If you don’t Google yourself regularly—once or twice a year—you’re essentially outsourcing your professional biography to a group project between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, large tech companies and artificial intelligence systems. Billionaires with murky goals. That’s a bold strategy.
So I Googled myself the other day. And that’s when I noticed the Google Knowledge Panel.
The Knowledge Panel is the tidy little box that appears above or to the right of your search results in Chrome. It presents a supposedly authoritative snapshot of who you are and what you do.
My panel describes me like this:
Julie Crosby is a theater producer, advocate for women artists, and author. She was most recently the artistic director of Women’s Project Theater, where she produced 25 off-Broadway plays written and directed by women.
Now, I’m very proud of that work. My years at WP Theater were meaningful and formative, and I’m still deeply invested in the advancement of women artists.
But the phrasing “most recently” caught my eye. Because I left that role in 2014.
In internet years, that’s roughly the equivalent of people buying DVDs at Target, Facebook being at the center of the universe, and the cloud being an abstract concept.
The source for that summary turned out to be a HowlRound interview that P. Carl conducted at the end of my tenure at WP. Out of curiosity, I re-read the interview for the first time in twelve years. And you know what? It’s fantastic!
The conversation dives deeply into women in leadership, systemic bias in the arts, and the challenges of producing work by women. It’s thoughtful, substantive and a meaningful record of that chapter of my career.
No complaints. The problem is not that the source was bad.
The problem is that the internet decided this excellent interview from 2014 represents my entire professional life.
But I was busy before and after life at WP. Since 2014, I’ve produced other theater, a web series and independent films. I’ve built a career strategy practice for indie artists. I’ve been writing this Substack for more than three years.
None of that appeared in the panel. The internet has simply frozen me in time. Which matters more than you might think. Because before meetings, collaborations, hiring decisions, press coverage or investment conversations, people often do the same thing I did.
They Google your name.
And within about three seconds they form a mental category for who you are.
The catch is that Google’s Knowledge Panels are not written by you. They’re generated by algorithms pulling from sources Google considers authoritative. Those sources often reflect the moment when your public visibility was highest, or the version of your career that is easiest for the system to verify and summarize, not necessarily the work you’re doing now.
In other words, Google is not asking: “Who are you now?”
It’s asking: “What story about you can I assemble fastest from sources that have traffic?”
Now layer AI on top of that. AI systems summarize, interpret and recombine information from across the internet. But AI does not magically correct outdated or inaccurate source material. More often, it amplifies it.
Think about that.
If the internet has an incomplete or outdated understanding of your career (or history or current events), AI is most likely to simply package that misunderstanding in smoother, more authoritative language.
Which is why it’s worth remembering that technology is powerful, but it is not omniscient. And there is no reason to hand over authorship of your professional identity to whatever the internet happens to infer.
Fortunately, there is a small step you can take today: claim your Google Knowledge Panel.
If one exists for your name, you can verify ownership and evenutally gain some ability to suggest updates or corrections. Here’s how to proceed.
Google your name while logged into your Google account. Do not go incognito. If you have a Knowledge Panel, it will appear above or to the right of the search results.
Scroll through the panel until you find those three little dots and then find the link that says “Claim this knowledge panel.” Google will ask you to verify your identity by showing that you control official websites or professional profiles associated with your name. Be sure the screenshots show your name and the site owner (e.g. Squarespace, LinkedIn). Once approved, you can begin suggesting updates.
Fair warning: I am currently about two weeks into this process and getting mixed results, probably because I’m attempting to update more than a decade of accumulated internet residue.
And while you’re in this “branding” frame of mind, do one more useful thing.
Keep a running list of the places where your professional identity lives online. I keep mine in Google Keep so I can update them quickly: LinkedIn, IMDb, personal and business websites, Substack, alumni platforms, industry directories.
Your online presence exists across dozens of platforms. If you don’t occasionally align them, they drift apart. And eventually the internet starts telling a story about your career that you didn’t write, or about an experience that you don’t recall in the manner implied, or about some blip on your professional timeline that you’d rather forget.
So please Google yourself twice a year. Think of it as routine maintenance for your professional identity. It’s like getting your teeth cleaned. Just do it.
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