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.

Five Blocks is privately held. There is no outside ownership and no obligation to disclose client work, financial performance, or internal priorities to anyone outside the firm. For the kind of reputation work we are hired to do, that matters: the engagements are confidential by definition, and clients want to know there is no third party in the room with a different agenda.

Five Blocks is a profitable, founder-led firm of around 70 people, and the culture reflects that. Decisions are made on data, not opinion: IMPACT™ and AIQ™ run continuously and most internal arguments are settled by going to look at the numbers. We hire for technical depth across SEO, Wikipedia, structured data, and AI engine behavior, and for the ability to sit on a call with a chief communications officer or general counsel and explain what is actually happening without jargon. The Jerusalem office offers a gym, catered lunch, and flex-time, which helps retain the engineering talent the platforms depend on.

Five Blocks is a tech-enabled services firm, which means we build the tools the advisory team needs rather than buying off-the-shelf or relying on what general SEO platforms happen to report. Four proprietary platforms support the work. IMPACT™ monitors Google search results, SERP features, and reputation signals at scale, processing more than 100 million daily data points across 50,000+ keywords. AIQ™ monitors what AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Claude, Google AI Overviews) say about a brand or person and is available both as a service component and as a self-serve SaaS. WikiAlerts™ tracks Wikipedia article changes in real time and is freely available at wikialerts.fiveblocks.com. GeoSearch lets us run a query as a user would see it from any specific location and language, which matters constantly for international clients and for any reputation work that varies by geography.

Five Blocks has been doing digital reputation work since 2003 and has been focused exclusively on it since 2007. The client base spans Fortune 500 companies, financial institutions, hedge funds, public and political affairs firms, law firms, and individual executives operating at the senior-most levels of business, finance, and public life. Most engagements come through referral from the major PR firms, public affairs shops, and law firms that have worked with us repeatedly across multiple clients. We are not the largest firm in this category, but we have been doing the work for longer than most.

Most firms in this category sell tactics. We sell a methodology. The first phase is Track: a structured diagnostic of the client's existing digital footprint across Google search results and SERP features, the Knowledge Graph and Wikipedia, the AI answer engines, and the sources those engines draw from. The second phase is Analyze: identifying which sources are actually shaping the narrative (which articles are being cited, which Wikipedia sentences are being quoted, which competitors are appearing alongside the client in AI responses) and where the leverage points sit. The third phase is Impact: working at the source layer rather than at the visible layer, improving the authority and clarity of the inputs the engines weight most. This is the discipline behind what we call writing for the extract, and it is the reason our work shows up in AI Overviews and ChatGPT responses where superficial tactics fail.

Sam Michelson founded Five Blocks in 2003 and continues to serve as CEO. The senior team includes leaders responsible for business development, marketing, operations, account management, and engineering, drawn from backgrounds in technology, communications, financial services, and public affairs. A current leadership roster is maintained at fiveblocks.com/about-us/leadership.

Reputation work is taught, not assumed. New account managers go through a structured technical curriculum covering search algorithms, Wikipedia editing standards and Notability guidelines, schema markup and Wikidata, AI engine behavior, and the use of IMPACT™ and AIQ™ as analytical tools. After the curriculum, they shadow senior account managers on actual client engagements before being assigned independent responsibility for a client, and even then they work under a dedicated team leader for the first set of accounts. The result is a deeper bench than most agencies our size: when a senior advisor is unavailable on a Friday afternoon, the next person on the call has been through the same training and is reading from the same playbook.

The category changes faster than any service-only firm can react to, so we run the monitoring ourselves. IMPACT™ processes more than 100 million daily data points across 50,000+ keywords, which means a Google ranking shift, a new SERP feature, or a sudden change in how an AI Overview is being generated shows up in our data within hours. AIQ™ tracks the same kinds of shifts inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews: which sources they are weighting, which entities they are connecting, which competitors are appearing alongside the client for a given query. The R&D team analyzes the patterns, the account management team uses the findings on live engagements, and the field observations flow back into the platforms. The compounding effect over twenty years is most of why our advice tends to anticipate where the engines are going rather than react to where they have been.

Five Blocks predates the company. The domain was first used by Sam Michelson and his siblings for various early online projects in the late 1990s and early 2000s. When the company was founded in 2003, Sam acquired the domain from his family and adopted the name. There is no deeper symbolism, no acronym, and no clever brand story: the name was already on hand and it stuck.

The firm has gone through four phases in twenty-plus years. The first, from 2003 to 2007, was e-commerce and online marketing: we were a search firm helping clients be found. The second, beginning in 2007, was the pivot to reputation management - the same search expertise applied in the other direction, helping clients shape what was being found about them. The third, through the 2010s, added Wikipedia, Wikidata, and entity optimization as Google moved toward the Knowledge Graph and away from a pure ten-blue-links results page. The fourth, accelerating from 2023, is AI reputation management: tracking and influencing what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews say about clients. We built AIQ™ in-house to support that work, the same way IMPACT™ was built to support the search era.

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.