What we count, exactly
For each person we take the first page of ordinary results for their name and mark every result as one of three things: theirs, somebody else's, or unclear.
A result counts as theirs only when it sits on a web address the person has told us they control. Not when the name matches. A matching name is the thing the whole exercise is about, so it cannot also be the proof.
What we found
Across 21 people, 20 owned under a fifth of their own first page. One reached 40 per cent, and nobody else came close to him.
The shape was consistent. Most people held one or two results, usually LinkedIn and sometimes a company page, and everything else on the page was either another person or something that could not be attributed.
Why the number is lower than the truth
This is the important caveat and we would rather state it than have somebody find it. The test is conservative on purpose, so the figure understates how much of the page is really yours.
Most people give us one web address, usually LinkedIn. If an old company biography, a conference listing and an interview are also theirs, none of those count, because nothing we hold joins them to the person. They are marked unclear.
The figure is a floor, not a measurement of the truth. It says what can be demonstrated, which is a smaller number than what is actually true.
So read it as the share of your first page that you could prove is yours to somebody checking you. For a client, a recruiter or a journalist doing exactly that, the demonstrable share is arguably the one that matters.
We got this wrong twice, in opposite directions
The first version of this check matched on names, and it failed both ways on real people.
Run on a non-executive director it called ten of ten results his, on a page dominated by a far more famous man with the same name. Run on a woman who goes by her middle name it called ten of ten not hers, when at least five were her own profiles.
Attributing a stranger's record to a client and attributing a client's record to a stranger are the same fault. The fix was the third column: unclear is the honest answer for most of a shared first page, and a tool that offers only two answers will confidently give you the wrong one.
What a good number looks like
There is no target, and anybody quoting one is making it up. What is worth watching is the direction and the composition.
Two results that both describe you correctly beat five that disagree with each other. What happens when your details disagree covers why.
If you want the count run properly on your own name, that is what the free audit does, with each result attributed and the unclear ones named as unclear.
21 audits, August to October 2026. 20 of 21 subjects owned under a fifth of their first page under a test that only counts a result when it sits on a web address the person told us they control. The highest was 40 per cent.