The LinkedIn personal branding expert who works on what Google files under your name

Personal branding has become Person Engine Optimization

For ten years personal branding meant posting. Post often, post well, grow the follower count. That still helps, but it no longer decides who gets the call. The decision now happens in a search box: Google first, and increasingly ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. We call the discipline of being found and correctly described there Person Engine Optimization, or PEO.

PEO treats your name the way search engine optimization treats a company: as something that has to be found, read, understood and believed by a machine before a human ever sees it. In that frame LinkedIn has a specific job. It is the most consulted witness. Semrush found LinkedIn is the second most cited website in AI search answers, cited in 14.3% of ChatGPT Search answers in its sample. A witness that contradicts your website does more harm than a witness who says nothing.

So the job of a LinkedIn personal branding expert under PEO is not to make you louder. It is to make the record about you consistent, specific and easy to quote.

The order we work in

A profile rewrite done in the wrong order wastes the good sentences. We follow the same sequence on every name, because each step depends on the one before it.

1. Search your name the way a stranger wouldLogged out, in a private window, in your country and one other. We record what Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity say before changing anything, so you can see the difference later.
2. Agree the one-line descriptionWho you are, what you do, for whom. Every later field repeats this line or supports it.
3. Rewrite the headline and the first lines of AboutThese are the words most often lifted into search results, so they get written first and tested in the preview tool above.
4. Arrange Featured as evidenceYour own site, then proof Google can check: a book, published interviews, talks. We use our entity check to see which of these Google already connects to you.
5. Match the rest of the recordWebsite bio, author pages, speaker bios. A LinkedIn profile that disagrees with your website cancels both.
6. Search again after four to eight weeksGoogle re-reads profiles on its own schedule. We compare the before and after and tell you plainly what moved and what did not.

If you prefer to do the Google side yourself, our 30-day do-it-yourself calendar covers it day by day, and the readiness score tells you where you stand today.

Who checks your LinkedIn before they decide

The people who matter rarely tell you they looked. An investor checks before the second meeting. A buyer checks the founder before signing. A recruiter checks before the shortlist. The best number we have on this is old but still solid: in a CareerBuilder survey of 2,380 hiring managers, 70% said they used social media, LinkedIn included, to screen candidates.

What they find is rarely a disaster. It is usually something quieter: a profile that says "Founder" and nothing else, an About section written for a job hunt five years ago, a Featured row that links nowhere. Each one is small. Together they tell a careful reader that nobody is minding the record. Our guide on what a well-kept name result is worth puts numbers you can check against that cost.

If your name result has a different problem

LinkedIn is one part of the record. If your situation is closer to one of these, the guides go deeper: when someone else's profile outranks yours, start with how Google decides whose record to show; when a panel already appears but says the wrong thing, read how to claim and correct it; and when you are not sure a panel is the goal at all, what a Knowledge Panel is sets out what it does and does not do.

The person in the videos

The videos on this page are recorded by Bhavik Sarkhedi, the strategist whose method shapes how we work. He is a three-time entrepreneur and a best-selling author of 21 books, has been published in The New York Times, and holds a verified Google Knowledge Panel for his own name, which is part of why the method begins with search rather than with posting.

"Google should have one centre point where it can see all the information."

That centre point is usually your own website. LinkedIn is the first witness Google cross-checks it against. The rest of his channel is at youtube.com/@bhavik_sarkhedi.

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