Nearly a decade into digital marketing and online reputation management, Royston Chua has witnessed the shift from search engine optimisation to AI-driven visibility. The founder of Master Scaling discusses how businesses can protect their reputation, navigate digital crises and adapt to the next era of online trust. Founded in 2018, Master Scaling has grown from a digital marketing agency into a reputation management and content infrastructure business that works across search, media, reviews and emerging AI platforms. Alongside its sister company, Quantum Scaling, the firm helps businesses, entrepreneurs and public figures strengthen their digital presence while navigating an increasingly complex online landscape. In this conversation, Chua reflects on his belief that reputation management is no longer a reactive exercise but a strategic discipline that begins long before a crisis emerges.

You are one of Malaysia’s youngest and promising entrepreneurs. We hear that Master Scaling has quite an intriguing story. Tell us more about it.

Master Scaling actually started from running social media and digital marketing for local businesses. Over the years, we’ve grown to doing digital reputation, both positive PR and negative content removal.

Now it has grown into a content and PR engine that now sits behind a network of publications rather than a single outlet, so the work scales. Founded in 2018-2019, it has grown faster than I expected, enough that we later spun out Quantum Scaling as a separate, more selective offering focused fully on personal brands after we had successfully grown our own personal brand. Being named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Monaco was a nice marker along the way, but honestly the more interesting part of the story is the infrastructure underneath it, the systems that let us do reputation-grade work at a scale most boutique agencies can’t touch.

How many years of experience in digital marketing and online reputation management (ORM) do you personally have?

Close to a decade now, hands-on. I learned by managing millions in advertising spend, liaising with dozens of top media publications, and helping clients resolve their crisis PR management online. I started in digital marketing broadly before specializing in reputation, customer/client acquisition, social media growth and search visibility specifically, once I saw how much damage or benefit a single search result or review thread could do to a business.

What exactly is online reputation management and why does it matter?

Online reputation management is the practice of monitoring, shaping and where necessary, correcting how a person or brand shows up across search engines, review platforms, social media, and now AI answer engines. It matters because that digital first impression happens before almost any human interaction does. A customer checks reviews before they buy. An investor searches a founder’s name before a meeting. A parent searches a school before enrolling their child. What comes up in those first few results, or in the first AI-generated answer, often does more work than any pitch, resume, or sales conversation ever could. Good ORM just makes sure that first impression reflects reality rather than an outdated story, one bad review, or someone else’s agenda.

How do you track what people say online? How do you reply to bad reviews? Can you describe in a few words your working process?

We monitor continuously across search results, review platforms, social mentions, and news coverage for every client, so nothing sits unnoticed for weeks. When something negative comes in, the process is roughly the same every time: verify it’s genuine and understand exactly what went wrong, respond quickly and specifically rather than with a copy-paste template, move the actual resolution to a private channel where it can get properly fixed, then follow up once it’s resolved to see if the person will update their review. Tone matters as much as speed. A defensive or dismissive reply almost always does more damage than the original review, even when the business was technically in the right. In a few words: monitor constantly, verify before reacting, respond like a human, fix the real problem, follow up.

How do you get more happy customers to leave good feedback?

Timing is the biggest lever, ask right after a genuinely good moment, not weeks later in a generic email blast. Friction is the second, if leaving a review takes more than a tap or two, most people simply won’t do it, so the link or QR code needs to be right there at the point of satisfaction. The third is making it personal, a real request from a real staff member consistently outperforms an automated one. What we don’t do is pay for or incentivize reviews. Beyond breaking most platform policies, it shows. Genuine feedback, even short and unpolished, reads completely differently from anything incentivized, and customers can usually tell the difference too.

Who in a company should handle brand image day-to-day?

Ideally there’s one clear owner, usually someone in marketing or communications, but reputation can’t live in a silo. Customer service is often the first to notice a problem forming, sales hears the objections that come from a bad search result, and leadership needs to be looped in the moment something becomes reputational rather than just operational. In smaller companies that owner is often the founder by default, which is fine early on, but it should get handed to someone dedicated as the company grows. Founders are usually the worst-positioned people to respond calmly to criticism of something they built themselves.

What steps stop a sudden online PR crisis? How long does it take to fix a broken brand image?

