Client One: Personal Reputation Management Starts With Your Own Name
Before we ran the method on anyone else, I ran personal reputation management on my own record. The engines described me by an old title, and most of the pages they trusted were mine.
Personal reputation & personal branding for the AI era · Founder, ExcBrand.AI
5 min read
In one paragraph
Personal reputation management for AI answers is best learned on your own name first. When I read what the engines said about me, they described me by an older title, and most of the pages they read were my own. The fix started with my pages agreeing on one current role, then with sources I do not control.
Every method needs a first client who cannot complain about the bill. Mine was me. Before we asked anyone to trust a reading of their name, I ran one on my own, read every answer, and treated the result the way I would treat a professional who had hired us. It was useful, and it was not flattering.
What the engines said about me
The first time I asked, three of the engines said they had no reliable information about me at all. That is not neutral. A model that finds nothing will either say so or fill the gap with someone else who shares the name, and neither answer helps the person being looked up.
When the answers did come, they were built from the wrong era. In my reading at the end of October, one engine introduced me by a title from an earlier venture in 6 of 15 answers and named the company I run today in only 2. It was not making that up. My own profile on one of those earlier sites still carried the old title.
My own pages were the problem
One engine was candid about it. It read ten pages to answer a question about me, eight of them pages I had written or controlled, and it concluded that independent reporting was not found. That is a fair reading. A record that is mostly self-published can tell an engine who you say you are. It cannot tell it that anyone else agrees.
Worse, my own pages did not agree with each other. One said one role, another listed several ventures as if they were all current, and an old profile kept a title I had moved past. An engine weighing those pages had no way to know which one was true today, so it picked the one that appeared most often.
If your own pages disagree about who you are, the engine will pick for you.
What I am changing, in order
- One current role, written the same way on every page I own, at the top, with nothing else presented as current.
- Earlier ventures kept, but dated as past. Deleting them would only leave the engines to guess.
- The profile with the old title corrected first, because it is a page I can change the same day.
- Only then, the slower work: sources I do not control that describe the same role in their own words.
The order is the same one I use for every professional we work with, and When the Sources Disagree explains why. Owned pages first, because they are fast and they become the reference. Independent sources second, because they are slow and they are the only thing that answers the question the engine actually asked.
What doing it to yourself teaches you
Three things I would not have learned from a client. First, how little a person sees of their own record. I knew every page, and I still had not noticed that they contradicted each other. Second, how unhelpful the reflex to add more is. My instinct was to publish another page about myself, which would have made the self-published share worse. Third, how it feels to read a confident paragraph that is almost right. Almost right is harder to fix than wrong, because nobody reports it.
It also set the standard for what we ask of anyone else. If I would not publish a line about myself without a page behind it, I will not publish one about a client either.
The terms this piece uses
- Personal reputation management
- The work of making what is said about a person, by search results and now by AI answers, accurate, current and backed by sources that agree.
- Current role
- The one title a person holds today, stated the same way at the top of every page they control, with earlier roles dated as past.
- Self-published share
- The part of the pages an engine reads about a person that the person wrote or controls. A record that is mostly self-published reads as unconfirmed.
What to take from this
- Read the AI answers about your own name first.
- An engine that finds nothing about you is not a neutral result.
- If your own pages disagree about your role, the engine picks one for you.
- Date old roles as past rather than deleting them.
- Owned pages make you consistent; independent sources make you credible.
Questions people ask
- Why does an AI engine describe me by an old job title?
- Usually because a page it reads still carries that title, often one of your own profiles. Find the pages that list the old role, correct the ones you control, and state one current role the same way everywhere.
- Should I delete pages about my earlier roles?
- No. Keep them and date them as past. A deleted role leaves a gap the engine fills on its own; a dated one tells it the order of events.
- Is publishing more pages about myself enough?
- No. Your own pages make the record consistent, but an engine still looks for sources you do not control before it treats a claim as confirmed.
Written with the help of AI and reviewed by our team.
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