Who Googled You? This Website Knows

by Sarah Kessler

After a date, a pitch or a job interview, there’s a good chance you’re going to get Googled. Online reputation manager BrandYourself now helps you figure out who is searching for your name.

The startup, which helps individuals control Google results for names through SEO, launched a new feature on Tuesday that shows users where visitors to their BrandYourself profiles work and where they’re located.

BrandYourself built a database of organizations’ publicly-available IP addresses in order to create the feature. They use it to match IP addressees of profile visitors with the companies that own those addressses.

Visitors most frequently reach BrandYourself profiles through Google, but the feature works the same way if visitors reach a user’s profile from another search engine or website.

The system isn’t foolproof. While it’s easy to track down IP addresses for large organizations, many smaller companies won’t be listed. The feature is more a way for BrandYourself to keep users engaged than it is a core part of its product.

“They are being Googled,” BrandYourself co-founder Patrick Ambron tells Mashable. “It gives them an idea of who is looking them up, and it motivates them to update their profile and make sure they’re putting their best foot forward.”

Ambron’s free product is a step-by-step dashboard that helps users optimize up to three links they want to push up in search results for their names. Because linking out and in are factors in how Google ranks pages, part of this process includes creating a profile page where users can link to all their other online profiles.

Since launching in March, Ambron says the site has signed up 25,000 users — 80% of whom have set up profiles. About 1,000 users have subscribed to a $10-per-month premium product that allows them to optimize unlimited links.

BrandYourself competitors such as Ziggs and Naymz also track the geographic locations of profile visitors, but they don’t provide the names of the organizations.

Career sites such as LinkedIn show exactly who visited your profile along with their work history.

“[It’s] similar to how LinkedIn and MyLife do it between their internal users,” Ambron says of the comparison. “Except, applied to the entire web.”

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