MeMyself.fyi versus LinkedIn: which one tells Google and AI who you are?

You have spent years on your LinkedIn profile. Every role is there, the dates are right, the summary has been rewritten more times than you would admit, and the photo is the good one. Then someone asks ChatGPT who you are, and the answer is a shrug, or worse, a confident description of somebody else with your name.

That is not because you did LinkedIn badly. It is because the place you put your professional identity is one of the hardest places on the web for an AI to read.

The login wall problem

Try something. Open a private browser window, signed out of everything, and visit your own LinkedIn profile URL. Depending on the day and your settings you will get a cut down public version, a sign in prompt laid over the top, or a flat demand to log in before seeing anything at all.

That signed out view is roughly what an AI crawler gets, on a good day. LinkedIn guards its pages aggressively: its robots.txt blocks most automated visitors, including OpenAI's crawler, and anything that gets past the front door meets the same login wall you just did. This is rational on LinkedIn's part. Your profile data is their product, and they have fought in court to control who extracts it. But it means the richest, most current record of your career sits somewhere the systems now answering questions about you can barely see.

Google has a long standing arrangement that lets a slice of public profiles into its index, which is why a LinkedIn result often ranks for your name. The AI assistants have no such arrangement. Ask one to read your profile URL and watch what happens: a refusal, an error, or a summary built from fragments found elsewhere. When you run your name through the assistants, the answers that come back are assembled mostly from everything except LinkedIn, which for many professionals means everything except the one record they actually maintain.

Rented, not owned

The second problem is older than AI. Your LinkedIn profile belongs to LinkedIn. The URL is theirs, the page is theirs, the rules about what appears on it are theirs, and the audience is metered out by an algorithm you do not control and that changes without notice. If the account is restricted, impersonated or caught in a moderation sweep, your professional record goes dark and you join a support queue.

None of this makes LinkedIn bad. It makes it rented. A page on your own domain is the opposite: nobody can throttle it, reword it, redesign it around ads or put a sign up prompt between it and a reader. It will say exactly what you want it to say for as long as you pay a domain registrar roughly the price of two coffees a year.

No structure underneath

Here is the part almost nobody considers. Google and the AI systems do not just read pages, they read the structured data underneath them: machine readable statements that this page is about a Person with this name, who holds this role at this organization, and who is the same person as the one behind these other profiles.

You cannot add any of that to a LinkedIn profile. There is no field for it and never will be, because the entity LinkedIn marks up is LinkedIn. Your profile is one more item in their catalog, not a source of truth about you.

A page on your own domain can carry all of it: a Person node with a stable identifier, and a sameAs list naming every profile you control, LinkedIn included. That identifier is what Wikidata can cite, what a knowledge panel can be built on, and what lets an assistant join your scattered profiles into one person. LinkedIn can be referenced by that record. It cannot be that record.

The namesake problem

Search LinkedIn for your own name and count the results. Unless your name is unusual, there are pages of them. LinkedIn solves this internally with profile URLs and mutual connections, but out on the open web there is nothing that tells a search engine or an assistant which of those people is you. A wrong person answer, the confident description of the dentist or the footballer who shares your name, is usually this problem wearing a suit.

Disambiguation takes a page that states the separating facts plainly, your city, your field, your company, your middle name if you use one, and a consistent name form and photo everywhere else, all tied together by that one identifier. That is entity work, and there is nowhere on LinkedIn to do it.

Why this matters more now

For years a weak name search cost you very little, because people clicked through and found out for themselves. That habit is fading. SparkToro's clickstream study, reported by Search Engine Land, found that 68.01% of US Google searches between January and April 2026 ended without a click.

When someone types your name, the answer on the results page, or the answer an assistant gives them, is increasingly the whole encounter. They do not visit your LinkedIn to check. They read what was summarized and move on. That makes the source of the summary the thing that matters, and if the summary is built from pages the assistants can read, those pages need to be yours.

What LinkedIn is genuinely good at

Fairness demands the other side, because LinkedIn earns its place.

It is where recruiters, buyers and partners actively look, with intent, every day. It has a feed, which your own site does not, so it is where your writing and commentary find an audience. A profile there is a baseline credibility check; the absence of one raises more questions in most industries than a thin one does. And to the systems that can see its public slice, a LinkedIn profile is a strong, recognized signal that a person exists and works where they say they work.

Nothing about building your own page replaces any of that. Delete nothing, keep posting.

This was never really versus

Which gives the game away about the title of this post. The honest answer to MeMyself.fyi versus LinkedIn is that they are not competitors, because they do different jobs on different ground.

LinkedIn is a distribution channel and a directory listing. Your own page is the canonical record: the one place on the open web, on a domain you control, that states every fact about you in plain sentences with the structure underneath that machines read. The record points at LinkedIn through its sameAs list, your LinkedIn points back through its website field, and each makes the other more credible, because cross source agreement is precisely what entity systems are built to detect.

Side by side, the division of labor looks like this.

Read the last column and the first and the pattern is plain: LinkedIn wins on audience, your own domain wins on authority, and the professionals who look established to both people and machines run the two together.

Three objections you will hear

"My LinkedIn already ranks first for my name." It probably does, and that is useful. But ranking is a position in a list, and an answer is a sentence. A search engine can rank a page it cannot fully read and show a snippet. An assistant writing a description needs facts it can extract and trust, and a ranked link to a login wall gives it very little to extract.

"I will just make my profile fully public and optimize it." Do that, it costs nothing. You will still be working inside one company's fields, with no place for a stable identifier or a sameAs list, and you will still be one of many people sharing your name on the platform.

"I post on LinkedIn every day, so people know me." They do, and that audience is real. It is also the audience you already have. The page on your own domain is for everyone who arrives later, with a question and no context, and needs the answer in a sentence.

What to actually do