What recruiters see when they google your name.

A recruiter rarely stops at typing your name once. The typical pattern: your first and last name, then your name plus the city or university, then the Images tab, which shows a very different picture from the text results. If your name is common, the search usually adds a qualifier — a city, a school, an employer — which is exactly the kind of detail your CV hands over.

The result page is also not a neutral list. Your LinkedIn profile, if it exists, will almost always rank first, followed by anything that repeats your full name in a title. Old pages that were never meant to be found again can sit below for years simply because nothing newer competes with them.

Every scan we run sorts what it finds into the same handful of categories, and they are remarkably consistent from one name to the next:

• Profiles you forgot — a forum account, an old gaming handle, a platform you stopped using in school, still indexed and still tied to your name.
• People-search and directory pages — sites that compile names, cities and sometimes home addresses or relatives, and rank well because they are updated constantly.
• Photos — tagged pictures on accounts you no longer control, visible through the Images tab even when the post itself is buried.
• Opinions — forum posts, blog comments, reviews written under your real name years ago, in a tone no one would use in an interview.
• Documents — a school PDF, a sports-club results table, a local news mention: pages where your name appears with a birth year, a phone number or a class list.
• Registry pages — if you have ever founded, directed or co-owned anything official, the registry entry ranks quickly, and it carries your birth data.

In the last two years, several large French datasets have leaked — fiscal records, bank details, health-insurance claims, a telecom operator’s subscriber base. We keep the press coverage on our home page up to date. None of this usually shows up on page one of a name search, which is exactly why it is easy to ignore: a clean first page says nothing about whether your data is in circulation. The two problems are separate. Page one is what a recruiter sees; the breach waves are what a scammer or an identity thief works from. Both deserve a look, and only the first one is visible to a stranger typing your name.

1. Search yourself properly first. Logged out, in a private window, on more than one engine: your name in quotes, name plus city, name plus each old handle, then the Images tab. Ten minutes, free, and it tells you whether there is anything to fix at all.
2. Fix what you own. Old accounts get deleted or locked down, privacy settings get tightened, posts you would not say out loud get removed. This is the fastest win and the one only you can do.
3. Third-party sites: the GDPR erasure request. For a page you do not control, Article 17 of the GDPR gives you the right to ask for your data to be erased, in writing, and the site has one month to answer. It costs nothing but attention: every site needs its own request, many route you through identity checks, and some refuse. It works more often than people expect — the hard part is doing it for every page and keeping track of who answered.
4. Google’s own removal forms. In the EU you can ask Google to de-list a page for your name. That hides the result from searches; the page itself stays up. It complements the erasure request, it does not replace it.

Where does a paid service fit? Honestly: if you have two traces and a free afternoon, do it yourself and keep the 29 euros. A service earns its keep when the traces are many, when the sites need chasing past their deadline, and when you want someone else to keep the ledger of who answered and who is stalling.

Before deciding anything, get a concrete picture. Our free scan searches your name the way a recruiter would, sorts what it finds into the categories above, and shows you the count, the categories and the single item a recruiter would notice first. It is free and it takes a few minutes. If the picture bothers you, the full report is 29 EUR once, and we send and track the removal requests for you.