§ 01
Rapid response and media handling
Holding statements, a message bank, a Q and A document for the hard questions, reporter triage, and one named point of contact so nobody inside your company answers a call they should not be taking.
The crisis PR agency that is working the story in hours, not next week
While the story moves through reporter inboxes, search results, and the AI answers your customers check you against, we read the exposure, write the statement, handle the reporters, and protect what people find when they search your name six months from now. Response times, deliverables, and recovery targets go in writing before kickoff, behind a 100% guarantee: you get the agreed results or your money back.
The first 24 hourswhat happens while the story is still moving
The stakes
What the first 24 hours actually cost you
Nobody shops for a crisis PR agency on a calm Tuesday. You are reading this because a reporter has emailed a deadline, a video is climbing, a regulator has called, or a former employee posted something your board has now seen.
The clock is the whole problem. Six hours of silence reads as guilt. A holding statement written by whoever was awake hardens the narrative and hands the next reporter a fresh angle. A single wrong sentence in a live interview undoes a month of careful work. And while your team argues about wording, the coverage is being indexed.
That is the bill people underestimate. The news cycle ends. The negative coverage does not. Three months later a buyer types your company name and page one is built entirely out of the worst week you ever had, ChatGPT summarizes the allegation as settled fact, and your sales team is answering for it on every call. Reputational damage is a search problem long after it stops being a press problem, which is exactly why most crisis firms hand you back a clean news cycle and a ruined brand name.
The work
What our crisis communications agency actually does
We work data breaches, product recalls, executive misconduct, regulatory investigations, litigation communications, consumer backlash and boycotts, social media crises, workplace disputes, ESG controversies, financial allegations, and leadership transitions gone public.
Crisis handbookruns at 2 a.m.
§ 02
Narrative and stakeholder communications
Employees, customers, investors, partners, regulators, and the board get sequenced messages that all say the same thing, because contradiction is the story that outlives the original one.
§ 03
Spokesperson and media training
We rehearse the questions the reporter will actually ask, on camera, before the camera is real.
§ 04
Monitoring and detection
Around the clock tracking of coverage, social platforms, review sites, and forums, with sentiment, share of voice, and pickup reported daily while the story is live.
§ 05
Reputation recovery and search suppression
Once the acute phase passes, we rebuild what ranks for your brand name with earned placements and owned assets.
§ 06
Crisis preparedness
Threat assessment, vulnerability audit, antagonist and influencer mapping, scenario simulations, a written crisis communication plan, a dark site ready to publish, and a crisis handbook your duty manager can run at 2 a.m.
Full media relations capability sits here and the wider PR menu here.
The log
How we run a live crisis
H+1hour one
Hour one: contact and containment.
You reach a senior strategist, not a form and not an account coordinator. We reply within 1 to 2 hours as standard, and once engaged we are operational in hours rather than days. The first call covers the facts, who else knows, what the legal exposure looks like, and what must not be said today.
H+2to 12hours two to twelve
Hours two to twelve: assessment and first statement.
Stakeholder map, exposure read across press and social, a holding statement approved by you and your counsel, and direct contact with the reporters already working the story so your version is in the file before deadline.
D+2to 14days two to fourteen
Days two to fourteen: the response.
Spokesperson prep, interview handling, proactive placement of the correcting facts, daily monitoring, and an escalation path if the story jumps tiers.
W+3onwardweek three onward
Week three onward: recovery.
Positive earned coverage aimed at the searches that matter, entity and schema cleanup, and a written preparedness plan so the next one is handled instead of survived.
AI answers
What ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews say about you during a crisis
Not one competing agency page mentions this, and it is now half the damage.
Your customers, candidates, and partners no longer read the article. They ask an AI engine whether you are safe to do business with, and the answer is assembled from whatever is indexed, repeated, and easy to verify. One wave of negative coverage with nothing credible published alongside it becomes the model's settled summary of your company, repeated in every zero click answer for months.
So we treat generative engine optimization as part of crisis work, not a separate invoice. That means publishing authoritative owned content that states the facts plainly, earning coverage that gives the models something newer and better sourced to cite, cleaning up entity signals and structured data across your site, and tracking what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews actually say about you week by week. PR and search sit in the same team here, which is the only way this works. See AI SEO and digital PR.
Why AceIt
Why hire AceIt as your crisis PR agency
Every firm competing for this search asks you to sign a five figure retainer during the worst week of your professional career, and not one of them puts anything behind it.
That is the trade this category has always offered. You are frightened, you are in a hurry, and the invoice clears whether the story dies on Thursday or runs for a month. Six months on you are still paying for a phone that rarely rings, the damaging articles still rank for your brand name, and the only deliverable anyone can point at is a monitoring dashboard.
We moved that risk to our side of the table. Response times, statement turnaround, monitoring cadence, deliverables, and the recovery targets we are aiming at go in writing before kickoff, and if we do not deliver what we committed to, on the timeline we committed to, you get your money back. What sits inside that guarantee is the work and the deliverables you signed off, not a promise that a named editor kills a named story. Nobody honest sells you another person's decision, and saying so out loud is exactly what makes the refund worth signing.
Three ways to sort your shortlist:
give you a name the board recognizes, global offices, and legal coordination, then hand your day to day to staff who learned your business on Monday. No refund clause exists anywhere in that contract.
Refund clause · noneDay to day · learned you Monday
give you the founder on the phone and very little after that. Most cannot touch what ranks for your name afterwards, because search is another company's problem.
