Helping AI understand who you are

From concept to action

The last lesson made the case that entities matter. This one is about doing something about it.

The good news is that helping AI systems understand who you are doesn’t require new technology, expensive tools, or deep technical skill. It mostly requires being consistent in places you probably aren’t yet — and that’s something you can fix today.

Five signals do most of the work.

1. Name consistency

The single most common source of entity confusion is also the easiest to fix. Pick the exact form of your name — personal or business — that you want to be known by, and use it everywhere.

That means the same spelling, the same punctuation, and the same word order on:

• Your website (every page, including the footer)
• Your LinkedIn profile
• Your Google Business Profile
• Any industry directories you appear in
• Your social media accounts
• Bylines on guest posts or external articles

“Warren Groom,” “Warren A. Groom,” and “W. Groom” all refer to the same person, but to an AI system trying to consolidate information, they look like three weakly-linked entities rather than one strong one. Even small inconsistencies — a comma here, an initial there — make the entity harder to pin down.

This is unglamorous work. It’s also the highest-leverage change most people can make in an afternoon.

2. A clear, structured biography

Every business needs a page that says, in unambiguous language, who you are and what you do.

For an individual professional, that’s your About page. For a company, it’s a combination of the About page and an explicit team or leadership page. Either way, the page should answer these questions clearly:

• What is your name?
• What do you do?
• Where are you based?
• Who do you serve?
• How long have you been doing this?
• How can someone get in touch?

You’d think these were obvious. Most About pages bury them under brand-voice storytelling. Storytelling is fine — but the factual core needs to be present too, in language an AI can extract cleanly.

A useful exercise: read your own About page, then write a single paragraph summarising who you are based only on what’s on the page. If you can’t write that paragraph confidently, an AI won’t be able to either.

3. SameAs links

This one sounds technical, but it isn’t.

“SameAs” is a way of telling AI systems that several different web addresses all refer to the same entity. You do it by linking from your website to your other public profiles — LinkedIn, GitHub, X, Mastodon, professional associations, podcasts you’ve appeared on, and so on.

A small block of links on your About page that says something like “Find me elsewhere: LinkedIn, GitHub, Stack Overflow, Substack” does two things at once. It tells human readers where else they can find you, and it tells AI systems “all of these profiles belong to the same person.”

You can reinforce this further with structured data (which we’ll cover in Module 5), but even the simple version — visible links on your About page — is genuinely useful on its own.

4. External corroboration

This is the only one on the list that you can’t entirely control. It’s also one of the most powerful.

AI systems weigh self-description against external description. If your website says you’re a freelance WordPress developer in Toronto, and your LinkedIn says you’re a creative consultant in Berlin, the AI doesn’t know who to believe. If, on the other hand, your website, LinkedIn, podcast appearances, conference talks, and client testimonials all describe you the same way, you become much harder to misidentify.

You don’t need to chase external mentions actively. But where you do have a presence — guest posts, interviews, association memberships, community contributions — make sure the description of you in those places matches the description on your site. Inconsistency dilutes the entity. Consistency reinforces it.

5. Active disambiguation

If your name is unusual, this is less urgent. If your name is common, it matters a lot.

Imagine your business is called “Compass Marketing.” Searching that name will turn up dozens of unrelated agencies in different cities. An AI trying to answer “who runs Compass Marketing?” will struggle to know which one you are.

The fix is to add disambiguating detail wherever your business is named. “Compass Marketing, a PR agency based in Halifax” is dramatically clearer than “Compass Marketing.” If your About page, your LinkedIn, and your directory listings all use the longer form when introducing the business, the entity becomes much easier to isolate.

This is especially worth doing for personal names, business names, and product names that are commonly shared. Adding location, profession, or specialism early in any introduction does more than you’d think.

A simple audit

If you want to run a quick check on your own entity clarity, this is the exercise I’d suggest:

1. Open your website’s homepage, About page, contact page, and footer side by side
2. Compare the form of your name across all four — does it match exactly?
3. Open your LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, and any directory listings — does the name match there too?
4. Read your About page out loud and check that it clearly states what you do, where, and for whom
5. Look at your About page for outbound links to your other profiles — are they there?
6. Search your name in an AI tool like ChatGPT or Perplexity and read what it says — does the description match the one you’d write yourself?

Most people find at least two or three things to fix the first time they do this. That’s normal. The point isn’t to be perfect. It’s to be consistent enough that an AI can describe you accurately without hedging.

A useful mindset

Every place your name appears is either reinforcing the entity or weakening it. There’s no neutral.

Entity clarity isn’t built once. It’s maintained — quietly and consistently — across every place your business shows up online.

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Coming up in the next lesson: The knowledge-graph mindset. We’ll widen the lens beyond names and biographies to look at the relationships between entities — the topics, places, and other things AI systems associate with you, and how to shape those associations deliberately.