In conclusion, changing the autocomplete for Google or other search engines can be done, but it can be a bit of a lengthy process. In fact, it could potentially take years and there is no guarantee it will ever work, if there were enough negative searches about you or your company.
It could potentially take several months, so this is by no means something that can happen overnight most of the time.
If it was a relatively small and unpopular issue, it will be quicker than if you were hacked and thousands of people were affected. The amount of time it will actually take to fully or partially remove all of the desired negative predictions will vary depending on how large your mishap was. Each company or provider will have their own strategy, and many can also help you in other areas such as improving your SEO and improving your rankings in Google. Instead of making all of the searches yourself, you are better off working with an online marketing agency ( ) as they often will have solutions or strategies that can help you quicker, efficiently and more effectively. But in general, enough authentic and real positive searches will eventually hide the negative ones. The production and promotion of online content could potentially help, as well. The only way this can happen is by having a lot of organic positive searches from different computers, which will eventually overtake the amount of negative searches you had in the past.
If you want to change the autocomplete for your name or company, it involves replacing those negative predictions with positive ones. Thankfully, it is possible to change and influence the Google autocomplete predictions that are given to users. People make lightning-quick judgements, so if the first thing a person sees is a bunch of negative keywords when they search your company’s name, they would likely make the wrong first impression. This obviously isn’t great for business and can hurt brands in a big way, for a very long time depending on the severity of what took place and how recent it was. However, while this autocomplete functionality is great for some of us who are searching for something in particular, it can be a source of a lot of stress and hardships for some individuals or companies.īecause it is based on real searches, if a person/company was in the press for a negative reason or has a bad online reputation, this will likely show up in in the predictions when you search their name or company. This often makes it simpler if you have the searching tendencies of the average person in your country, but may not help if you are looking for something niche or unpopular. While there are likely other factors in play as well, how popular a search term is will be a big factor in if it shows up as a suggestion or not. For example, if you search the word “best” into Google, it will provide results such as “best buy”, “best company to work for” and more.īasically, this feature is supposed to allow for quicker human-computer interactions as these suggestions are often based on popular searches by other real people, so the algorithm lists them first. This feature will allow users to see a list of a few predictions of what the search engine believes you might be searching for from the first few letters or words in your query. When searching on Google or other search engines, you have the ability to use a feature called autocomplete, which is known by many people as “autofill”.