How common it is
On the audits we have run, a namesake on the first page is closer to the rule than the exception, and the cases are rarely subtle.
A coach we audited shared his first page with five other people of the same name, among them a rival in the same trade and a footballer who died in 1970. A woman in a professional services field found the strongest record for her name belonged to a socialite who died in 1939. A non-executive director found the address at his own name in hand belonged to a different man with a decoration after his name, working in the same professional territory and sitting directly above him.
That last one is the expensive version. A famous footballer is obvious to anybody looking. A different person with your name doing your job is not, and that is the one that costs you work.
Why removal is not available
The other person has the same right to the name that you do. There is no mechanism for taking somebody out of results for sharing a name with you, and there should not be.
Anybody offering to clear namesakes off your page is describing something they cannot deliver. What they can usually deliver is an invoice.
The exception is a result that is genuinely about you and genuinely wrong, which is a different job with a different route and is not what this page is about.
Separation, which does work
The thing that moves is not removal but distinctness. You are trying to make it obvious, to a reader and to a search engine, which rows are you.
What that means in practice:
- One job title, identical everywhere, word for word rather than roughly the same.
- Your own page, carrying your name, your role and your company together in one place.
- Your profiles listed on that page, so the links between them are stated rather than inferred.
- The company you are actually at now, named consistently, including its registered number where you have one.
A company number is the strongest of these, because it is a value no namesake shares. A name plus a role is a weak join. A name plus a registered company number is not a join anybody can get wrong.
The counter-intuitive part
A dull distinctive name is easier to work with than a memorable shared one. Two ordinary words together are the hardest case of all.
We know this from running the exercise on our own parent company, which is called Domain Farm. A search appeared to show nine platforms carrying the company, and reading the actual titles showed that not one of them named it. They were pages that happened to contain the words domain and farm.
If your name is common, expect this to be slower, and be suspicious of anybody who does not say so. How much of page one is yours is the number to watch while it moves.
Namesake counts taken from real audits in 2026. One coach shared his first page with five other people of the same name, including a rival in his own trade and a footballer who died in 1970. One woman's name returned a socialite who died in 1939 as the strongest record for those words.