Most agencies keep this behind a discovery call, which is a way of making a simple thing feel proprietary. Here is the entire twelve months: the five workstreams, what we do, what you do, exactly how many hours it costs you, and what happens if it stalls.
Opens your assistant with this page's address and a prompt asking for a plain summary. Useful if you want the version your own advisor would give you rather than ours.
Nothing starts with an invoice. It starts with a written diagnosis of what Google currently holds on your name, whether a fragment already exists, and whether somebody better known owns the meaning of your name. That document is free and it arrives within three working days.
Roughly a third of applicants are told not to proceed. Not as a negotiating position, but because the mechanism genuinely will not work for them yet. If the public web holds nothing independent about you, no process conjures it into existence, and taking the money anyway would buy both of us a year and end in a refund.
Your total time commitment across the whole engagement is about fourteen hours. Two hours at the start, roughly one hour a month in the middle stretch, and ninety minutes around the claim. Everything else happens without you. If that sounds too good, read the workstream chart below, because the reason is that most of the work is waiting on third parties rather than on effort.
The chart below is the whole engagement. Three of the five streams finish inside the first two months. One runs almost the entire year, and it is the one that decides whether any of this works.
Three of the five workstreams finish inside two months. The one that runs all year is the one that decides whether any of it works, and it is the one nobody can accelerate.
Read the green bar first. Everything above it is preparation that a competent team completes in about six weeks. The green bar is independent people publishing things about you on their own schedule, and no amount of money shortens it. That is the honest reason this takes a year rather than a month.
People assume the technical work dominates. It does not. Here is where the total effort on an average engagement actually lands.
This is the complete demand on your calendar. If any month looks impossible for you, say so at diagnosis rather than at month four, because a stalled client is the second most common reason an engagement fails.
The interview at the start is where every fact used for the next twelve months gets written down: dates, qualifications, the exact spelling of your name, the numbers you will defend in public. Rush it and everything downstream inherits the vagueness. It is the single highest-leverage hour of the whole engagement, and it is the one clients most often want to shorten.
Written from the client's side. What lands in your inbox, what you are asked for, and what is going on in the background while nothing appears to be happening.
You send a short email with your name, role, website and anything already published about you. We run your name through the entity records and a logged-out search, and write up what Google currently holds, whether a namesake is in the way, and whether this is buildable.
If the answer is no, you get told plainly and there is no invoice. The commonest reasons are genuinely nothing independent existing yet, or a famous namesake making the bare name unwinnable at this price.
The engagement begins with a long conversation about your own facts, followed by a written questionnaire that captures everything the conversation missed. Dates, qualifications, every organisation you have led, every name variant you have published under, the numbers you will stand behind publicly.
This becomes the single reference document that every later step reads from. It is also where hallucinated facts either start or never start, because anything vague here gets repeated confidently everywhere else.
One canonical page that is unambiguously about you as a person, separate from your company, opening with a plain identity sentence and carrying your master headshot. The machine-readable identity layer ships with it, and your search console gets verified under an account you will still control in five years.
That last detail matters more than it sounds. The same account is required for the claim later and for every correction after that, so it cannot belong to an agency or a departing employee.
Same spelling of your name, same headshot file, same first ten words of the headline, same city, one link pointing home. Across every account you have ever made, including the ones you forgot about.
It is the least interesting stage and it resolves more fragmentation than anything else on the list. Most people arrive with three job titles and two photographs spread across five platforms, which is precisely what stops a search engine concluding they are one person.
Independent sources publishing things about you: podcasts other people host, conference and association listings, trade press, peer mentions. The target is a handful in your industry and a handful institutional, each repeating the same identity line and pointing home.
This is the stage clients find hardest, because progress is invisible for months and then arrives in clusters. You will receive a written progress note monthly. Some months it will say that two things are in flight and nothing has published yet, which is a normal month rather than a bad one.
How we source and sequence this is the part of the method we do not publish, for the obvious reason. What you will see is the output: an appearance in your calendar, a bio to approve, and a link when it goes live.
