Employer review sites follow different rules, and most businesses get the strategy exactly backwards.
A negative Glassdoor or AmbitionBox review feels like a customer complaint, so companies respond as though it were one. That instinct causes most of the damage that follows.
Here is what these platforms actually remove, what they do not, and why the most common response makes things worse.
What Glassdoor and AmbitionBox will remove
- Reviews naming individuals. Both platforms prohibit identifying non-executive employees by name. A review naming your HR manager and describing her conduct is actionable on that ground alone.
- Confidential business information. Unreleased financials, client names, product roadmaps, anything under NDA.
- Slurs, threats and harassment. Discriminatory language, threats of violence, sexual content.
- Reviews from people who never worked there. Competitors, rejected candidates posing as employees, personal disputes.
- Duplicate reviews. The same person posting repeatedly about the same tenure.
- Legal allegations stated as fact. Some claims about ongoing litigation or specific illegal conduct get removed pending substantiation.
What they will not remove
A genuine former employee’s honest negative opinion about working for you. Ever.
Both platforms exist specifically to host that content, and their entire value proposition depends on not removing it on employer request. “This review is unfair and damaging our hiring” is not a ground. It is a description of the platform working as designed.
This includes reviews that are exaggerated, one-sided, written in anger, or that describe a situation you remember differently. Unless it breaches a specific written rule, it stays.
The mistake that turns a review into a crisis
Asking current employees to post positive reviews.
It is the most common response and the most dangerous one. Consider what actually happens:
Platforms detect review clusters — a sudden burst of five-star reviews from new accounts, posted in a narrow window, using similar language. Both Glassdoor and AmbitionBox have publicly flagged employers for this, and the resulting notice on your profile is far worse than the original review.
More importantly, you have now asked employees to do something many will find uncomfortable. Some will refuse. Some will comply and resent it. And at least one will screenshot the request and post it — which becomes a much better story than a two-star review ever was.
There is also a legal dimension. Pressuring employees to make public statements about their employment, particularly where refusal might affect their standing, is territory you do not want to be in.
What actually works
1. Report what genuinely breaches the rules. Read the review carefully for named individuals, confidential information, or claims that the person worked in a role they did not. Cite the specific policy. Do not report the whole review as “false” if only one line is actionable.
2. Respond once, briefly, and without defensiveness. Your reply is for candidates reading in six months, not for the reviewer. Acknowledge the theme without disputing details, state what you are doing differently, and stop. Never argue about whether the events happened.
3. Build genuine review volume, properly. Not by asking for five stars. By asking departing and current employees to leave an honest review as a matter of routine — at exit interviews, at annual reviews. Some will be critical. That is fine, and the mix is what makes the profile credible.
4. Fix the thing. If three separate reviews mention the same manager, the same pay issue, or the same working hours, that is data, not an attack. No review strategy survives an unresolved problem that keeps generating new reviews.
On AmbitionBox specifically
AmbitionBox carries particular weight in the Indian market because candidates use it alongside Naukri during active job searches. Its salary and interview sections often matter more to candidates than the review text.
Practical consequence: incomplete or inaccurate salary data on your profile can hurt you more than a negative review. Claiming your profile and ensuring the basic information is correct is free and frequently skipped.
When a review wave is coordinated
Sometimes it genuinely is an attack — a competitor, or a group of former employees acting together after a mass exit.
The case is in the pattern, not the individual reviews: account creation dates clustered together, similar phrasing, tenure claims that do not match your records, timing aligned to a specific event. That has to be documented across the whole set and submitted as one case, with evidence. Reporting each review separately gets each one rejected separately.
An honest summary
- Reviews naming individuals or leaking confidential information: usually removable
- Reviews from non-employees: removable with evidence
- An honest negative opinion: not removable, by anyone, at any price
- Buying or soliciting positive reviews: creates a bigger problem than the one you started with
- Coordinated attacks: addressable, but need pattern documentation rather than individual reports
Send us the profile through our review removal assessment and we will tell you which reviews have genuine grounds and which do not — including when the answer is that you have an internal problem rather than a reputation problem.
Remove Negative Articles is an online reputation management company. We are not a law firm and do not provide legal advice; references to legislation and case law are general information, not advice on your situation. Where a matter requires it, we work alongside licensed counsel. Outcomes cannot be guaranteed in advance.