How many times has my name been Googled?

Wondering how many times your name has been Googled? Unfortunately, there’s no way to find out: Google Search, like other search engines, doesn’t disclose individual search data. Any websites or companies claiming they can reveal an exact number are, ultimately, lying—some data brokers claim to do exactly this.

Tech giant Alphabet Inc. doesn’t make exact numbers available for Google Search queries, but there are some things you can do to get at least an idea of how many times your name is being searched, how that number changes over time, and whether new websites that mention your name have been indexed. 

If people typing in your name on Google is a concern to you, then what they find there probably is too: there are steps you can take to limit how much of your private data ends up in the search results. There’s the personal information you’ve willingly revealed on social media sites, and then there are data brokers.

Adam Cholinski

Asking yourself “how many times has my name been Googled?” In short:

• Use Google Trends to get a rough idea of how often your name is Googled over time.
• Set up a Google Alert to stay informed about any new websites that mention you.
• Opt out of the sale of your personal information to exert some control over what typing your name into Google’s search bar brings up.

Use Google Trends to track interest in your name over time

Google Trends shows changes in interest in a particular search term over time. You can use it to get an idea of how popular your name is as a search term. This will only work if you have a unique, or at least extremely uncommon, name. Otherwise, you’ll get a sense of how many people are looking for your name, but not necessarily you.

Google Trends won’t show you how many times your name has been Googled, but it will give you a good idea of how the frequency of Google searches for your name changes with respect to time and across different regions. So, you can see if searches for your name have spiked at a certain time, but you can’t get an accurate number for any particular point in time or period.

Google Trends data is based on a sample of search data. Search frequency is presented on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 means no discernable interest and 100 represents peak interest for the given period. You might be able to, for example, correlate a spike in searches with a doxxing incident.

Google Trends only picks up on searches performed through Google Search, so people looking for you online using privacy-respecting search engines or social media sites won’t affect these statistics.

Set up a Google Alert to catch new mentions of your name

Rather than focusing on how many times you’re being Googled, you can set up a Google Alert to receive a notification every time a new website mentioning your name gets indexed with Google Search. This won’t tell you how many times your name has been Googled, but it will let you stay on top of what people Googling your name are likely to come across.

Once you’ve set up your Google Alerts, you’ll be notified by email if your name appears in newly indexed news articles, blogs, personal and corporate websites, or discussion forums.

How to set up Google Alerts

Setting up Google Alerts is a free and easy process, with just one catch. Here’s how:

1. Go to https://www.google.com/alerts.
2. Type in your name.
3. Click “show options” to adjust the settings to your liking. Here, you can set:
   1. How often notifications are sent
   2. The types of sites you want to monitor
   3. Your preferred language
   4. The geographical region you want to monitor
   5. The number of results you want to see
   6. What Google accounts are to get the alerts.
4. Click “create alert” to complete the process.

The catch with the above process is that you need to have a Google account in order to set up an alert like this. For many people, this isn’t a problem, but it can be a pain point for those who are more privacy conscious. You can always set up a dummy or burner account if you don’t already have one.

Set multiple alerts if you use or have used different names or different variations or spellings of your name. If your name is very rare in your part of the world but extremely common elsewhere, use the settings in Step 3, above, to limit the alert to just your region.

Think outside the Google box: other ways to gauge online interest in your name

Chances are, if you’re curious how many times your name has been Googled, you’re probably interested in knowing how often people are looking for you online in general. Google is just one search engine in a sea of other search engines, and there are other platforms that people might reach for when searching for you online.

Social media platforms like Microsoft’s LinkedIn, for example, will let you know how many times your profile appeared in users’ search results in the past week or how many times it’d been viewed by other users. Microsoft will tell you a lot more about who has been looking you up on LinkedIn, but not while you’re on a free account.

Meta doesn’t offer anything similar, unfortunately, but the Twitter Analytics page might be of some help if you have a Twitter (now “X”) account in your real name (not recommended). There are other things you can do to figure out roughly how often people are searching your name, but they require some technical know-how, time, and money.

You could, for example, create a personal website and use SEO techniques to make sure it features prominently for search terms involving your name. You could then use common online marketing and Google tracking tools (like Google Analytics) to measure how much traffic reaches your site through those Google results.

Final recommendations

Some data brokers claim they can tell you how many times you’ve been searched on Google. These data brokers don’t have any special access to Alphabet’s Google logs, so their claims are, to put it bluntly, false. We recommend staying away from these kinds of companies. More than that, we recommend you opt out of their data-harvesting and data-sharing operations.

Anyone who’s concerned about people Googling their name is likely also concerned about what those people are likely to find in the search results. Thanks to the ongoing actions of data brokers—people search sites in particular—anyone searching for you online is likely to come across a treasure trove of your personal information. 

People search sites will happily display your personal details, including your up-to-date contact details, for anyone to come across in Google Search results. They, like other data brokers, scrape the internet looking for your personal information. They get it from public records, your social media profiles, and other data brokers. 

You’ve seen these companies if you’ve searched for your name on Google. All those data brokers in the search results are profiting from your digital footprint with no regard for your online reputation, online privacy, or physical safety. Some of the data points they have on you are easily accessible free of charge.

To stop data brokers from profiting off personal information collected without your consent or even knowledge, opt out of their schemes by using our step-by-step guides. Don’t want to leave your personal data exposed online but can’t spare a few hundred hours a year to do it yourself? Try Incogni and let us take care of it for you.

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