When Your Name Leads to the Wrong Website

A prospect mentioned a platform to me the other week, one I’d never looked at closely. I always love checking out new tools, so I went looking, and on the platform’s own site I spotted a testimonial from someone I recognized, who it turned out had been running her whole business on it for about four years. So I went to find her. Partly to see how she’d built the thing, mostly to ask a straight question: after four years of real use, what do you actually think of it?

That’s about as warm as inbound contact gets. Someone who already knows you, arriving with a specific question, wanting to hand you a few minutes of their attention. If a stranger did this to me I’d be delighted.

The testimonial gave me her first name, her last initial, and her line of work, a specific clinical specialty. No last name spelled out, no link to her site. So I did the obvious thing and Googled what I had. That was the only thread to pull, and it brought me to the URL that’s just her name, which is exactly what you’d expect, because why wouldn’t that be the current one, the main one, the front door.

Reader, it was not the front door.

I couldn’t reach her from it. No email, no phone number, and nothing telling me where she was based. I always look for that. Partly to gauge whether someone’s legit, partly to see if they’re in Canada like me, and in this case to confirm she was even the person I thought she was. The only way to contact her was a booking link for a sales call I didn’t want and didn’t need. There was no path anywhere on the site for a person who wasn’t ready to book. She’s barely on LinkedIn, so that was a dead end too. By this point I’d spent more effort trying to reach one person than she’d probably spent building the page, which is its own small tragedy given what I do for a living. I found her on Instagram eventually and sent a DM. She never replied. Fair enough. It’s a DM.

And to be clear, this wasn’t an accidental or even a neglected site. It was built on purpose, which tells me she meant it. It just does exactly one thing: it takes a stranger who is ready to buy and books them a call. I wasn’t a stranger and I wasn’t ready to buy, so the whole site had nothing for me. That’s not neglect. That’s a page built for one visitor and one visitor only, and I wasn’t him.

Here’s the part I only learned afterward. She has a second site, her actual clinical practice, and that one has her office details in the footer, her real credentials, and a bio that reads like a specific competent human. It was there the whole time.

I never landed on it, and there was no reason I would have. I had her name, not her practice’s name, so I had nothing to search for it by. And even if I’d stumbled onto the practice site, the real bio sat several clicks deep, well back from the front page. The version of her that would have answered my question was buried behind a version that couldn’t.

Keeping the two separate is reasonable, by the way. One site for her coaching, under her name, one for the clinic, under the clinic’s. Plenty of people split their work that way and it makes sense. The trouble isn’t the split. It’s that the site her name leads to, the one every warm stranger lands on first, is the booking-only one, and the site that could actually answer a question about her is the one nobody arrives at.

Two people, one of them real

The site I found, the one wearing her name, described her in the language every coach uses. Passionate. A wealth of experience. “Committed to helping people unlock their potential and embrace a more fulfilling path.” You know the register. You could lift the name out and drop in any of ten thousand others and the page wouldn’t blink. Warm, fluent, and completely without edges. Nothing on it a real person could grab and hold.

The clinic bio, the one I never reached, described a different person entirely. It named the specialty plainly, the same one the testimonial had credited her with, a genuinely uncommon one, with the training and the years behind it. It sounded like someone specific who is good at a specific hard thing. It even had one plain, human line, the kind of phrase I know her clients are typing into a search bar at two in the morning, which I won’t repeat here because this isn’t a shame game. It had the detail that piques interest, would’ve told me instantly she was the real deal, and it was sitting on the site nobody arrives at.

Here’s the part that stuck with me. The platform’s testimonial, a page I reached by accident, named her real specialty in a single line. Her own site, the one her name points to, the one built to represent her, left it out. A stranger’s quote about her was more specific about what she does than her own homepage.

So this isn’t only about a missing email address. The version of her that’s easy to find is the thin, performed one. The version that’s specific and credentialed and real is the one search never surfaces, the one I had no way of knowing was even there. Same person, two sites, and the wrong one’s answering the door. 

That’s the gap I want to talk about, because it’s widening for everyone, and I’m standing in it myself.

I’m managing my own version of this

This gap opens up every time you change who you are in public. It happens when a company rebrands and the old name keeps ranking for another two years. It happens when a solo operator grows into a team and the whole site still speaks in a lonely first-person “I.” It happens when someone changes their own name. Whatever the shift, there’s a stretch where the version people can find and the version that’s true have come apart, and closing that stretch is real work that mostly nobody sees.

I’ve done the company version of this before. In 2023 I rebranded from Bright Web Design to Clarity, and I know what it takes to drag a name change through every profile, every old mention, every place the previous version is still sitting there being findable.

But the one I’m in right now is a different animal. I changed my own surname this spring. Not the company’s, mine. Built this business under one name for years and now run it under another. That’s a deeper kind of switch, more personal, more tangled, and honestly more work, because it’s not a logo and a URL, it’s the person behind all of it. It was a deliberate choice and I’d make it again, but I went in knowing exactly the mismatch it creates. The old name is still on podcast episodes, old credits, a trail of mentions I can’t fully round up. Someone who heard me speak three years ago and goes looking now is searching for a person who, on paper, isn’t that me anymore.

I don’t get to opt out of that gap. Nobody does, once you’ve been at this a while. What I get to do is manage it, decide where the current, true information lives, make sure the door people actually walk up to isn’t the empty one, point the old trail at the new home wherever I can. That’s ongoing work, not a thing you finish. I’m in the middle of it right now.

Which is why her two sites landed the way they did. I wasn’t looking at a stranger’s mistake. I was looking at a sharper version of my own open project.

