A New York Times investigation published May 17 detailed the inner workings of Terakeet — and, with them, much of the largely unseen machinery of high-end reputation management.
The Syracuse, New York firm spent roughly 20 months on a single assignment for Goldman Sachs: neutralize what one internal memo reportedly called an "association risk problem." The risk was Goldman general counsel Kathryn Ruemmler's documented friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex trafficker. Ruemmler's name had surfaced in the Justice Department's Epstein files, and Goldman became one of Terakeet's largest accounts. The brief, in plain terms: reshape what users encountered when they searched her name.
The mechanics
According to the Times, which obtained an audio recording of an April 2024 strategy meeting, Terakeet set a specific target — at least 80% of the first 30 Google results for Ruemmler's name should be favorable. The method was not removal. It was displacement: the firm produced positive content — profiles, articles, optimized owned assets — built to outrank the Epstein coverage and move it onto the later results that draw little traffic.
The work did not produce the intended outcome. Ruemmler announced her resignation from Goldman Sachs on February 12. Search her name today and the first result is a Wikipedia page whose opening lines state she resigned over her links to a child sex offender. Twenty months. Tens of millions of dollars. Beaten by a single encyclopedia entry.
The economics
Terakeet is not a fringe operator. It reports revenue in the range of $100 million and has worked across the Fortune 500. The Times reported that most clients can expect annual fees between $5 million and $10 million — a figure competitors described as well beyond their own. The full pricing of the category is broken down in a separate piece in this series.
What the story exposes
Read narrowly, this is a story about one firm and one disappointing client outcome. Read accurately, it describes an operating model used across the upper end of the industry.
That model rests on a single assumption: that a reputation is, functionally, a set of search results — and that search results can be rearranged. Build content. Optimize it. Move the negative material down. Bill the retainer. The Terakeet investigation is simply the most detailed public look at a process many firms run every day.
Why the model is under strain
The exposé arrives as the assumptions beneath it weaken. Two reasons.
First, exposure. Displacement work depends on not being recognized as displacement. Once the method is documented — a recording, internal memos, a motivated reporter — the work itself becomes the story. The cleanup becomes the crisis.
Second, and more lasting: the results page is no longer the only place reputation forms. More than a third of consumers now begin research inside AI tools — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. These systems do not return a long list of links to be reordered. They tend to read across many sources and present a single answer. The lever the displacement model pulls — ranking position — has far less to grip in that setting.
The takeaway
The Terakeet investigation will be filed as a scandal. It is also a useful marker: the point at which a long-standing model became materially harder to run safely.
EPR will profile the major firms in this category and examine the economics, the legal exposure, and the strategy now replacing displacement over the coming weeks.
