Recording an episode with Royce Blake last week, he asked whether we’d still need websites in a couple of years. A reasonable question, and most people expect them to go the way of the fax machine.
My answer surprised him, and the reason is a mechanic almost nobody writes about.
This is the least exciting advice I give, and it’s the piece I’d fight hardest for. People spend real money building their visibility and then undercut it with a bio they wrote years ago and forgot about. It frustrates me, because the fix costs almost nothing and the damage stays invisible until somebody asks an answer engine a question you should own.
What is an entity, and why does the machine care?
To a search engine, a page is a document. To an answer engine, you’re a thing. A person, with a job, a body of work, a set of claims attached to your name. The technical word is an entity.
Before the machine can say anything about you it has to answer a prior question: is this the same person? The Richard Lowe on the ghostwriting site, the Richard Lowe on the Amazon author page, the Richard Lowe quoted in an article about answer engines. One person, or three?
That process is called entity resolution, and it’s not clever. It looks for agreement. Where the sources agree, confidence goes up. Where they disagree, confidence goes down, and a low-confidence entity is one the machine will simply not name, because naming you is a risk it doesn’t need to take.
Can one inconsistent number hurt your AI visibility?
Yes. The machine can’t tell the difference between a typo and a different person, and that punishes the people who’ve been working longest, because they’re the ones with the most old bios scattered around the web.
Say your website reports 54 ghostwritten books. Your LinkedIn says over 50. Your speaker bio says nearly 60 because you rounded up for a conference two years ago. To you these are the same fact stated loosely. To an entity resolver they’re three conflicting claims about the same attribute, and conflicting claims are exactly the signal that says these might not be the same person.
Nothing breaks. No error appears. You simply stop being the answer to questions you should own.
My own canon, and I don’t deviate from it
- 113+ books authored, always with the plus sign
- 54+ books ghostwritten, always stated separately, never added to the first number
- 980,000+ photographs, never rounded up to a million
- 33 years in enterprise IT
- 20 years as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services at Trader Joe’s
That last one is more important than it looks. I’ve taken a lot of photographs, and over a million would be a better line. It would also be a number I couldn’t support, and the moment one source says 980,000 and another says over a million, I’ve created the disagreement myself.
I don’t round, and I tell clients not to either. A bigger number feels good for the length of one introduction. After that it’s a contradiction with your name on it, sitting on somebody else’s server where you can’t fix it.
Which attributes have to match across your online profiles?
Not everything. Prose can vary, and should. What has to hold still is anything a machine would treat as a fact about the entity.
Your name, in one form. Not Rich in one place and Richard in another. Not with a middle initial here and without it there. Every variant creates a candidate for a separate entity, and separate entities compete instead of reinforcing each other.
Countable claims. Books, years, clients, photographs. Any number that appears in more than one place.
Your role, stated the same way. Ghostwriter, or author, or consultant. Pick the one that’s true and lead with it everywhere.
Pick one and live with it. People call themselves a consultant on one site, a coach on the next and a founder on a third, then wonder why no answer engine will name them as any of the three. The machine won’t pick for you.
Organization names. The company as it appears in your schema should match the company on your invoices and your book jacket.
Identifiers. ISBNs, an ORCID, a Wikidata item. These are the strongest of all, because they’re unique by design and can’t be misread.
Where do contradictions about you online come from?
Almost never from carelessness. They come from time. You wrote a bio in 2019 saying 40 books. You’ve written more since, and you updated the website. The 2019 bio is still on a conference site, a guest post, a podcast page, three directories and an old press release. None of those were wrong when you wrote them.
The other source is helpfulness. Somebody writes an introduction for you and rounds a number, or promotes you to a title you haven’t claimed. It reads well and it contradicts everything else. An event organizer who bumps up your years of experience to make an introduction sound bigger means well. Ask them to use the real number anyway, because their page is one more place the machine reads, and it’ll quote their version of you as readily as yours.
How do you fix inconsistent numbers without spending a month?
Search your own name and read the first three pages as though you were a stranger trying to work out who you are. Write down every number and title you find. The contradictions will be obvious and there will be fewer than you fear.
Then fix in this order. Your own site first, because it’s the source everything else should agree with. Then the profiles you control. That’s most of them. Then the ones you can request a correction from. That’s fewer than you think but not zero. What you can’t change, leave. A single stale bio against a dozen consistent sources is noise. It’s the even split that hurts, where half your sources say one thing and half say another, because then there’s no majority for the machine to trust.
Why does your own website carry the most weight?
Websites are changing jobs, and that’s the answer to the podcast question. I’d bet my own business on it.
A website used to be where traffic went. Now it’s where your entity is defined. It’s the one place you control completely, the one place that states the canonical version, and the place a machine goes when the other sources disagree. Every platform you use is rented. The site isn’t.
That’s also why structured data matters more than it used to.
Schema is how you state the facts in a form that removes the guessing: this is the person, this is the organization, these are the same entity as these profiles elsewhere. The sameAs property exists for precisely this problem, and most sites leave it empty. I go through the whole mechanism in The Day Your Website Died.
What does consistency buy you?
Not a ranking. There’s no consistency score.
What it buys is the absence of doubt. When somebody asks an answer engine who to trust on a subject, it assembles candidates and discards the ones it can’t resolve confidently. Consistency doesn’t put you at the top of that list. It keeps you on it.
That’s unglamorous, and it’s the game. Being the answer starts with being a coherent thing to be asked about.
So go find your own numbers this month and make them match. It’s dull work and nobody will congratulate you for it, but I think skipping it is one of the dumbest ways to lose visibility you’ve already paid for, because the machine never tells you it happened.
