I Spent a Week Googling Myself So You Don't Have To (But You Kind of Should)

Confession time: I used to think Googling yourself was peak vanity. Like, who does that? Then a brand partner mentioned in a call that they'd "done their homework on me," and my stomach dropped. What homework? What did they find? I genuinely had no idea what the first page of results said about me.

So I turned it into an experiment. One week, every day, searching my own name like a stranger would — different browsers, incognito mode, even image search. Here's what happened.

Day One: The Blink Heard Round the Internet

The very first thing I saw wasn't my website. It wasn't my Instagram. It was a photo from a press event three years ago where I am, without exaggeration, mid-blink. Eyes fully closed. Mouth doing something my mouth should never do. It's on some aggregator site I've never heard of, and it's the third image result for my name.

I laughed. Then I panicked. Then I laughed again, because honestly, what can you do? You cannot control a blink. But you can control what else is out there — and that's where the week got interesting.

The Ghost of Interviews Past

By day two, I'd dug up a podcast appearance from 2016 where my opinions on, let's say, hustle culture were... very 2016. "Sleep when you're dead" energy. Grind, grind, grind. I listened to about four minutes of my own voice before I had to tap out.

Here's the thing though: I'm not going to pretend it doesn't exist. It does. That's me. People evolve, and the internet keeps receipts. What I did do was make sure the current version of me is louder than the old one. More on that in a second.

What Strangers See First (vs. What I Want Them to See)

By midweek, I'd made a list of what actually surfaced:

• My website (good! that's the point of having one)
• Social profiles, in roughly the order I'd expect
• Two old interviews I'd forgotten about
• A random Pinterest board someone made with my content on it
• That blink photo

The gap between "what's there" and "what I'd choose" was the real finding. Most of us assume our online presence is a reflection of effort. It's actually a reflection of neglect — whatever's oldest and most linked-to wins, unless you intervene.

The 45-Minute Audit I Now Do Every Quarter

I'm not talking about hiring a reputation firm. I'm talking about a coffee-and-laptop situation you can knock out on a Sunday:

Search yourself three ways. Your name, your name plus your city, and your name plus your profession. Incognito mode, so your search history doesn't flatter you.

Claim what's yours. Every dormant profile — that old Twitter, the LinkedIn you haven't touched since college — either update it or delete it. Dormant accounts are where brand confusion lives.

Check image search. This one hurts but do it anyway. If the top images don't represent you, start publishing fresh ones consistently. New, well-tagged content on your own site eventually outranks the old stuff.

Set up Google Alerts for your name. Free, takes two minutes, and you'll know the moment something new pops up instead of finding out from a brand partner's "homework."

Steering the Narrative Isn't Fake — It's Maintenance

Look, I get the instinct to say "my work speaks for itself." Mine did too. But the internet doesn't wait for your work to speak — it hands strangers the loudest, oldest, blinkiest thing it has.

The fix isn't spin. It's volume. The more current, accurate, genuinely-you content you put out — a proper About page, updated press links, recent work front and center — the less room there is for the 2016 version of you to do the talking.

By the end of the week, my first page of results looked a lot more like the person I actually am. The blink photo? Still out there. I've made peace with it. Everyone blinks. But now it's a footnote, not the headline — and that distinction is entirely something I built on purpose.

Your digital self is out there meeting people before you do. Might as well introduce yourselves properly.