The common fault is not error, it is disagreement
When we audit somebody, outright false information is rare. Inconsistent information is almost universal, and it does more damage than people expect.
A family solicitor audited in August 2026 had four sources describing her. Her firm's own page said one thing, her professional profile said she was a partner, a review directory said she had been licensed for three years, and the regulator's register named her as a director of a differently named company. Three job titles, two firm names, one person.
Why that costs more than a gap
An empty page is a blank. Four pages that disagree is a contradiction, and a contradiction is worse in both directions: a person reading it does not know which to believe, and a search engine has no confident answer to settle on.
In our experience the disagreement is almost never anybody's fault. A directory captured a title in 2019, a regulator records the legal position rather than the trading one, a firm's own website was written at launch and never revisited. Each was true once.
Each source was right when it was written. Nothing is a lie, and together they describe nobody in particular.
The register is the one that surprises people
Official registers carry a version of you that is frequently not the current one, and because they look authoritative, people trust them hardest.
On one firm we audited, the company shown on the first page of results for their own short name had been dissolved three years earlier. The company that actually trades did not appear on that page at all. Anybody running the ordinary check on that firm landed on a dead company and would have had no reason to doubt it.
That is worth checking on yourself, particularly if you have ever changed a company name, closed one or moved between two.
Fixing it is mostly free
Pick the settled version: one job title, one company name, one spelling of your own name. Write it down. Then change every source you control to match it exactly, and ask the ones you do not control.
An evening of this is worth more than a month of coverage, and it is the step we most often find has never been done. Ranking for your own name puts it in order with the rest.
It also decays. A promotion, a rebrand or a change of registered office breaks consistency everywhere at once, so it is worth a diary note rather than treating it as finished.
One family solicitor, four sources describing her, read on the same day in August 2026: three different job titles and two different firm names for one person. Each source was right once.