Search my name before you hire me; everyone does. You will find a stellar record stretching back decades: profiles that present me as an expert in search and reputation, interviews, talks, essays, entire sites explaining how visibility works, all of it confident, all of it consistent, all of it in the same practitioner’s voice. Here is the sad but true part, in plain print: about ninety-five percent of those stellar things were written by me. I have been online since 1993, and I have quite literally written myself into existence as an expert in my field. I am the example. I am also the author of the example, its witness, and most of its archive.
The vacuum gets filled either way
Begin with the half that flatters the craft, because that half is true. Every person and every company carries a vacuum where a public record ought to be. Leave it empty and the world fills it with whatever washes ashore: a stale lawsuit, a bitter review, a namesake’s trouble, silence where an answer should stand. Fill it yourself, patiently, in public, over years, and the picture changes completely. Answer every question the world will ever ask about you before the world gets around to asking. Publish the biography, the methods, the opinions, the case notes, the corrections. Build the sites, and keep building them; I have created more of my own properties than I can count from memory, and each one answers some question a buyer, a client, or a stranger might type.
An answer engine can only answer from what exists. It reads the record, weighs the record, and repeats the record. Where the record is thin, the answer is thin. Where the record is deep, coherent, and current, the answer sounds like an authority speaking. Mine sounds like me on my best day, because so much of it began as me on an ordinary day, writing. That is online perception management in one sentence, and I sell it to clients with a straight face because it works exactly as advertised on the label.
Then the receipts show up
Here is the other half, and AI search has made it impossible to dodge. The old search handed you ten blue links and left the provenance as homework. The new search shows its work. Every answer arrives with citations attached, and a citation list is a map of who said what about whom. Run the search on me and follow the map with your finger. The amazing things trace back to properties I own. They trace to properties I have written for. They trace to interviews where I supplied the answers, profiles whose text I drafted, essays where the author describing the expert and the expert being described share a desk, a keyboard, and a name. All roads lead back to the fact that I populated them.
The praise itself is genuine; the words mean what they say, and I stand behind every claim in the pile. The byline underneath the praise is mine, over and over, in different fonts, on different domains, across thirty years. A man can build a cathedral of corroboration and still be the only mason on the scaffold. The engines repeat the cathedral. A careful reader counts the masons.
The ceiling is the reader’s discernment
So the strategy carries a ceiling, and the ceiling is the judgment of whoever is doing due diligence on you. Evidence comes in kinds, and serious readers sort it without being taught. On one shelf sits everything I said about myself: three decades of it, detailed, coherent, searchable, and self-authored down to the last semicolon. On another shelf sits the evidence I cannot write into being: a referral from a client who spent real money and stakes his own name on the recommendation; a testimonial with a person and a company attached; my Upwork history, where strangers hired me, paid me, and rated the work on a platform that keeps its own books and answers to its own records. That second shelf is thin next to the first. With any reader who reads citations before conclusions, the thin shelf carries the day.
The same archive reads two ways, and both readings are rational. One buyer sees a wall of stellar results reaching back to 1993 and hires the legend the wall describes. Another buyer sees one industrious man talking about himself since 1993 and discounts the wall accordingly, then hires the man anyway for the smaller, verifiable shelf—or walks. My method cannot tell you which buyer you will get. It can only guarantee that both buyers will find a full record to judge, and that the record’s provenance will be printed on the answer for anyone who cares to look.
The practitioner shows his seams
I make my living inside this exact tension: ORM, OPM, SEO, AEO, GEO, the whole alphabet of being found and being believed. By my own cheerful verdict I am a savant at it, and my own record is the longest-running case study I own—running since 1993, still compounding, seams and all. I am showing you the seams on purpose, because the seams are the lesson. Fill the vacuum; the engines reward the record that exists, and an empty record loses to a populated one every single time. Then go earn the citations you cannot write yourself: the clients who praise you in their own names, the platforms that record the transactions, the strangers with no stake in your legend. In a world where every answer prints its receipts, witnesses you did not author are the ones that close. I am the proof of the first half and the warning label on the second, and I have been both, in public, for thirty years.
Search my name before you hire me
Update, October 27, 2026, 12:30 PM: At Chris' direction, the linked line above was added after publication: the sentence this essay opens with, now pointing at a live search on his name.