As AI Rewrites Search, Scott Keever Is Building a Business Around Who Controls the Narrative
Keever founded Keever SEO in 2015, initially concentrating on helping businesses improve their visibility in search engines
For years, online reputation management largely meant influencing what appeared when someone typed a name into Google. Scott Keever believes that definition is becoming outdated.
The founder of Reputation Pros and Keever SEO has spent more than a decade working in search engine optimization and online reputation management, fields that are increasingly converging with artificial intelligence.
As consumers, investors and journalists begin asking AI systems questions they once directed to traditional search engines, Keever argues that individuals and companies face a new challenge: their reputations are no longer defined solely by a list of blue links.
They are increasingly being summarized.
That shift has become a central focus of Keever’s work and research into how search engines and AI systems interpret information about people and companies.
From SEO to Online Reputation Management
Keever founded Keever SEO in 2015, initially concentrating on helping businesses improve their visibility in search engines.
His work eventually exposed a different problem.
Ranking a company for a commercial keyword was one thing. Changing the information people encountered when researching a founder, chief executive or company was considerably more complicated.
Search results could contain news coverage, social profiles, reviews, corporate websites, government records, videos, biographies and other third-party sources. A single highly authoritative negative article could remain prominent long after the event that produced it had passed.
That problem led Keever deeper into online reputation management and ultimately to founding Reputation Pros, a firm focused on helping individuals and organizations manage their digital presence.
His work has since centered on the intersection of search visibility, reputation management and digital authority.
Studying What Happens After a CEO Reputation Crisis
Keever has also attempted to quantify how damaging news coverage behaves in search.
In 2026, he published research examining the Google search results of 50 chief executives who experienced significant negative press between 2015 and 2026.
The analysis found that 78 percent had negative coverage appearing on the first page of Google within 72 hours of the initial news cycle. More significantly, according to the study, negative coverage remained on the first page more than a year later for 62 percent of the executives examined.
The findings illustrate a characteristic of modern reputation crises that companies sometimes underestimate: the news cycle and the search cycle operate on different timelines.
A controversy may disappear from daily headlines while continuing to appear whenever someone searches the name of the person involved.
For a chief executive raising capital, negotiating an acquisition or being considered for a board position, that distinction can matter.
“Search results have a much longer memory than the news cycle,” Keever says. “Someone can discover a controversy years after everyone involved stopped talking about it.”
The research also raises questions about what happens as artificial intelligence becomes another layer between publishers and audiences.
From Search Results to AI Answers
Traditional search generally requires users to evaluate sources themselves.
AI systems can behave differently.
When someone asks an AI platform about a company or individual, the system may synthesize information from numerous sources into a direct response.
Keever sees this as an important evolution of reputation management.
Instead of asking only whether favorable information ranks prominently in Google, companies increasingly have to consider whether machines can confidently establish basic facts about them: who founded the company, what the organization does, what its leadership is known for and which independent sources corroborate those facts.
That places greater importance on consistency across the web.
A corporate website might identify one person as founder while an old directory lists someone else. A biography might use different company names or founding dates. News articles, social profiles and business databases can contain additional variations.
Individually, those discrepancies may appear insignificant. Collectively, they can make an entity more difficult for search and AI systems to interpret.
Keever describes the emerging discipline as less about controlling individual webpages and more about establishing a consistent body of evidence.
Reputation Is Becoming an Information Problem
That philosophy represents a broader change within the reputation-management industry.
Historically, some firms concentrated heavily on suppression: creating or promoting favorable webpages in an effort to move unfavorable results lower in search rankings.
Keever argues that contemporary reputation management requires a wider approach.
Search engines increasingly evaluate brands and individuals across an ecosystem of independent sources. AI systems add another layer by interpreting relationships among those sources.
As a result, a person’s digital reputation can be influenced by traditional SEO, journalism, reviews, structured data, authoritative profiles, original research, video, social platforms and the consistency of information connecting them.
“The goal shouldn’t be to manufacture a version of someone that doesn’t exist,” Keever says. “The stronger strategy is making accurate information easier to verify.”
That distinction is especially important for executives and companies operating in industries where credibility influences financial decisions.
Why Executive Search Results Matter
Investors and customers now have access to more information about corporate leadership than at any previous point.
Before a meeting, an investor can search a founder’s name, examine previous companies, read litigation records, find news coverage and increasingly ask an AI system to summarize the person’s background.
The same behavior occurs during hiring, partnerships and acquisitions.
Keever argues that this makes reputation management less of a crisis-response function and more of a form of digital risk management.
The best time to establish authoritative information about a company or executive, he says, is before a controversy gives algorithms a competing narrative to understand.
Once negative coverage becomes the dominant source of information associated with a name, changing that information environment becomes considerably harder.
Building Authority Before It Is Needed
Keever’s approach reflects a lesson from his years working in SEO: authority generally accumulates over time.
A website does not become authoritative simply because its owner wants it to rank. Similarly, an executive cannot instantly manufacture years of credible third-party information after a crisis occurs.
That has led Keever to advocate for building what he describes as digital authority before it is urgently needed.
That can include publishing original research, developing recognized expertise, maintaining accurate organizational information, earning legitimate media coverage and ensuring that authoritative sources consistently describe the individual or company.
The objective is not merely visibility.
It is corroboration.
When numerous independent sources consistently associate an individual with the same companies, expertise and accomplishments, search engines have a clearer set of relationships to interpret.
AI systems potentially benefit from the same information environment.
An Industry Being Reshaped by AI
Keever’s career has followed the evolution of search itself.
He began with traditional SEO, expanded into reputation management as search results became increasingly consequential to personal and corporate credibility, and is now concentrating on how artificial intelligence changes that equation.
The underlying problem, however, has remained remarkably consistent.
People make decisions based on the information they can find.
What has changed is how that information reaches them.
A decade ago, managing digital visibility largely meant understanding Google’s rankings. Today, it can mean understanding how search engines, news organizations, databases, social platforms and AI systems collectively construct an individual’s digital identity.
Keever expects those disciplines to become increasingly intertwined.
“Google taught businesses that visibility matters,” he says. “AI is teaching them that being understood matters too.”
As AI becomes a more common gateway to information, the distinction could become increasingly important for executives whose names are inseparable from the companies they lead.
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