How it works
The slot map, and everything that follows from it.
Suppression is not persuasion and it is not negotiation. Page one holds ten slots, each slot has a measurable value, and the job is to fill the valuable ones with assets that deserve to be there. This page describes exactly how we do that.
Step one
Four slot classes.
Before anything is built, we pull your page one and classify all ten results. Every timeline, price and asset count we quote comes out of that classification — never out of a guess about what a case like yours usually costs.
Owned
Properties you control outright — your site, your profiles, anything you can publish to today. These are the slots we can move fastest, because nothing stands between the decision and the page.
Earned
Third-party pages about you that you did not publish: interviews, contributed articles, trade coverage, speaker bios, legitimate directories. Slower to place and worth more per slot, because search engines weigh them higher than anything self-published.
Neutral
Results that neither help nor hurt — data broker pages, scrapes, someone else with your name. They occupy slots that could be working for you, and they are usually the cheapest thing on the page to displace.
Negative
The reason you called. We classify each one by the authority of the host, its position, and how actively the story is still being covered. That classification sets the timeline and the tier.
Step two
The entity stack, in five tiers.
Displacing a result at position one requires ten stronger pages above it. Those pages are not interchangeable — they work as a stack, where each tier makes the tier above it rank better.
Tier 1
The hub site
A site on your own name, built as six or more distinct pages rather than a one-page profile. Separate pages can hold separate slots, and a site with real depth outranks a business card. It is the only asset in the stack we control completely, so it carries the most weight in the first ninety days.
Tier 2
The structured data layer
Schema markup connecting the hub to every profile you actually control, so search engines and AI assistants read a single consistent entity rather than a dozen loose pages sharing a name. Consistency here is what makes the rest of the stack compound instead of competing with itself.
Tier 3
Profile properties
Eight to twelve high-authority profiles claimed, completed and cross-linked — professional networks, industry bodies, author pages, verified accounts. Individually modest, collectively they hold several slots on almost every page one we build.
Tier 4
Earned coverage
Podcast appearances, contributed articles, trade press, conference listings. This is the slowest tier and the one that decides whether a page one reads as a person or as a campaign. We place it under real bylines with real editors, or we do not place it.
Tier 5
Content velocity
Two pieces a month on the hub, one placement elsewhere, sustained for the length of the term. Ranking is partly a measure of ongoing activity, so a stack that stops publishing loses ground to whatever is still being updated.
Variables
What makes a case harder.
Four things decide whether your campaign runs at the short end of our timeline table or the long one. We assess all four during the slot map.
Host authority
Where the result lives
A national outlet with decades of domain authority does not move the way a forum post does. We can still displace it, but it takes more assets, more earned placements and more time — and we will say so before you sign rather than after.
Name commonality
How rare your name is
A rare name means every result on page one is about you, good and bad. A common name means competition from strangers, but also more room to build a distinct entity around your profession or city.
Existing footprint
What you already have
Clients arriving with a real site, active profiles and prior coverage start several slots ahead. An empty page one is not necessarily easier — there is nothing to build on and everything to build.
Story status
Whether it is still developing
Coverage that is still being written about will keep producing new results faster than we can displace old ones. In those cases we build the foundation and wait for the news cycle rather than spend your budget against a moving target.
Reporting
What lands in your inbox every month.
The report exists so you can verify the work rather than trust it. It shows the same map we look at internally, including the parts that are not going well.
- 01Your current page one, every slot classified Owned, Earned, Neutral or Negative
- 02Position movement on each tracked result since the previous month
- 03Every asset published or placed that month, with links
- 04What is queued for next month and what is blocked
- 05Word-for-word logs of what the major AI assistants say about your name
- 06A plain statement of anything that did not move, and why