At some point the entity crosses a threshold and a panel appears. There is no notification and no scheduled date, so it is checked on a fixed cadence rather than hoped for.
When it appears you receive the panel link, the entity identifier, and a prepared packet: the exact wording for the question most claims are rejected on, the profile URLs to supply, and a briefing on the one setting that silently blocks the whole flow for people on work Google accounts.
You click claim, not us. Verification asks for government identification and a selfie, and those never come near a consultant. We stay on the call while you submit.
Wrong photograph, wrong job title, a namesake bleeding in, a stale company name. Once claimed, suggested edits go through your account and land in days rather than weeks, provided the underlying sources agree with the edit.
That proviso is the whole trick of stewardship: fix the source first, then submit the edit. An edit request that contradicts what your own site says will be ignored, and repeated ignored requests are a corroboration problem rather than a form problem.
This is the question that produces the most anxiety at the diagnosis stage, usually because somebody has recently spent money on a website and is bracing to be told it was wasted. Almost always it was not.
The entity home is a different object from a company website, and the two coexist. Your company site sells what the company does. The entity home states who you are. Conflating them is the single most common structural mistake, because a page that is trying to sell a service and establish a person's identity does neither convincingly, and a machine reading it cannot tell which subject the page is about.
In practice this means one of three things, decided at diagnosis. If you already own a personal domain, we build there. If you do not, one gets registered in your name, usually your name itself or the closest available form of it. If your existing site is genuinely personal already, it gets restructured rather than replaced, which is the cheapest and most common outcome.
What does not happen is a redesign of your company website. It is not what you are buying and it would be an expensive distraction from the thing that actually produces a panel.
Your company site sells the business. The entity home states who you are. They are different jobs, and trying to do both from one page is why so many well-marketed people remain invisible as individuals.
Pricing in this field ranges from a few hundred dollars to well over twenty thousand, which tells you the market has not settled on what the work is. Here is the honest arithmetic behind this particular number.
The fee covers roughly forty to sixty hours of work on our side, spread thin across twelve months rather than concentrated. Most of it is not glamorous: writing and rewriting an identity line until it is boring enough to be repeatable, auditing profiles nobody has looked at since 2019, drafting pitches, chasing people who said yes in March and went quiet in April, and checking a search result on a fixed cadence for months.
What the number is not covering is a guarantee of a specific outcome, because nobody can sell that honestly. It is covering the construction of conditions, the honesty about whether those conditions are achievable for you, and the refund if they do not produce a result within the year.
| What you might be quoted | What it usually is | Worth it |
|---|---|---|
| Under $500 | Directory submissions and a schema plugin. Sometimes an unsourced Wikidata item that will be deleted, which leaves you worse off than before. | No |
| $1,000 to $2,000 | Usually genuine markup work plus profile cleanup, stopping before corroboration. Useful as far as it goes, and it rarely goes far enough to trigger anything. | Partially |
| $3,000, flat | The full sequence including the long corroboration stage, the claim packet, and stewardship afterwards. Priced for a solo operator running four builds, not an agency with a sales team. | This |
| $7,500 to $15,000 | The same twelve steps at agency rates, frequently with a longer guarantee attached. Not dishonest, and you are paying for account management and overhead rather than more work. | Sometimes |
| Over $20,000 | Either a genuinely complex contested-name situation, or an upsell wrapped around a retainer. Ask precisely which records will change and on what timeline. | Ask hard |
The useful question to ask any supplier is not what it costs. It is "which specific records will you change, and what happens if nothing appears". A vendor who cannot answer the first is guessing, and one who has no answer to the second is selling you their optimism.
After the interview you receive a written questionnaire. Clients occasionally push back on its length, so it is worth explaining what each part is for, because none of it is administrative padding.
