The method
Five stages, with a gate between each one.
The same method runs every engagement, which is what makes it possible to audit. Each stage has defined inputs, a specific deliverable, and a review point at which stopping is genuinely available.
Every matter is genuinely different, which is exactly why the method is written down rather than improvised. A documented sequence is what makes a month of work possible to evaluate, because you can see what should have happened and what you should have received.
That solves a specific problem. If a stage's deliverable has not arrived, something has gone wrong, and you are in a position to ask about it precisely rather than generally.
The gates matter more than the stages. Each one is a genuine decision point where the engagement can end without penalty, because we would rather lose a month of fees than continue work our own assessment says will not produce a result.
The stages
What happens, in what order.
Assessment
One to two weeks
Establishing what is actually there, dated and in writing, before anything is touched.
Inputs
- Your account of the situation and its history
- Names, entities, and aliases in scope
- Any prior remediation attempts and their outcomes
You receive
A baseline document: every relevant result, source, and machine-held assertion, with position, date, and a capture of contents. Plus our reading of what can and cannot be changed.
Gate
You decide whether to proceed. A meaningful number of engagements end here, because the honest answer was that intervention would not help.
Sequencing
Days
Deciding the order. This stage is short and it determines most of the outcome.
Inputs
- The assessment baseline
- Your constraints: legal exposure, transaction timing, confidentiality requirements
- Coordination with your counsel where a legal dimension exists
You receive
A written plan: which mechanisms apply, in what order, with what expected timeline and what we explicitly are not attempting.
Gate
Written approval of the plan, including its stated limits, before any external action is taken.
Intervention
Weeks to months
The removable material first, because removal is the only permanent change.
Inputs
- The approved sequence
- Evidence packages assembled per counterparty
- Your approval on any external correspondence sent in your name
You receive
Requests made, tracked, and reported, including refusals, which are reported as they happen rather than aggregated at the end.
Gate
A checkpoint on what succeeded and what did not, and an honest reassessment before moving to construction.
Construction
Months
Building the material that carries weight: structural foundation first, then published work.
Inputs
- Entity definition and structured data on properties you control
- Your genuine standing on the subjects being written about
- Your sign-off on every word published under your name
You receive
A resolved entity, consistent representation across sources, and substantive published work correctly attributed to you.
Gate
Position and answer measurement against the original baseline, not against a new one.
Verification
Ongoing
Confirming that what changed stayed changed, including in systems that update silently.
Inputs
- The original baseline document
- The agreed monitoring cadence and escalation threshold
- The standing AI question set, re-run each cycle
You receive
Scheduled reports measured against baseline, stating what improved, what did not, and what we recommend next.
Gate
Your decision each cycle on whether the standing engagement continues. Month to month, always.
Fees
You will know what the work costs before you commit to any of it.
The sequence is the same in every engagement: a first conversation at no cost and no obligation, an assessment that establishes what is actually there, and then a written proposal scoped to what the assessment found, with the fee stated in it. Nothing begins before you have agreed to that document.
There is no price list and there are no packages, because scope only becomes clear once the assessment is done. A figure offered by phone before the facts are established would be a guess, and guessing is the opposite of what you would be hiring us for.
Questions we are asked
- Do all five stages always run?
- Not always. Many engagements stop after assessment, either because it concluded that nothing meaningful could be changed, or because the situation was already resolving on its own. Proactive engagements frequently skip intervention entirely and begin at construction.
- Why is there a review gate between every stage?
- Because each stage produces information that can change whether the next one is a good idea. A gate is an opportunity to stop, which is only meaningful if stopping is genuinely available. It is, at every gate, with no penalty.
- What does the baseline document actually contain?
- Every relevant URL with its position and publication date, a dated capture of its contents, the autocomplete predictions across regions, and verbatim AI answers to a standard question set. It is the reference point every later claim of improvement is measured against, including by you.
- How do you report progress?
- Against the original baseline, on the agreed cadence, including the measures that have not moved. A report that only contains improvements is a sales document rather than a report.
- What does this cost?
- The fee is stated in a written proposal before any work begins, scoped to what the assessment finds. The section above sets out how that figure is arrived at.
Start at stage one.
An assessment tells you what is actually there and what can realistically be changed. It is also the stage at which many engagements correctly end.