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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.
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.
What will you do as the best known brand in your market?
Best Known is a show about AI visibility: how people and companies become the name that comes up when someone asks Google, ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude for a recommendation. Search changed shape. People increasingly ask an assistant instead of scanning a page of links, and an answer engine does not rank pages, it names the businesses and people it recognizes.
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.
Produced by Brett K. Moore and Mike Partners.
Each episode covers the practical work behind answer engine optimization: entity graphs, schema markup, Wikidata, Google Business Profile, and what actually makes a Google Knowledge Panel possible. Built for real estate agents and brokerages, speakers, authors and coaches, and executives building under their own name.
Best Known Brand is at bestknownbrand.com.
All right, this is Best Known. I'm Brett K Moore, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Best Known Brand.
Today I want to talk about what to do when you look yourself up online but you find somebody else.
This comes up constantly, and it's a different problem than not showing up at all online. If nothing about you exists online, that's a building problem. You need one consistent version of your name and your description on every platform that matters, with the links between them pointing both ways. That could be a weekend of work, and it's mostly just typing.
Plenty of people do all of that and still lose the search, because something else is already occupying their name. And you can't fix that just by doing more of the same thing. You have to figure out which version of the problem you have, because there are four of them and they don't really share one solution. They kind of have their own.
First problem is that a genuinely famous person might already have your name.
If you're a financial advisor named Tom Brady, you're not winning that search, ever. And you shouldn't spend a dollar trying. Every hour and every backlink you throw at it is going up against a mountain.
What people do wrong here is they treat it like it's a volume problem. That if they just publish more, or post more, or hope to eventually outweigh the other person. But that's a fight that you're typically going to lose slowly and expensively.
What actually works is just accepting that you're never going to own that bare name, and then going after the search people actually type when they're trying to hire you. Nobody who's about to hire a financial advisor just types Tom Brady into Google and stops. They would type your name and advisor. Or your name plus your city. Or your name plus the company you work for.
Make sure those combinations are locked down cold. Your name and your occupation should appear together, in that order, in your page titles, your profile descriptions and your listings. Not buried in a paragraph. Right up front, where it's the first thing read.
The upside is that this is a better search anyway. Somebody typing your name plus your city is a lot further along than somebody typing just your name.
The second version of this problem is even worse, and it's when someone with your name does something similar to what you do.
So let's say another Sarah Chen who's also in real estate, three cities over. Or the same name in a different profession that's close enough to be confusable.
The reason this is worse than a celebrity situation is that a machine may not just rank her above you. It may decide that you're the same person, and it may merge you.
And when that happens, you inherit whatever's attached to her. Her reviews, good or bad. Maybe even her license status, her complaints, her old business that closed. Somebody looks you up, gets a blended picture of two people, and quietly decides not to call. You'll just never know that that happened.
The fix here isn't ranking, it's separation. You need to give these systems things that pull the two of you apart. And when I say these systems, I mean AI systems or Google search.
So start with your name string. If you've got a middle initial and you've been leaving it off, start using it everywhere, without exception. For example, I go by Brett K Moore for exactly this reason. It's a small change that creates a distinct string, and distinct strings are easier to keep separate.
Then pin yourself to things that the other person isn't connected to. Your city, your company, your license number if your field has one. Or a book, a podcast, a credential, a board you sit on. Relationships separate people far more reliably than keywords do, because a machine can actually check all that stuff.
So here's the practical version. Let's imagine two people named Sarah Chen who both sell real estate, and they look identical on paper. One Sarah Chen who founded a specific company, hosts a specific show, and holds a specific license number, that's unmistakably one person.
Okay, so the third version of the problem is that the thing outranking you might be an old version of you.
This one's incredibly common, and people underestimate what it costs. Let's say that your bio is still up on a company that you left two years ago. Or a directory has your old brokerage. Or a scraper site built a page about you in 2019 with a headshot you hate and a phone number that's been disconnected since.