Every fact in it becomes something a machine will eventually be asked to confirm. A vague answer here does not stay vague, it becomes a confident inaccuracy repeated across a dozen surfaces. The questionnaire exists to make vagueness expensive at the only point where fixing it is cheap.
| Section | What it asks for | Why it matters later |
|---|---|---|
| Name, exactly | Every form your name has ever been published under, including maiden names, initials, transliterations and abbreviations used by conference programmes. | This is the single field that decides whether you become one entity or four. Nothing else in the questionnaire matters as much. |
| The identity sentence | Who you are in one plain sentence with no adjectives. Role, organisation, location. We draft it, you approve it. | It gets repeated verbatim across every profile and every third-party bio. Consistency here is what a machine reads as agreement. |
| Dates | Founding dates, qualification dates, publication dates. Where you are comfortable sharing it, date of birth. | Dates are the facts a panel can display. Most people have never published any of theirs anywhere citable, which is why most panels show no fact rows. |
| Organisations | Every company you founded, led or hold a named role at, with registration details where they exist. | Ties you to entities that may already be resolved, which is one of the cheapest credibility transfers available. |
| Prior coverage | Press, podcasts, panels, awards, teaching, jury seats. Links where you have them, approximate dates where you do not. | This is the raw material for the corroboration stage. It is also how we work out whether the diagnosis was right. |
| Published work | Books with ISBNs, papers with identifiers, patents, registered designs. | The strongest accelerators available. Also where we discover that your books are split across two spellings of your name. |
| The photograph | One master headshot at full resolution, plus where it currently appears. | Images in a panel come from sources Google trusts, not from your gallery. One face everywhere is the entire strategy. |
| Namesakes | Anyone well known who shares your name, honestly. | Changes the plan fundamentally. Clients occasionally omit this hoping it will not matter. It always matters. |
| Boundaries | Anything you do not want published, discussed or connected to your name. | Easier to respect from the start than to unwind after it has been syndicated across four sites. |
The questionnaire is not admin. It is the only opportunity to be precise before imprecision gets copied everywhere, and the name field alone is worth the whole exercise.
The hardest part of this engagement is psychological rather than technical. There is a long middle stretch where you are paying, appearing on things, and seeing absolutely no change in your search results. That stretch is normal, and clients who do not know it is normal tend to conclude it is failing.
Silence from us. A monthly written note is part of the engagement, including in the months where the honest content of that note is "two things are in flight and nothing has published". If a month passes with no note, chase it. Slow progress is normal in this work. Not being told about slow progress is not.
Worth reading before you commit rather than after. Two of these are our problem and two are yours, and it is only fair to name both.
| What happens | How often | What we do about it |
|---|---|---|
| The client goes quiet | The most common failure by a distance | Corroboration needs you to appear on things. If months pass with no availability, the middle stage simply stops. We flag it in writing at the second missed month and pause rather than keep billing time against a stalled build. |
| A namesake proves stronger than the diagnosis suggested | Occasionally, on common names | The plan shifts to the name plus a qualifier, and we tell you that the bare name is no longer the realistic target. If it materially changes the scope, we say so rather than quietly under-deliver. |
| The claim is rejected | Sometimes on the first attempt | We keep an exact record of what was submitted, diagnose which of the known causes applied, and resubmit once. If the underlying entity is still thin, more attempts will not help and we go back to the build instead. |
| Nothing appears by month twelve | Rare, and it has happened | Full refund of the fee. Not a credit, not extra months. This is also why the diagnosis at month zero is genuinely used to decline people rather than as theatre. |
Kept here rather than sprinkled through the text, so the guide reads at speed and the definitions stay findable.
Everything on this page is the shape of the engagement, and you are entitled to all of it before you spend anything. What is not here is the part you are actually paying for: which sources are worth pursuing in a given field, the order they are approached in, how a pitch is framed so it lands, and the specific structural work that makes a machine resolve one person out of several fragments.
That distinction is deliberate rather than coy. A published method stops being an advantage the week it is published, and clients who came for a result would end up funding a manual for their competitors. What you get instead is a monthly written note showing exactly what was done, which is accountability without publication.
If a supplier ever refuses to tell you the shape of their process, walk. If they hand you the entire method for free, ask what they are actually selling.
The second guide covers exactly what happens when the panel appears: the link you receive, the question that decides most rejections, the setting that silently blocks the flow, and what to do if the answer comes back no.
Start with the free diagnosis →