Five Blocks: The Firm The NYT Named as Terakeet's Closest Competitor

Reputation Management Firm Profile · Everything-PR

Terakeet investigation series anchor: Terakeet Firm Profile — The $100M Firm From Syracuse.

Headquarters: New York, with a development center in Jerusalem · Founded: 2007 · Founder & CEO: Sam Michelson · Model: Technology-driven digital reputation management, sold largely through PR, communications, and law firm partners · In the news: Cited in the May 2026 New York Times investigation as a Terakeet competitor.

When the New York Times needed a competitor to size up Terakeet's fees, it went to Sam Michelson, founder and CEO of Five Blocks. His comment was brief: his firm charges high fees too, but nothing on Terakeet's scale. That single line placed Five Blocks in the story as the benchmark against which Terakeet's economics looked extreme.

What Five Blocks does

Five Blocks describes itself as a technology-driven digital reputation management company, using data analysis to help clients plan and execute a deliberate search presence. Founded in 2007 by Sam Michelson — the holder of two U.S. patents in adjacent technical fields — the firm grew out of an earlier e-commerce venture.

The work spans digital reputation strategy, Wikipedia strategy and implementation, and reputation crisis management. The firm markets proprietary tools for monitoring and analyzing how a brand or executive is perceived in search and, increasingly, in AI.

The distinguishing move: a partner model

Five Blocks differs from Terakeet most clearly in how it goes to market. Rather than selling directly to corporations as the primary reputation vendor, it works substantially through partners — PR firms, corporate communications teams, and law firms — supplying the digital reputation layer inside a broader program someone else owns.

That structure is worth understanding because it changes the firm's exposure, not necessarily its methods. As one input within a larger engagement, Five Blocks is less likely to be the visible center of a controversy. It does not follow that the underlying search-displacement techniques differ in kind from the rest of the high-end market; the partner model changes who carries the relationship and the risk, not what the work fundamentally is.

The stated ethics position — and its limits

Five Blocks is unusually vocal about what it says it will not do: no fake or "spammy" tactics, no work where the outcome could harm someone, no pushing of negative content about a client's competitors. The firm says it runs potential engagements through an ethics-evaluation process developed with outside experts.

A published standard is a deliberate market position in a category that mostly stays silent on method. It should also be read for what it is: a self-description. No outside profile can verify how consistently any firm applies its own stated limits, and a firm operating at the high end of search displacement is engaged in fundamentally the same business as its peers, ethics charter or not. The charter is a meaningful signal. It is not, on its own, proof.

Where Five Blocks sits in the industry

Five Blocks occupies the technology-and-partnership end of the high-end market: data-driven, Wikipedia-literate, sold through professional channels, and more public than most about ethical limits. It has also been discussing AI's effect on search and reputation for several years.

The question facing Five Blocks is the one facing the category. A monitoring platform can tell a client what AI systems say about them. Influencing what those systems say is a harder, separate discipline — and the one the next few years will judge every reputation firm on.

The Terakeet Investigation Series

• The news — Terakeet Built a Search-Manipulation Machine for Goldman Sachs
• The diagnosis — What the Epstein-Linked Scandal Reveals
• The firm — Terakeet: The $100M Firm From Syracuse
• The competitor (you are here) — Five Blocks: The Firm the NYT Named as Terakeet's Closest Competitor
• The legal question — Is Search Result Suppression Legal?

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Reputation Management Cluster

This profile is part of Everything-PR's ongoing trade coverage of the Reputation Management industry. Related firm profiles:

• Status Labs
• Terakeet
• Reputation.com
• BrandYourself
• NetReputation
• ReputationDefender
• WebiMax
• Igniyte

Master pillar: Reputation Management on Everything-PR · PR Firms Directory.