BrandYourself review [2024]: Is it worth it?

BrandYourself is an online reputation management company that offers a suite of software and services for individuals and businesses. The company was founded in 2010 by Syracuse University students Evan McGowan-Watson, Patrick Ambron, and Pete Kistler, and currently has offices in New York and Pennsylvania.

BrandYourself promises to suppress negative Google search results, clean up social media profiles, remove information from data brokers, and help establish a positive personal or business brand image. We signed up for the service to see how it stacks up to competitors and if it’s worth the investment. Find out what we learned in our review.

Pros and cons of BrandYourself

How BrandYourself works

Services for individuals

BrandYourself offers individuals a range of tools designed to protect online privacy and improve online reputation.

Software:

• Free reputation report: Also called a free “risk scan”, this tool assigns a privacy risk level based on the amount of personal information it finds about you online.
• Reputation management software: BrandYourself analyzes your digital footprint and identifies threats to your online reputation. The software uses machine learning to evaluate Google search results, social posts, and online images. Then, it creates an action plan to improve your personal brand. For example, it might recommend improving LinkedIn profiles, finding and deleting old accounts, or creating a personal website for search engine optimization (SEO).
• Social media cleanup software: This tool identifies social media posts and comments that could damage your reputation, then tells you how to clean them up.
• Data broker removal: Data brokers – especially people-search sites – make it easy for anyone to find your personal information, from former classmates and family members to telemarketers and scammers. BrandYourself scans 115+ brokers to see which have your sensitive information, then submits opt-out requests on your behalf.
• Dark web scan: The name is a little misleading as it’s virtually impossible to scan the dark web entirely due to the complexity of its networks. What this service really does is search for your personal info in known data breaches that are likely available on the dark web.

Services:

• Reputation management: BrandYourself experts remove negative Google results, when possible, then create positive content about you on blogs, social media, and other web pages. They’ll also build a personal website to establish a strong online presence through SEO. The goal is to make favorable content outrank unflattering content (such as court documents, news articles, and photos) so that prospective employers and others only see the good content.
• Personal branding: BrandYourself experts help you create a personal brand with a strong online presence. They build websites and profiles that cast you in a positive light, publish blog and social media posts that position you as a thought leader in your industry, help you build an audience, and identify press, speaking, and career opportunities.

Services for Businesses

BrandYourself also offers tools to help companies clean up and improve their online reputation:

• Negative Google results removal: BrandYourself experts will work to remove eligible Google search results, including unfair complaints. Then, they’ll employ search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, content marketing, social media marketing, and other tactics to help positive information about your business outrank any negative information.
• Online review management: BrandYourself develops a strategy to counteract negative reviews with positive ones, including a review outreach program for sites that have business profiles such as Yelp, Google, and Trustpilot.
• Glassdoor review management: While the online review management service focuses on reviews customers read, BrandYourself’s Glassdoor review management focuses on prospective employees. They help businesses build a strategy that fosters favorable employee reviews.
• Employee branding: This is essentially a personal branding service for each employee at your business. BrandYourself helps employees build positive online reputations, which in turn helps your business reputation and can even help you get more leads and sales.

Our user experience with BrandYourself

We started with the free risk scan, which only asked us to enter our name before taking us to an account creation page where we needed to add our email address and create a password.

Once on the dashboard, the system asked for our age and location, then started the free scan. The process only took a few minutes, after which the platform revealed our online privacy risk, which is “high.”

Below the privacy risk chart, the dashboard depicts three boxes evaluating exposure risk and one with a checklist outlining our next steps to protect our privacy. The exposure sections address exposed private info (profiles found on data broker websites), dark web breaches (our sensitive information found in known data breaches), and old accounts storing our data.

Then, there is a section describing the benefits of protecting online privacy, the sensitivity of personal information, and a call to upgrade to paid services.

