How to Google Yourself — the right way

Regular Google is your Google. It knows your history, your logged-in account, and your city — so it quietly ranks your own site, your LinkedIn and your Instagram higher than they'd appear to a stranger. Open a fresh incognito window (or a browser you never sign into) before you search.

Wrap your name in double quotes: "Jane Smith". This forces an exact-match. Then repeat with modifiers:

• "Jane Smith" + city
• "Jane Smith" + employer
• "Jane Smith" + university
• "Jane Smith" site:reddit.com

Recruiters and dates run these exact combinations. Page two matters — 40% of people who Google someone click through to results 11–20.

Almost every reputational surprise we surface for our users lives in Google Images: an old profile photo, a group shot from a party, a screenshot that got indexed. Click the Images tab and scroll two full screens.

Your name is not your only trail. Old handles from Reddit, Twitter/X, Discord, gaming forums and abandoned blogs often still rank — and Google links them together when they share an email or a profile bio.

List every username you've used since you were 13. Google each one. Then search "username" site:archive.org — the Wayback Machine keeps pages you deleted years ago.

Go to myactivity.google.com/results-about-you. Google's own tool flags pages that expose your name paired with your address, phone, or email — and lets you request removal from search results in a couple of clicks. Free, official, and criminally underused.

Steps 1–5 take about an hour and still miss the big stuff: follower ratios that scream "bot", archived posts you thought were deleted, photos on third-party sites, data-broker listings you never signed up for.

Stalk Yourself runs the whole playbook in about 60 seconds. You get an Internet Aura Score, every finding ranked by risk, and a direct removal link for anything you want gone.