Work
Four areas, and what each one actually involves once the work starts.
A damaging page holds its position because nothing better is competing for it. That is the whole mechanism. The page is not there because it is true or important. It is there because the alternatives are weaker, thinner, or do not exist yet.
Suppression is not deletion, and anyone promising deletion is usually selling something they cannot deliver. It is building assets strong enough to outrank the thing you want gone, and durable enough that they hold the position long after everyone has stopped paying attention to the project.
The judgment is in knowing which results will move and which will not. Some pages sit on domains that will outrank anything I build. When that is the case I say so early, and we work on managing the surrounding context instead.
Most people own almost nothing about themselves online. There is no personal site, no considered profile, nothing written under their own name. The internet fills that vacuum with whatever it happens to find, which is usually a directory listing and somebody else with the same name.
Construction means building the profiles, the writing and the pages that should rank for a name and simply do not exist yet. Done properly it gives search engines and language models one coherent story to repeat rather than a scattering of fragments to guess from.
This is the work I would do first for almost anybody, including people with no problem at all. It is far cheaper to own your name before you need to than to reclaim it afterwards.
Home addresses, phone numbers, relatives, every place a person has ever lived, bought and sold by data brokers who count on nobody looking. Most people have no idea how much of this is sitting in public view under their own name.
Removal is the part of this work nobody enjoys and everybody needs. It is repetitive and adversarial, and every broker has its own process, its own delays, and its own quiet incentive to make it unpleasant enough that you give up.
It also has to be maintained. Records come back, because the brokers repopulate from each other. A removal done once and never checked again is a removal that has already failed.
A founder and the company share one reputation whether either of them likes it or not. Search a company and you find the people. Search the people and you find the company. Treating those as separate problems is how both get handled badly.
This is the work of protecting both at the same time, ahead of a crisis when it is cheap and quiet, and during one when it is neither. The preparation matters more than the response, because the assets that protect you in a bad week are the ones that have been in place for a long time.
If something is already happening, the sooner the conversation starts the more options remain.
Where to start
Most of this is easier before it is urgent. If a search for your name is already costing you something, the conversation is worth having early.