Research identifies overlooked strategies for managing negative online reviews including making them harder to find

Online reviews can shape purchasing decisions. But their influence depends in part on whether consumers encounter them and some businesses manage that exposure by making negative reviews harder to find.

Research on online reputation management (ORM) has long focused on how businesses respond to dissatisfied customers. New research from the University of Florida Warrington College of Business shows that responding is only part of what businesses do.

Drawing on academic studies, industry materials, court records and regulatory actions, the researchers developed a framework that organizes 17 ORM strategies into three broad categories: micro-engagement, rebuild and visibility. The framework provides a more complete picture of how organizations manage negative online reviews and a foundation for future research. It maps existing practices rather than endorsing them.

“Not every negative review carries the same weight,” said Steven Shugan, research co-author and McKethan-Matherly Eminent Scholar at UF Warrington. “A review’s impact depends on factors like the consumer, the product and even how the review is written. Our framework helps explain which reputation management strategies may work best in different situations, rather than assuming the same response works every time.”

The first category, micro-engagement, addresses individual reviews through actions such as public or private responses to complaints or efforts to have a review removed. Rebuild strategies aim to offset negative reviews by strengthening a company’s overall reputation over time. These range from improving products and seeking endorsements to, at the unethical extreme, planting fake reviews. Together, the two categories account for much of the existing ORM research.

Shugan and co-author Man Xie (Ph.D. ’21) of Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management found that the third category, visibility, has received little scholarly attention despite its use in practice. Rather than changing reviews themselves, these strategies alter which information consumers encounter and how easily they find it.

Tactics include adopting generic business names that create ambiguity in search results, using multiple names to spread reviews across separate identities, leaving review pages unclaimed and building decoy websites designed to push review platforms down in search rankings. For example, the paper notes that Chuck E. Cheese sold delivery pizza under the separate name “Pasqually’s Pizza & Wings.”

Visibility strategies can be blunt instruments, the researchers caution: a generic name that makes negative reviews harder to find can also obscure positive ones.

A preliminary analysis of 100 dry cleaning and plumbing businesses in Orlando illustrates another potential trade-off. Among low-rated businesses, claimed Yelp pages were more prominent in Google search results. Claiming a page enables public replies, but it was also associated with greater visibility for the reviews themselves—including complaints. The analysis is correlational and does not establish cause and effect.

These tactics raise broader concerns about transparency in digital marketplaces, Shugan and Xie note. Consumers rely on search rankings, platform algorithms and curated content to guide their choices. A fake review can, in principle, be detected; pushing a review page down in search results can leave no obvious trace in the review record itself.

Regulators and platforms have focused on fake reviews, the researchers argue, but attempts to control what consumers can find also deserve scrutiny. A business with no visible complaints, they add, is not necessarily a business with no unhappy customers.

The complete paper, “Bridging Research and Practice: Strategies for Managing Negative Online Reviews,” is forthcoming in the Journal of Interactive Marketing.