Part one. What the assistants say
Do this in a fresh conversation with memory turned off, otherwise the assistant may be describing you from things you told it yourself.
- 1. Ask each one who you are. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. The question is simply: who is [your full name]? Copy each answer somewhere. This is your baseline and you will want it later.
- 2. Ask whether you are any good. Is [your name] credible in [your field]? Watch for the words self-reported, according to their website, or I could not verify. Those are the hedge, and the hedge is the problem.
- 3. Check it is actually you. Assistants confuse people with similar names constantly. If it describes a different person in your field, that is worse than knowing nothing, because it is confidently wrong.
Part two. What Google shows
- 4. Search your name in a private window. Not your normal browser, which personalises results towards things you already visit. List the first ten results.
- 5. Count how many you control. Of those ten, how many could you edit today if you wanted to? Your own site counts. A directory profile you cannot change does not. Three or more is healthy. Zero or one is why you are reading this.
- 6. Check what the snippet says. Read the description under your own site in the results. Google often shows a stale one. If it describes a job you left, that is what every prospect sees.
Part three. What the machines can read
- 7. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Look for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot and CCBot. If any is followed by Disallow, you are blocking the assistant you want to be found in.
- 8. Search site:yourdomain.com on Google. This lists every page Google has indexed. If it returns nothing, Google does not have your site at all, and nothing else on this list matters yet.
- 9. Run your homepage through validator.schema.org. You are looking for a Person entity with a sameAs list pointing at your real profiles. If there is no structured data, a crawler is guessing your identity from prose.
Part four. The one that decides it
- 10. Find one credible page about you that you did not write. A professional body, a university, a conference, a publication, a paper. Not your own site, not a profile you filled in yourself.
If you cannot find one, you have just explained every hedge in part one. An assistant that can only find your own account of yourself will attribute your achievements to you rather than state them. That single sentence, "according to his own website", is doing more damage to you than any ranking position.
Reading your result
Mostly fine
Assistants describe you accurately, three or more results you control, crawlers allowed, structured data present, at least one independent source. Nothing here needs buying. Re-check in six months.
Leaking
You are described roughly right but with hedging, or you control one or two results. The record exists but it is not legible or not corroborated. This is the common case and it is fixable.
Invisible
Assistants do not know you, or describe someone else, and your name returns directories you cannot edit. Every person who checks you before a meeting is forming their impression from somebody else's page.
If you would rather not do it yourself
Everything above is the diagnostic half of what I do for clients. It is genuinely free and genuinely complete: there is no step eleven that you can only get by paying me.
What I sell is the second half, the fixing, for people whose time is worth more than the ten hours this takes to do properly. That work is described here, and the method is written out in full here, so you can also just do it yourself.