• 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). His co-founder is Mike Partners, Founder and Chief AI Officer (mike.partners). Best Known Brand is at bestknownbrand.com.

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

Five steps, and you can do all of them yourself.

• Step one: write down one version of the truth. One spelling of your name, one format, decided once and never varied, because Brett K. Moore and Brett Moore are two different strings to a machine, which means two candidate people, which splits your evidence in half. Titles written out in full, since CSO could be Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Sales Officer or Chief Security Officer and a machine has to guess. And your description written four times at four lengths, before you open a single signup form.
• Step two: inventory where you already exist. Every platform, every directory, including the pages you didn't create. Scraper sites build pages about you with an old company, an old phone number and a six year old headshot, and those pages sometimes outrank your own website. Most will let you claim or correct the listing.
• Step three: make them all say the same thing. And watch for what platforms generate on your behalf without telling you: a thirty character random string as a public web address, a company name split in half and turned into somebody's first name, a username with five random digits on the end. All live, all public, none announced.
• Step four: connect things in both directions. Google keeps a graph of entities and the relationships between them. That's the Google Knowledge Graph, and it's what an assistant draws on when it decides whose name to say. One way links are assertions. Two way links are evidence.
• Step five: verify by reading it back. Don't trust a confirmation message. Leave, come back, and look at the live version signed out in a private window.

This episode also covers schema markup, Wikidata, and the honest answer to "how do I get a Google Knowledge Panel," which is that you don't, directly, and anyone selling you one is selling something that doesn't work. Plus the correct sequence, because the wrong order wastes time: claim your handles first and polish later, since a bio can be rewritten any day of the week and a handle somebody else took is gone permanently.

Chapters

0:00 How do I get ChatGPT to recommend my business?

0:40 The three things people find when they look

1:00 Why an answer isn't a list

1:16 Step 1: One version of the truth

2:16 Writing your description at four lengths

2:35 Step 2: Inventory where you already exist

2:46 The pages you didn't create

3:00 Step 3: Make them all say the same thing

3:16 What platforms invent without telling you

3:55 Step 4: Connect things in both directions

4:16 The Google Knowledge Graph

4:46 One way links vs. two way links

5:16 Schema markup, Wikidata, and Knowledge Panels

5:46 Step 5: Verify by reading it back

6:45 Claim first, polish later

7:15 Who this moves hardest for

8:01 Close

About the show

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

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

That's a different problem than ranking badly. A list is forgiving. Eighth place still exists. An answer isn't a list. One name comes back, maybe three, and there's no page two. If you're not in it, you're not eighth. You're absent.

In this first episode of Best Known, Brett K. Moore, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Best Known Brand, covers:

• Why your own browser gives you a false reading, and the three separate mechanisms behind it: personalization from your search history, location weighting from your IP address that a private window does not fix, and the Google Business Profile owner view that shows you your own listing at the top of the page whether or not you actually rank.
• How to run the search properly, signed out, in a private window, with the location set to your real market.
• The three things people find when they look honestly. Thin, meaning a few profiles and an old website. Inconsistent, meaning listings that contradict each other on title, company and phone number. Or human legible and machine invisible, meaning a beautiful site that tells a system nothing about what kind of business it is.
• Why buying attention before you fix the lookup is paying to send strangers to a background check you're failing, and why it fails silently.
• The three conditions that make a system confident enough to name you: be the same everywhere, be confirmed by sources you don't control, and be connected to things that already exist.
• The infrastructure underneath it: the Google Knowledge Graph, what a Google Knowledge Panel actually is and why nobody can sell you one, schema markup, Wikidata, and the discipline the industry calls answer engine optimization.
• Who this moves hardest for: real estate agents and brokerages, speakers, authors and coaches, and executives building under their own name.

Chapters

0:00 What would you do as the best known name in your market?

0:30 The two-minute test: ask an AI assistant about your industry

1:00 Being absent isn't the same as ranking badly

1:30 AI visibility vs. SEO

2:00 Why your browser lies: personalization and location

2:30 The Google Business Profile owner view

3:00 Thin, inconsistent, or machine invisible

4:00 What a bad lookup costs you

4:48 Same, confirmed, connected

5:48 The Google Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Panels

6:48 What the work actually looks like

7:18 Who this moves hardest for

7:48 What changes when you're the name that comes up

9:36 What will you do?

About the show

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

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