The team is split roughly evenly between client-facing and engineering. On the client side: account managers (the senior advisors who run the engagements), Wikipedia specialists (trained in Notability, NPOV, sourcing standards, and disclosed COI editing), AI analysts (interpreting AIQ™ data and engine behavior), search strategists, content writers, and researchers. On the engineering side: software engineers, data engineers, and machine learning analysts who build and maintain IMPACT™, AIQ, and WikiAlerts™. People come in from technology, academia, communications, public relations, law, and journalism backgrounds. The mix is intentional: reputation work needs both the technical depth to understand what the algorithms are doing and the editorial judgment to know how to write for them.

Five Blocks is a digital reputation management firm founded in 2003 and headquartered in New York. We work with Fortune 500 companies, financial institutions, law firms, public affairs firms, and high-profile individuals across five continents. The work spans three layers of the modern reputation stack: Google search and SERP features (tracked at scale through our IMPACT™ platform), Wikipedia and Wikidata (where we do disclosed COI editing on behalf of clients), and the AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI Overviews) that increasingly mediate what people learn about a company before they ever click a link. Our methodology is Track / Analyze / Impact: diagnose the current state with data, identify the sources actually shaping perception, then intervene at those sources rather than at the visible layer.

Sam Michelson founded the company in 2003 as an e-commerce and online marketing firm. By 2007 it was clear that the search expertise we had built for clients trying to be found by customers was the same expertise required for clients trying to manage what was being said about them, and we pivoted. Reputation management has been the sole focus since.

Sam Michelson founded Five Blocks in 2003 and continues to serve as CEO. He holds two U.S. patents in search-related technology, contributes to Forbes and Entrepreneur, and is one of the longer-tenured operators in digital reputation management. The firm predates Google Knowledge Panels, Wikipedia’s modern Notability standards, and every current AI answer engine.

Five Blocks is headquartered in New York City at 450 Lexington Avenue, with our technology and product development team in Jerusalem. The split is deliberate. New York keeps us close to the financial, legal, and communications advisors we partner with most often, while Jerusalem houses the engineering teams that build and maintain our IMPACT™ and AIQ™ platforms. We serve clients on five continents.

We are roughly 70 people, organized into two halves of the business. New York runs client advisory: senior account managers who sit on weekly calls with CCOs and general counsel, plus the research and content teams that produce the work product. Jerusalem runs engineering: the developers, data engineers, and analysts who maintain IMPACT™, AIQ™, and WikiAlerts™ and process the daily data flow that supports the advisory side. Team members come in from technology, academia, communications, public relations, and law backgrounds.