Why a matching name proves nothing
The obvious way to decide whether a result is yours is to check whether it carries your name. Every result on the page carries your name. That is why it is on the page.
So the name cannot be the test. Something else has to join the result to you: a web address you control, a company number, a role that is genuinely yours and not merely similar.
Our own two failures
We did this wrong twice in the same month, in opposite directions, and both cases reached a real document.
A written report once listed a venture as belonging to the person it was about. It belonged to a different man with the same name. The checking tool already had a rule against exactly this and the written section had no equivalent, so a person did deliberately what the tool had been fixed twice to stop doing by accident.
The other direction is just as bad. A woman who goes by her middle name had every result on her page marked as not hers, because the check wanted an exact full-name match. The report would have told her that strangers share her name while listing her own accounts.
Attributing a stranger's record to you and attributing your record to a stranger are the same fault, and the second one is easier to miss.
Three answers, not two
The fix was to stop forcing a yes or no.
This matters beyond our own tooling. If you are assessing your own results, the useful question is not whether a row feels like you but whether you could demonstrate it to somebody else.
When the result is something serious
Occasionally a result on somebody's name is a legal matter belonging to a different person of the same name. It happens more often than people expect on common names.
Our rule is fixed. We will say that a result is not you. We will not write about what it is, we will not guess whose it is, and where it needs discussing we do that by telephone rather than in a document that can be forwarded.
If you are dealing with this yourself, the same discipline is worth keeping. The strongest position is a page of your own that is unmistakably you, which is what separates you from it without ever having to discuss it.
Our own checker attributed the wrong person twice on real audits in August 2026: once calling ten of ten results a client's on a page dominated by a more famous namesake, and once calling ten of ten not hers when at least five were her own profiles.