A founder in Pune searches her own company’s name and finds a forum thread calling the business a fraud on the first page. A clinic in Chennai has a review that names a doctor and describes a procedure that never happened. Both then search for the best online reputation management company in India, and both land on the same kind of page.

That page is a listicle. It ranks ten or twelve firms, and it was written by one of them. Very few of the companies on it publish what they charge, how long their work takes or how often it fails. That makes the category hard to assess, and the sensible response is to judge a reputation management agency on what it puts in writing rather than on what it calls itself.