How Exposed Are You Online — And Is It Working For You?
Use AI to measure your public footprint and separate what helps your career from what puts you at risk.
The problem
Every professional has a public footprint, but most people have never actually measured it — or thought about whether what's findable about them is helping their career or putting them at risk. This exercise uses AI to search your own public presence and separate the two.
Search the web for public information about [your name], who lives in [your city] and works at [your employer/role]. 1. Group everything you find into two categories: (a) Information you deliberately published or control — professional profiles, articles, talks, your own website, conference bios. (b) Information that appears incidentally — old accounts, mentions by others, data broker/people-search listings, forgotten pages, tagged photos you didn't post. 2. For each item, flag whether it's genuinely sensitive (home address, phone number, date of birth, family members' names, daily routine or travel patterns) versus simply professional or already public-facing by design. 3. Give two separate scores, 0–10: - Professional Visibility Score: how findable and credible you are professionally. - Risk Exposure Score: how much of what's findable could realistically be used to impersonate or target you. 4. Recommend which category-(b) items are worth removing or locking down, and which category-(a) items are working in your favor and worth building on further.
How to interpret your results
A high Professional Visibility Score is generally good. It means your intentional presence — LinkedIn, published work, speaking history, your own site — is doing its job and the internet reflects the professional you meant to build.
A high Risk Exposure Score is the one to act on. It usually means personal details are surfacing from sources you don't control: data broker and people-search sites, old accounts you abandoned, or pages others published about you.
What good vs. concerning looks like
High Visibility + Low Risk
Strong professional presence, few personal details exposed. This is the goal.
Low Visibility + Low Risk
Minimal footprint either way — safe, but a missed opportunity if you're trying to build a public professional profile.
High Visibility + High Risk
Strong professional presence, but personal details are exposed alongside it. Worth a cleanup pass on category (b) sources.
Low Visibility + High Risk
The most concerning combination — little professional upside, but real personal exposure. Prioritize cleanup here.
Make it yours
Adapt the prompt to the question you actually care about. Add a platform or a specific worry to the end of the first line and the answer gets far more useful:
- …focus specifically on what's visible via LinkedIn and Google.
- …focus specifically on information a scammer could use in a phone call.