Here's why that hurts more than just being embarrassing. When multiple sources disagree about basic facts, like where you work, what you're called, how to reach you, a system doesn't pick a winner and just move on. Confidence in the whole picture drops. And when confidence drops far enough, an AI assistant that would have just named you, it won't. It gives a different answer rather than an uncertain one.
So the contradiction isn't a cosmetic problem. It's actually the thing that's keeping your name out of AI answers.
So what people do wrong here is they go straight to demanding removal. They email the site, they get angry, and oftentimes nothing happens, because most of those sites have no obligation to take anything down. Or even if they do, they might not do it.
But what works better is correction. A lot of those data sites, the ones that scrape your information and build a page, sometimes they do have a claim process. Oftentimes it's buried, but it might be there. And if it can get done, that's so helpful for you, because a corrected page that says the right thing is more useful to you than a deleted page. It becomes another source agreeing with all your other sources.
For old employer bios, just email whoever runs the site and ask them to take your page down or to update it. Most people will. It's not adversarial, it's just housekeeping, and they usually just forgot.
So you need to go find every one of these. Search your name plus your old company. Search your name plus your old city. Anything live and wrong is actively working against you.
The fourth version of this problem is the one that nobody expects, which is that you might just be competing with yourself.
Let's say that you have two LinkedIn profiles, because you made a second one and forgot about the first. Or you have an old Facebook page for a business you rebranded. Or a personal account and a professional account, both sort of half filled in.
Every one of those splits your evidence. Instead of one profile with a complete picture, you've now got three partial ones. None convincing, all diluting each other.
So just delete the duplicates. Or if you can't delete them, gut them and point them at the real one. Consolidating three weak profiles into one strong profile is one of the fastest wins available to you, and it costs you nothing but maybe an afternoon, or even sooner if you do this with AI.
So now, how do you tell which problem you have?
Just open a private window, sign out of Google, and set your location to your actual market rather than wherever your laptop happens to be. Then search your name. Then search your name plus your occupation. Then open ChatGPT or Gemini or Grok or Claude, whatever you use, and ask it about you the way that a customer would. Like, hey, is this person any good? What do they do? Should I hire them for this?
Read what comes back and just ask one question. Is the wrong thing here a stranger, a similar person, an old version of me, or another me?
Because that determines everything. Stranger means go after name plus occupation and stop fighting the bare name. If it's a similar person, that means add distinguishing details and connect yourself to things they can't claim. If it's an old version of you, that just means go and correct or remove. If it's another you, that means consolidate.
Doing the wrong fix for your situation is how people spend six months and get nowhere.
And one thing that helps every version of it is this. There's a way to state directly, in code on your website, that a given person is the same person as a specific set of profiles. Your LinkedIn, your company page, your book's listing, your professional license. It's part of what's called schema markup. And it's essentially you telling these AI systems, yes to this one, no to that one, here's my proof.
Most websites do not have this. It's not difficult to add, and it does the disambiguation work that no amount of content would ever do on its own. Wikidata does something similar publicly, and it's read directly by a lot of these systems. That's a major fix.
So you can diagnose which of the four problems you have, then do the specific work for fixing it. And it's worth doing, because most of your competitors have some version of this problem right now and have never once checked. Literally, you can spend 10 minutes in a private window and you can do a whole diagnosis.
So, what would you do as the best known name in your market?
If you want the wider picture on putting AI to work in a small business, Mike Partners and I, that's my business partner, wrote a book called AI or Die. It's the plain version, written for owners instead of engineers.
So this is Best Known. I'm Brett K Moore, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Best Known Brand. You can find me at brettkmoore.com. My co-founders are Mike Partners, he's our Founder and Chief AI Officer, you can find him at mike.partners, and then Russ Laggan, he's our Founder and Chief Revenue Officer, and you can find him at russlaggan.com. Our company is bestknownbrand.com.