You look yourself up and find somebody else. That's a different problem than not showing up at all, and it doesn't have one fix. It has four, depending on which version you've got.

• A genuinely famous person has your name. If you're a financial advisor named Tom Brady, you're not winning that search and you shouldn't spend a dollar trying. What works is owning the searches people actually type when they're ready to hire: your name plus your occupation, your name plus your city, your name plus your company.
• Someone with your name does something similar to what you do. This one is worse, because a machine may not just rank them above you. It may decide you're the same person and merge you, and then you inherit their reviews, their license status, their complaints. The fix isn't ranking, it's separation.
• The thing outranking you is an old version of you. An old employer bio, a directory with your former company, a scraper site from 2019. When sources disagree about basic facts, confidence in the whole picture drops, and an assistant that would have named you gives a different answer instead.
• You're competing with yourself. Two LinkedIn profiles, an old page for a rebranded business, a personal and a professional account both half filled in. Three partial profiles dilute each other where one complete profile would convince.

Brett K. Moore walks through how to diagnose which one you have in about ten minutes, why correction beats demanding removal on scraper sites, and the one thing that helps in every version: stating directly in schema markup that a given person is the same person as a specific set of profiles.

Chapters

0:00 When you look yourself up and find somebody else

0:36 Four versions of the problem, four different fixes

0:56 Problem one: a famous person has your name

1:13 Go after name plus occupation instead

2:13 Problem two: someone similar with your name

2:43 What happens when a machine merges two people

3:14 Separation: the middle initial and distinct connections

3:59 Problem three: an old version of you

4:29 Why contradictions keep your name out of AI answers

5:11 Correction beats removal

5:40 Problem four: competing with yourself

6:40 How to diagnose which one you have

7:23 Matching the fix to the problem

7:53 Schema markup and Wikidata

8:53 Close

About the show

Best Known is hosted by Brett K. Moore, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Best Known Brand (brettkmoore.com). Co-hosted by Mike Partners, Co-founder and Chief AI Officer (mike.partners), and Russ Laggan, Co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer. Best Known Brand is at bestknownbrand.com.

Brett K. Moore and Mike Partners are the co-authors of AI or Die.