First, get the facts straight internally before saying anything publicly. A fast wrong response is worse than a slightly slower right one. Second, acknowledge it quickly, even if the full statement takes longer to prepare, because silence reads as guilt whether or not it actually is. Third, centralize communications through one spokesperson so the message doesn’t fragment across different channels and contradict itself. Fourth, and most important, fix the actual underlying issue rather than just the messaging around it, because the crisis comes back if the cause never gets addressed. On timelines, initial containment can happen within days if the response is fast and honest. Full recovery of sentiment and search visibility takes longer, often several weeks for a contained issue, and closer to a year or more if it reached mainstream media or turned into a recurring search result. Anyone promising an overnight fix for a serious crisis is usually overselling.

How do you view the latest developments of AI technologies in an ORM perspective? How substantial the impact amongst your clients?

It’s probably the biggest shift I’ve seen in this field. For years the entire game was ranking in ten blue links. Now a huge share of searches get answered directly by an AI overview or a chatbot, which means the reputation surface has expanded to include how large language models describe a name or brand, not just how a search engine ranks it. That’s a real problem for a lot of businesses because those AI answers pull from a narrower set of sources than a full results page, so fewer, higher-trust citations now carry outsized weight, and an error or an outdated mention can get repeated as fact without anyone noticing for months. For our clients the impact has already been substantial. We’re actively doing work today to understand and influence how AI systems characterise a brand, not just how search engines rank it. It’s no longer optional to think about this.

Is GEO the next big thing in the digital world?

Generative engine optimization is real and moving fast, but I’d push back gently on treating it as some separate next big thing that replaces everything before it. It’s really an extension of the same fundamentals ORM and SEO have always depended on, credible sources, well-structured and clearly cited content, consistency across the web, just applied to a new set of engines that summarize instead of listing. Brands that already had strong, honest digital footprints are adapting to GEO faster than the ones that relied on manipulation, because AI systems seem to weight trust signals even more heavily than traditional search algorithms did. Even the industry hasn’t settled on one name for it yet, you’ll hear GEO, AEO, LLM optimization, all describing the same goal. So yes, it matters enormously. The underlying discipline just hasn’t changed as much as the term suggests.

When is it time to hire an outside ORM agency?

Good rule of thumb: the moment a negative result shows up on the first page for your own name or your company’s name, you’re already behind, so ideally you engage before that happens, not after. Realistically, most people call an agency once there’s already a problem, before a funding round or public listing, after a bad news cycle, or once a crisis has already broken. I’d also say it’s time the moment reputation work starts eating hours that should be going into actually running the business. At that point, doing it internally, slowly, and without real expertise usually costs more than hiring someone who’s good at it.

In a fast-changing environment, how do you keep your ORM knowledge constantly updated? How is your team encouraged to do so?

Platforms change their rules constantly, and search and AI algorithms shift even faster, so we treat staying current almost like a compliance function rather than a nice-to-have. That means tracking platform policy updates, watching how regulation like GDPR and regional data and cybercrime laws affect what’s even possible to do in different markets, and testing new AI tools ourselves before we ever recommend them to a client. For the team, it’s built into the actual workflow rather than treated as separate training. Whoever spots a relevant change shares it immediately, and we adjust our internal guidelines that same week, not the following quarter. In a field moving this fast, being a few months behind is functionally the same as being wrong.

Where do you see Master Scaling in five years? What are the major challenges ahead?

In five years I’d like Master Scaling to be the infrastructure a lot more brands run their reputation and content work on, closer to the engine other agencies and companies plug into rather than something they try to build themselves. We’re already expanding the publication network well beyond where it started, and I expect AI-native monitoring and response to be standard practice by then rather than a differentiator. The bigger challenges honestly aren’t technical. They’re about trust at scale: keeping editorial quality consistent as the network grows, staying ahead of how AI platforms and regulators treat reputation content, and making sure we don’t get lumped in with the lower-quality, spammier end of this industry as it gets more crowded. Top tier talent is the other real constraint. This work needs people who can write and think clearly under pressure, and that’s genuinely hard to hire for at the pace we’re growing.

Additionally, we’re also operating a private equity and brand-building model, partnering with brands and scaling them while taking ownership.

To find out more, head to www.masterscaling.com.

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