To see what data brokers BrandYourself found our profiles on, we opened the “Protect Private Info” part of the dashboard. There, we found a list of 115+ brokers BrandYourself covers and, presumably, scans. 

While BrandYourself samples what private information is available on each data broker, it doesn’t provide any screenshots or links to pages where the information is allegedly exposed. So, to remove our profiles manually, we’d have to go to each site one by one and look up our profiles ourselves. We would also have to find the opt-out pages and forms on each site since the dashboard doesn’t provide any removal instructions.

Moreover, while some brokers have our info marked as “Exposed,” a lot more sites have a “Possibly exposed” status. This has us questioning whether BrandYourself actually scanned the brokers for our information. If our data was exposed, wouldn’t the scan find it?

After examining the data brokers tab, we opened the Dark Web Scan tab which listed three data breaches our information has been exposed in. Every breach has a description of what happened along with DIY instructions to protect yourself. 

Below, the page also lists 800+ known data breaches BrandYourself scans.

After the “Dark Web Scan” goes the “Delete Old Accounts” tab. The tab can sync to your email account and scan it to find what third-party services and platforms you signed up for using this email. This will help you find old accounts you no longer use and may have even forgotten about and delete them.

Besides the described above, the dashboard also has the following tabs:

• Clean Up Social Media: Scans your social media content to find any inappropriate or controversial posts and photos that could damage your reputation and employment prospects.
• Improve Google results: Analyzes your visibility on Google and helps optimize positive links and content so that they appear higher in the search results.
• Build Personal Brand: Provides a checklist of action points to build a strong personal brand online.
• Reputation Report: Summarizes all the information about your online exposure from all the tabs.

Overall, we found the dashboard easy to use and understand. We liked that it helped evaluate our online presence from different angles. A great advantage is that it provides some guides and action points for free.

However, we believe that some tabs lack valuable information. For example, the page about data brokers provided neither comprehensive insight into our exposure nor instructions on how to opt out.

BrandYourself customer reviews

At the time of this writing, BrandYourself has an “F” Better Business Bureau rating and is not BBB accredited. The company has a “poor” rating on Trustpilot, earning 1.9 stars out of 5 based on 73 reviews. It also has a 3.5-star rating on G2 based on 17 reviews.

BrandYourself positive customer reviews state the service:

• Has responsive customer service (Trustpilot)
• Removes personal information online and reduces spam calls (Trustpilot)
• Helps clean up social media (G2)
• Is a great tool for managing search results (G2)

Negative BrandYourself reviews state the service:

• Is a scam and that much of the information it says is negative is really “false positives” (Trustpilot)
• Has poor customer support (Trustpilot)
• Has poor search engine optimization (SEO) results (G2)
• Is a scam (G2)

Overall, we find it confusing that a company that provides online reputation and review services for businesses has such poor ratings itself. If BrandYourself is as effective as they claim, why don’t they improve their own online reputation?

How much does BrandYourself cost?

BrandYourself doesn’t publish pricing on its website, but after creating a free account, the platform offered us an upgrade to its “Protect Private Info” plan for $49.99/month or $299.99/year. The dashboard states that, under the paid plan, clients get removal from 115+ data brokers with ongoing monitoring. It also offers a couple of add-ons for an extra fee: dark web alerts, Google search results improvement, and social media clean-up.

Since there’s no pricing available for reputation management and personal branding services on the site and in the dashboard, we reached out to BrandYourself’s support team. They replied that the monthly payment ranges from $800 to $1,000. This should include a BrandYourself-managed tailored-to-you strategy to build strong personal branding. What exactly that involves depends on each person and their own case. 

Whether the investment is worth it or you should choose another reputation management service is for you to decide. We recommend reading reviews of users who bought the same features you’re looking into and basing your opinion on that. 

However, if your goal is opting out of data brokers, we recommend skipping BrandYourself and committing to a service that covers more sites and provides more comprehensive information about your exposure at a lower price.