You pay for a car wash, and before you pull away, the cashier hands you a coupon: “Leave us a five-star review. Get 20% off your next wash.” Apparently, it works. Otherwise, they wouldn’t keep printing the coupons.

For a $25 car wash, there’s nothing particularly surprising about the transaction. Reviews are part of the business model.

But imagine the same conversation at Hermès. You purchase one of the brand’s iconic cashmere blankets, and the sales associate smiles before saying, “If you leave us a review on Trustpilot, we’ll give you 20% off your next purchase.” It would feel completely out of place.

Not every business should chase reviews. In fact, for many premium brands, the customers you’d most want reviewing you are often the ones least likely to do so. That’s especially true for businesses built on discretion.

As managing partner of Ivy Coach, a leading college consultancy, I’ve spent many years helping families navigate highly selective college admissions. Our clients routinely invest a premium in their children’s education. Yet many of them don’t want their closest friends knowing they hired us, let alone the entire internet.

We’ve long joked inside our firm: “We always get the siblings. We usually get the cousins. We rarely get the friends.”

Parents are perfectly happy for everyone to believe their child’s admission to Stanford or Harvard happened entirely on merit. They’ll quietly hire us again for their younger children, but they aren’t rushing to announce it on Trustpilot. And that creates a problem.

The loudest reviews often come from people who were never your clients.

When your happiest clients stay silent, who fills the vacuum? Often, it’s people with an agenda.

The prospective client who didn’t like hearing that Harvard wasn’t realistic with four junior-year B’s. Or the one who couldn’t afford your services. Or, increasingly, your competitors.

Just last week, we discovered a competitor publicly commenting on Facebook that she had “close friends” who had worked at, and left, our firm, implying inside knowledge before steering prospective clients toward her own business. The claim, of course, was fabricated.

Fortunately, we knew it was false because virtually our entire team has been with us for years. After we confronted her, she removed the comment. But deleting a falsehood doesn’t erase the damage it may have already caused. Many businesses aren’t so fortunate.​

AI just raised the stakes.

For years, business owners worried about reviews because they influenced Google results. Today, they influence something potentially even more powerful: AI.

Large language models increasingly summarize businesses using publicly available information from review sites, forums and other user-generated content. They don’t investigate motives, depose witnesses or distinguish between an authentic client and a competitor posing as one. Rather, they identify patterns. If enough negative reviews accumulate, even if they’re coordinated or misleading, they can begin shaping how AI describes a business.

We’re entering a new era of search, whether you call it AI Overviews, generative engine optimization (GEO), AI optimization (AIO) or something else entirely. And just as black hat SEO tactics—like hiding white text on white backgrounds so only search engines could read it—once manipulated Google’s algorithm before being heavily penalized, some businesses are now trying to game AI by manufacturing online sentiment. It’s a shortsighted strategy that may deliver fleeting gains but ultimately erodes trust and invites the same kind of reckoning.

Here are three ways to protect your brand.

1. Treat your reputation like intellectual property.

Don’t ignore false reviews. If a competitor is making deceptive claims, act quickly. The Federal Trade Commission has made clear that businesses cannot use fake reviews, undisclosed endorsements or deceptive practices to gain a competitive advantage. Protecting your reputation isn’t being thin-skinned. It’s protecting a valuable business asset.

2. Resist the urge to fight in the comments.

Nothing amplifies a false review faster than a public argument. Consider the restaurant owners who spend three paragraphs attacking someone who complained about overcooked salmon; they almost never win. Handle disputes privately or through appropriate legal channels whenever possible. Public sparring often gives misinformation a much larger audience.

3. When necessary, use the legal system.

Anonymous often doesn’t stay anonymous. If a knowingly false review is causing real harm, legal tools, including subpoenas, can identify the individual behind anonymous posts. Sometimes you’ll discover exactly what you suspected all along. The anonymous reviewer wasn’t a customer. It was your competitor.

Reviews were never designed to become evidence.

Customer reviews began as digital word of mouth. Today, they’re increasingly becoming training data for artificial intelligence. That’s a profound shift.

Businesses that once viewed reputation management as a marketing function now need to think of it as risk management. Because in the age of AI, protecting your brand isn’t just about what prospective customers read. It’s also about what artificial intelligence learns.

Brian Taylor is the Managing Partner of Ivy Coach, a leading college consultancy.