✦I searched my own name
I opened an incognito window and searched for my name in Korean. First place went to a professor at Seoul National University's business school who shares it. Below that came a stage actor with the same name, a doctor who had been a physician to a former president, and the head of a financial company.
At least five people use the name, and I was a long way down. My LinkedIn profile appeared first, then my website.
I had spent years raising rankings for clients and had never checked my own name. So over the past few months I ran an experiment on my personal site. Can I make myself the result when someone searches my name?
This note is that process written out. It is not a success story. It is still running, and the parts that did not work are in here too.
If you are a foreign brand launching in Korea, the same problem arrives in a different shape. Your Korean brand name may already belong to something else in search, and finding that out after the campaign starts is expensive.
✦Fifth in AI mode
I did not only check normal search. In AI mode the order ran through the medical professor, the presidential physician, the finance executive, the business professor, and the stage actor, with me fifth. As an SEO consultant.
What mattered there was not the position but what it drew on. Building my entry, the AI cited LinkedIn and my website. YouTube was not cited.
The others had different sources. University sites, publishers, ticketing sites, the Kyobo bookstore, the National Theater Company's channel, medical publications. All of them positions where authority is recognized in their field. The professor is on the university site, has books in shops, and appears in the press. I had none of that.
✦Entities, recognized as a person not a string
The industry word for this is entity. The concept is simple. The moment a search engine stops treating my name as a set of characters and starts distinguishing the person who does SEO, the results change.
Google describes the same thing. Its help page says a knowledge panel is an information box that appears when you search for entities in the Knowledge Graph, meaning people, places, organizations, or things, and that the information comes from various sources across the web.
Put simply, a search engine identifies subjects rather than matching name strings. Get it to recognize you as one subject and the game changes from there.
✦The two things I actually did
Nothing elaborate. Two things.
The first is a technical declaration. The second takes time. Both are needed. A declaration with no mentions has no evidence behind it, and mentions with no declaration stay scattered.
One more thing. I bought a domain and built a personal site, so that there is one position in search and AI search that carries my name and that I control.
Does your company name pull up the wrong thing?
What appears when someone searches your brand gets looked up most right before a contract. I can show you the current state.
Send me a note✦Adding three letters changed it
On the name alone I cannot beat a professor or an actor. So I added three letters. My name plus SEO.
It came up immediately. YouTube as an SEO consultant, then Instagram, then several channels in a row. One, two, three, four, five.
I tried one more. Asking AI mode for a recommended Korean SEO podcast returned mine, and the interesting part was what it cited. Not YouTube. It cited the podcast page on my own website.
That is the part of this experiment I liked most. The importance of running several channels is something I covered in the note on AI search, and here I could see with my own eyes that my website still carries real weight among them.
It does not happen every time, of course. Searching for SEO podcast on its own, sometimes I appear in the AI recommendation and sometimes I do not. Writing that down as it is.
✦Why this matters, the search before signing
One reason. Everybody runs a reference check before working with someone. A proposal arrives and the first thing people do is search the name. Open LinkedIn, check whether they publish on YouTube, look at what the company does. I have done exactly that.
These days something is added to it. People ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity what kind of person this is. And where does that answer come from?
It comes from what is currently accumulated in search. It is not as though anything gets invented out of nothing.
So if searching your name returns nothing, or returns only unrelated people who share it, the other side has no way to learn more even when they want to. That search happens right before a decision, which is what makes the difference large.
Which is the point of this episode. You can decide in advance what will be there when that moment arrives.
Press this and my new posts show up more often in your Google results.
✦When the other person is famous
Being realistic. If someone sharing your name is a celebrity, an athlete, or a politician, reaching the top on the name alone is difficult, barring some particular event.
What to do instead:
Put a qualifier next to the name
The way I took my name plus SEO and my name plus SEO creator. Attach the role or the field. Better still if it is the word people already type when looking for you.
Create a nickname or a brand name
If the name is too common, building visibility around a distinguishable name is another route.
Secure one position of your own
A personal site or a profile page. You need at least one place you control. It becomes the center that connects the rest.
Get mentioned by others
Interviews, appearances, contributed articles, talks. Increase the occasions where your name is left on someone else's platform. It carries different weight than writing it yourself.
✦Still in progress
Honestly, name search does not change overnight. I showed the first page, and on other days it drops to page two or three. It moves several times within a day.
Even so, until recently searching my name returned almost nothing of mine. A list that held only other people has finally started to accumulate. YouTube not yet being picked up in AI citations is still an open item.
If you have read this far, search your own name. See what comes up, and whether it matches who you are now. Some of you are being pushed down by someone who shares it, the same way I was.
How I work is on the services page, who I am is on the about page, and the other episodes are in the episode list.
Sources and notes
- Google, About knowledge panels. Knowledge panel help center. Read it
- Schema.org, definition of the sameAs property. Read it
- The SEO Podcast by Insung Song, EP 13, published 20 August 2026. Recorded in Korean. Watch it
The search results described were checked directly in an incognito window in August 2026. Results vary by moment and by personalization, so what you see now may differ. For the other people who share the name, I have described only the public fields of activity that appeared in the results.
✦Common questions
It means a search engine recognizing a name as a thing rather than a string of characters. Google describes knowledge panels as information boxes that appear when you search for entities in the Knowledge Graph, meaning people, places, organizations, or things. Several people sharing a name get separated into distinct entities.
Taking first place on the name alone is not realistic. Pairing the name with a role or field is much faster. In my case the combination of my name plus SEO started working immediately. Pick the word people would type alongside your name when looking for you.
Create one place you control and declare who you are there, once. Set the title and the organization, then use sameAs to signal that the scattered accounts belong to the same entity. After that, increase the number of times your name appears on someone else's platform.
Not overnight. I worked at it for months and it still moves between page one and pages two and three, several times a day. The shift from nothing appearing at all to results starting to accumulate is visible, though.
I help companies grow in search, mostly on Google, in Korea and across borders. Eight years in the field taught me to look at content and structure together rather than chasing one technical fix.