Refund clause · noneSearch afterwards · not theirs
runs PR, SEO and GEO, and web as one senior team out of Austin, replies in 1 to 2 hours, agrees the targets in writing, and stands behind them with a refund.
Refund clause · in writingSearch afterwards · same team
Receipts
Proof, and the one thing we will not show you
Crisis file · sealed
We do not name crisis clients. That is policy.
Any agency that walks you through a named crisis engagement in a sales meeting is showing you precisely how it will handle yours.
What we can show you is the recovery half of the job, because it uses the same muscle. One anonymized Forbes feature returned 4,200+ visits, a 38% rise in branded search, a DA 94 backlink, and 12 secondary pickups, which is precisely the shape of pushing new coverage over old. That program has secured 50+ placements across 12+ industries. On the campaign side, our organic PR carried over 1 million brand impressions for Vezbi, a community super app, through its U.S. expansion.
4,200+Visits one anonymized Forbes feature returned, with a 38% rise in branded search and 12 secondary pickups
DA 94Authority of the backlink that same feature earned, the shape of pushing new coverage over old
50+Forbes placements secured across 12+ industries
1M+Brand impressions organic PR carried for Vezbi through its U.S. expansion
Clients have been featured in
Clients have been featured in Forbes, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, USA Today Network, Inc., Wired, Adweek, Fast Company, New York Post, and Entrepreneur.
The number
What a crisis management agency costs
No agency page competing for this search publishes a number, so start with the market. Published roundups in this category put crisis retainers at roughly $10,000 to $50,000 a month, with acute response engagements at $25,000 to $150,000 and up once a story goes national. The enterprise names bill against the top of that range and will not quote you until after a discovery process you are paying for in the only currency you are short of.
An on call retainer
Keeps a senior team briefed on your business, your vulnerabilities, and your spokespeople before anything happens.
A project fee
For a live incident, with scope written down before we begin. Individual placements are priced one at a time, so you approve the outlet and the cost before money moves.
Ours is plainer. Two models: an on call retainer that keeps a senior team briefed on your business, your vulnerabilities, and your spokespeople before anything happens, or a project fee for a live incident with scope written down before we begin. Individual placements are priced one at a time, so you approve the outlet and the cost before money moves, on the pricing page. Forbes campaigns are scoped and priced in writing before kickoff. Programs that pair earned media with search run mid five figures to six figures annually. Pricing is settled on the strategy call, not three emails later.
The honest filter
Who we take on, and who we turn down
We take onit fits
- Technology and SaaS companies
- Healthcare and life sciences organizations
- Financial services firms, manufacturers, ecommerce and consumer brands
- Professional services and law firms
- Corporate teams carrying board and investor exposure
- Growing companies that the enterprise firms will not take a call from, which is most of the market this SERP ignores
We turn downon the first call
- Anyone who wants a story deleted from the internet
- Anyone asking us to mislead a reporter
- Anyone who wants something buried that a regulator, a court, or a customer has a right to see
We will tell you that on the first call rather than take a retainer and discover it in week three.
Questions
Asked before every crisis engagement
Anything else, email [email protected] and it comes back in 1 to 2 hours.
A crisis PR firm protects a company's reputation while a damaging story is live and rebuilds it afterwards. The work covers assessing the exposure, writing holding statements and a message bank, handling reporters and interviews, coordinating with legal counsel, training spokespeople, communicating with employees, customers, investors and regulators, monitoring coverage and sentiment, then repairing what ranks in search and appears in AI answers once the news cycle ends.
The right answer is hours, not days. We reply within 1 to 2 hours as standard and are operational in hours rather than days, which means assessment, stakeholder mapping, and a first statement while a slower agency is still booking a kickoff call. Ask any firm you shortlist to put its response time in the contract. If it will not, that number is marketing rather than a commitment.
Establish the facts before saying anything, and appoint one spokesperson so your company speaks with a single voice. Then issue a holding statement that acknowledges the situation without speculating, brief employees before they read it externally, notify affected customers and regulators, and start monitoring coverage and social sentiment. Silence and deflection both make the second day worse than the first.
The acute phase usually runs one to three weeks. Search and AI recovery takes longer, because you are replacing what ranks rather than deleting it, and meaningful movement in organic visibility typically takes 6 to 12 months of consistent earned coverage and owned content. A crisis communications agency that promises to erase results in 30 days is selling you something it cannot deliver.
Yes, and it is the cheapest work in this category. A prepared client has a message bank, an approved holding statement, a dark site ready to publish, a stakeholder contact tree, a trained spokesperson, and a decision chain that does not require finding a director at midnight. Preparation is what keeps a bad day from becoming a bad quarter, and it costs a fraction of an acute response fee.
Offline crisis management handles the press cycle: reporters, broadcast interviews, statements, and stakeholder briefings, mostly over days. Online crisis management handles what persists: search results for your brand name, social platforms and forums, review sites, and what AI engines cite about you. A crisis management agency that only does the first leaves you invisible damage that compounds for months after the story stops.
Next step
Tell us what happened, and we will tell you what we would do today
Send the situation, your deadline, and the name of the reporter if there is one. You get back the exposure read, the statement approach, who we would contact first, and the response times we will put in writing. Every engagement carries a 100% guarantee: you get the agreed results or your money back.
Every engagement carries a 100% guarantee: you get the agreed results or your money back