what do you actually do when a bad review starts hurting your business?

i'm curious how other small business owners handle this because i'm honestly getting pretty frustrated.

we recently had a couple of negative reviews show up on trustpilot that we believe aren't from real customers. we contacted their support and provided what evidence we had, but didn't really get anywhere.

the frustrating part is that these reviews are now one of the first things people see when they search for our company. we've had actual customers tell us they were happy with us, but i'm starting to wonder how many potential customers see those 1-star ratings and never even give us a chance.

i know some people will say "just get more positive reviews," and we're obviously doing that. but it doesn't really solve the problem when the negative page itself is still sitting prominently in the search results.

i started looking into whether we could just get our own positive content to rank higher and push that page out of the way. i saw a few names mentioned online for this kind of thing, like loganix and buylinkpro, but it honestly feels like a gamble. i really don't want to waste my budget if google is just going to keep that review site at the top anyway.

for those of you who've dealt with something similar, what actually worked?

did you focus on getting more legitimate reviews, getting outside help to shift the search results around, or just accept that u can't control what people say online?

i'm less interested in the perfect strategy and more interested in what actually made a difference for a real small business.