milestone is paid.

Weight policy compliance and diagnosis quality heavily: 30 percent for explicitly ruling out review gating and any other policy violating tactic in their proposal, 25 percent for a clear process to distinguish genuine reviews from policy violating ones, 20 percent for a plan built around sustained review velocity rather than a one time push, 15 percent for price, and 10 percent for references who can describe a comparable recovery.

Be wary of any proposal promising to "remove negative reviews" without qualification; that promise usually means either a tactic that risks your listing or a claim the vendor cannot actually deliver on for reviews that do not violate any policy.

Ask references specifically how long their recovery took and whether the improvement held six months later, since some reputation pushes look successful briefly and then fade once active work stops.

Get these answered in writing before you score a single proposal: How do you determine whether a negative review can legitimately be flagged versus one that has to be addressed through response and volume? Do you use review gating or any similar practice, and if not, how do you generate review requests fairly across all customers? What is your plan for sustaining review velocity beyond the first few months? How do you handle a duplicate or incorrect Google Business Profile listing?

Also ask them to walk through, in writing, exactly what they would say in a public response to a specific negative review you provide, since the quality and tone of that response tells you more about their actual approach than a general description of their process.