Before anyone reads a word you’ve written, a machine has already told them who you are.
That used to be your website’s job. Somebody heard your name, typed it into Google and clicked the first result. The first result was usually you. Now Google often answers first, with an AI Overview sitting on top of the results. That summary is stitched together from whatever ranks for your name. Your site is one source among many. A five-year-old complaint thread is another.
For an author, a coach or a consultant, your name is the brand. So the question is worth a few minutes of your time: what does AI say when someone searches your name?
What does Google’s AI Overview show when someone searches a brand name?
More than it used to. For a long time, AI Overviews mostly stayed away from plain brand searches. If you typed a company’s name, you got the company’s website. That’s changed, and SEO people have been posting screenshots.
On a recent SEO podcast, consultant Ann Smarty walked through a few. A search for nothing but “GoDaddy” produced an AI Overview with a section on why many people avoid it. A search for “JustAnswer” produced one about a billing controversy, with advice to read carefully and cancel quickly. Nobody typed “GoDaddy complaints.” They typed a name, and the summary handed them the complaints.
Even a neutral overview can hurt. In another example she showed, the AI described a hosting company accurately enough, but every feature it listed came from third-party sites. None of it came from the company itself, so nothing guaranteed it was current.
She also pointed out that people don’t even have to search. They start typing your name into the browser’s address bar, Google suggests “yourname legit,” they get curious, they click, and the AI Overview tells them what the internet thinks.
Why do old complaints hurt more in AI answers?
Because nobody clicks through to see how old they are.
Before AI Overviews, a searcher might click a Reddit thread calling you a scam, notice it was five years old and archived, and give you the benefit of the doubt. Now the overview summarizes that thread in the present tense, right next to everything else, and the reader makes up their mind without visiting anything. You never see it happen. There’s no click, no referral and no way to know a buyer walked away.
Ann Smarty made another good point. Happy customers almost never go online to say they’re happy. Unhappy ones post everywhere they can find. So unless you do something about it, what ranks for your name tilts negative, and the AI summary inherits the tilt.
Before anyone reads a word you’ve written, a machine has already told them who you are. – Richard LoweShare on X
ChatGPT remembers what Google forgot
Google has a short memory for this kind of thing.
ChatGPT doesn’t.
Ann Smarty’s own story shows it. In 2014, Google publicly penalized MyBlogGuest, the guest blogging community she founded, and the SEO world talked about little else for a while. Twelve years later, you’d have to dig through page after page of Google results to find any of it. Ask ChatGPT about her, and she says it brings the penalty up in the second paragraph.
So checking Google isn’t enough. A prospect deciding whether to hire you is just as likely to ask ChatGPT, “Can I trust this person?” and the answer may come from things you assumed were long gone.
What happened when I searched my own name
I did the check myself, for my name and for The Writing King.
My name comes up cleanly. No complaints, no confusion, nothing I’d want to fix. The Writing King is a little different: the AI answers often mention Stephen King alongside me, since he’s the king most people associate with writing. It mentions us both, and that’s fine. What am I going to do about Stephen King? So far, it’s all clear.
Part of the reason is that I’ve spent a long time making my own site the most authoritative source about me, something I wrote about in whether websites are dead in the age of AI answers. When the machine goes looking for who I am, the best answer it finds is mine.
How do you check what AI says about your name?
Spend twenty minutes on it. You don’t need a tool or a consultant for the first look.
Search your name and your business name in Google, then add the words people use when they’re deciding whether to trust someone: reviews, legit, scam, complaints, price, lawsuit. Look at the AI Overview and at the top ten or twenty results under it. Then ask ChatGPT and Gemini the same questions in plain English, the way a nervous buyer would: “Is this person legit?” “What do people say about working with them?”
Write down what comes back and which sources the answers cite. Do it again in a few months, because these answers shift as new pages rank and old ones fall away. If something wrong or out of date shows up, you’ll know where it’s coming from. That tells you what to fix.
Why does this matter more for authors and consultants?
A big company can survive one bad AI summary. A solo professional often can’t, because the buyer is deciding about one person and has very little else to go on. Somebody thinking about hiring a ghostwriter, a coach or a speaker types the name, reads three sentences from an AI and makes a call. If those three sentences come from an old forum spat, a stale bio or another person with the same name, that’s the impression you make.
Shared names make it messier. My own case is harmless, but plenty of authors share a name with someone notorious, or with a dozen other people, and the AI blends them together. The only defense is a clear, consistent picture of who you are on your own site and profiles, so the machine has something better to work from.
What should you do if AI gets your name wrong?
Answer the question yourself, on pages you control.
That sounds obvious. Most people skip it.
A big company can survive one bad AI summary.
The AI summarizes what it can find. If the only place your prices appear is a Reddit thread where somebody complained about them, the AI repeats the complaint. Smarty described a client who kept a large upfront fee off its website on purpose, so it wouldn’t scare people away. Customers went to Reddit to ask about it, those threads ranked, and the AI Overview printed the exact fee for everyone to see. The client wanted it removed. It couldn’t be. The only fix left was to own the fee and explain it.
So put the answers where the machine can read them. Your about page, your pricing, how you work, what happens if something goes wrong. If there’s an old problem, explain it on your own site: what happened, what you changed. Keep it updated, because outdated information on your own pages is as bad as outdated information on someone else’s.
Then get the happy people talking. Silence from satisfied clients is the default.
Ask satisfied clients for a review or a short video testimonial, and post it where search engines and AI models look. Most of them will gladly do it. They just won’t think of it on their own.
What you shouldn’t do is wade into a hostile thread and argue. Smarty’s advice there is sound: build your answer in your own corner and leave the fire alone.
My take
Search your own name today in Google and in an AI chatbot, with words like scam and reviews attached. Whatever ranks is what the machine will repeat. A client that kept a fee off its site learned this when Reddit threads put that fee in the AI Overview. Put the answers on pages you control, explain old problems yourself, and ask happy clients for reviews. Stay out of hostile threads.
Why does burying bad news backfire?
Because people notice, and then the burying becomes the story.
The podcast host told a story about a well-known SEO, whom he wouldn’t name, facing a serious and very public lawsuit. The SEO flooded every platform with content about a different, minor lawsuit, so anyone searching his name plus “lawsuit” found the harmless one. It worked for a while. Then people in the industry caught on, wrote about what he was doing, and now the top results for his name and “lawsuit” are stories about the cover-up. Smarty said she’d never have heard of either lawsuit if he hadn’t tried to hide one.
She owned her own penalty in 2014. She explained it to her users, said what she thought had happened, and got a lot of support for it. That’s the better model for anyone with something in their past. Say what happened. Say what’s different now. Then let your own pages do the talking.
If you’re a small business or a solo professional, the stakes are smaller than a famous SEO’s lawsuit, and so is the risk. Most of the time, all you need is to know what’s out there and make sure your own answer is the best one available. I go deeper into how AI decides who to trust in how AI picks who it recommends and the cracks in AI search nobody’s warning you about.
My book The Day Your Website Died covers how to become the source the machines quote, and the AI and writing hub collects the rest of what I’ve written on AI search. If you’d like help sorting out how AI sees you and your work, my AI services are a good place to start. Go search your own name tonight. You’ll want to know what the machine is saying before your next client asks it.
After my search traffic changed shape, I wrote The Day Your Website Died. It covers optimizing for AI search, including what AI engines say when someone looks you up.