Now the machines are doing it too

Here’s what makes this harder than it used to be. It’s no longer just you and a search bar deciding which version of you shows up. Something is assembling a picture of you out of signals you can’t see.

The team at iPullRank ran an experiment on this. They seeded brand signals through people’s Gmail and Photos, then watched whether those brands started showing up more often in Google’s AI recommendations. They did. Signals planted in Gmail moved the results the most, and when the team seeded brands that didn’t even exist, those showed up too.

Sit with that. The ordinary trail of your connected life, the stuff you never published and never meant as a signal, can shape how you show up to other people, and can conjure things that were never real.

It lines up with separate survey work Search Engine Land wrote up, where nearly a third of AI prompts now carry personal context the person just hands over on the way in, their job, location, budget, life stage. So the picture of you a stranger meets is getting built from two directions you don’t control: the context they bring, and the context the machine pulls from your connected life. The version of you out there is less a thing you authored and more a thing that got assembled. Leave the parts you can control to chance, and you’re handing the whole portrait to a system that has no idea which version of you is current.

There’s a lot of talk right now about this being the death of the open web. I get the alarm, and the direction is real. I just don’t think the web was ever as open as we’re being told we’re about to lose. It wasn’t open in the way people mean it, where you wrote for readers and readers found you. 

People wrote for the algorithm for fifteen years before they started writing for the agents. We’ve always been shaping ourselves for whoever stood between us and the reader. The thing in the middle just changed shape again, that’s all.

At least one in four people lives with a disability. That’s not a number about “other” people. It’s self-reported. So the next time you’re at a table of four, your partner, a friend or two, whoever’s there, the odds are good that at least one of you already does. Probably more than one, because neurospicy conditions like ADHD get underreported all the time, which means the real figure sits higher than anything people write on a form. And a lot of those people hit a wall on a typical website, a form they can’t complete, a button a screen reader can’t announce, text they can’t make bigger. More than 95% of sites have barriers they’ll run into. Unless you’ve designed your site specifically to remove barriers like these, those visitors leave, and you never hear about it. 

None of that is new. The so-called “open web” was literally never “open to everyone.” So forgive me if I don’t panic about losing something we never actually had.

Which is oddly steadying, because it means the fix hasn’t changed either. Be findable, be reachable, be usable by actual people, be unmistakably the current you, in whatever a machine can read and a human can trust. That was the job in 2010 and it’s the job now.

Which brings me to the About page

I’ve been rewriting my own About page as part of all this, and it’s made me pay attention to how strange a page it is.

It’s the page most likely to be performed. At a roundtable I hosted in June, two guests who make their living with their actual voices, one on stages for nearly thirty years, both circled the same idea. Your real voice only shows up when you stop performing and just talk to one person. The About page is where people do the exact opposite. They write it for everyone who might land there, which means they write it for no one, and it comes out sounding like the thin version, the coach-brochure version, the one with no edges.

I wrote last month about why that happens, the committee in your head that talks you into the safe, sanded-down version of yourself right when you’re about to be seen. The About page is where that committee does its loudest work. It’s the page you write while bracing to be judged, so it comes out braced, generic, protected. Which is exactly how the performed version ends up being the one that greets everyone.

And it’s usually the page a real person reaches when they’re closest to wanting you. They heard your name. Someone recommended you. They came to confirm a decision they’re halfway to. What they need is small and concrete. Are you the right person. Are you near me, if that matters. How do I reach you like a human. The performed page answers none of it, because it was built to impress a stranger instead of help someone who already likes you.

That’s what both of her sites got wrong, from opposite ends. The findable one performed and couldn’t be reached. The real one could be reached and couldn’t be found.

The part everyone gets backwards

There’s a piece of advice going around, and I mostly agree with it: protect the original perspective and first-hand experience, the work only you can do, and let AI handle the parts that don’t need a person. That’s right.

The trouble is most people apply it exactly backwards. They let AI near the one thing that’s supposed to be them, the About page, the positioning, the description of who they are, and then they hand-write the busywork a tool could genuinely help with. They automate the wrong half.

I’m not anti-AI. I use it every day, including working through pieces like this one. But I’ve gotten ruthlessly strict about which side of that line I let it near. A tool that draws on everything already out there is the worst possible author for the pages whose entire job is to point at the real, current, specific you.

What I’d actually do

Go find yourself the way a warm stranger would. Not a lead in your funnel. A person who already knows your name and has one real reason to reach you.

Don’t do what I’d never do, which is search your own name from your own logged-in browser and trust what comes back. Your session already knows you. It hands you the version that’s easiest for you to reach, which is the opposite of what a stranger gets. Open a private window, or use a search engine that isn’t keeping a file on you, and know that it’s still guessing at your location. Better still, text someone a province away and ask them to search your name cold, on Google and in whatever AI tool they use, and tell you honestly what came up first. Then check Search Console for what’s actually ranking for your name, which is the one place the truth isn’t personalized to flatter you.

When you see what a stranger sees, ask the real questions. Is the version that surfaces first current, or is it who you were three years and one repositioning ago. Land on it as someone who isn’t ready to book, and see if there’s any way to reach a human. Check that a regular person could find your email or your location where they’d think to look, not several clicks deep on a site your name doesn’t even point to. And if you’ve got more than one property with your name on it, an old personal URL, a clinic or sister site, a dormant thing from a business you’ve half-left, ask which one answers the door, and whether it’s the one you’d want to.

The version of her that would have answered my question exists. It was specific, credentialed, reachable, real. It just wasn’t the version I could find, and she probably still doesn’t know I came looking.

That’s the thing about the ones who bounce off the wrong version of you: you never find out they were there.