I Rank #2 on Google for My Own Name. AI Still Doesn't Know I Exist.

Your own name is supposed to be the easiest keyword there is. No real competitor, nothing to out-optimize, no ambiguity about who "means" what. So a few days after this site went live, I did the obvious thing and just googled myself.

widiginanjar.com sits at position #2, right under my LinkedIn profile. For a domain that's a few days old, I'll take it. Genuinely pleased about that one.

Then I scrolled up to the AI Overview sitting above those results, for the exact same search. It got my role right, my background right, what I'm currently working on, all correct. And it cited exactly one source to get there: LinkedIn. My own site, sitting two spots below in the actual results, didn't get a mention. Not even a "some sources suggest."

Why this is more unusual than it looks

Here's the thing: most AI-generated answers don't lean on just one source. Research aggregated by AEO Vision, citing Pew Research Center, found that the large majority of AI summaries cite three sources or more, and only about 1 in 100 rely on a single one. So my search didn't just miss out on a citation. It landed in a genuinely rare bucket, and not the good kind of rare.

The ranking side of the story checks out too, and not in my favour. Industry analysis from QuickSEO, aggregating Ahrefs and SE Ranking data, puts the overlap between top-10 organic rankings and AI Overview citations somewhere between 17% and 54%, depending on the study and the month. Ranking #2 bought me visibility. Apparently it didn't buy me a single line in the summary.

What this probably means, and what I'm not claiming

Let's be clear about what this actually is: one search, one day, zero statistical significance. I'm not about to dress it up as a study. But it happens to match exactly what the research above says, and it's honestly the cleanest example I've run into of something I keep telling clients: ranking well and getting cited are not the same job, even when it feels like they should be.

My best guess, and it is a guess, is that LinkedIn simply has more history behind it than a domain that's a few days old: more inbound signal, more time for Google to build confidence in it. That's a reasonable explanation. It's also not something a content tweak fixes by next Tuesday. Domain age and accumulated trust aren't things you can shortcut.

Ranking is a snapshot. Citation is a track record. I've got the first one. I'm still building the second.

So what do I actually do about it, other than write a note about it? Keep the site fast and easy for anything crawling it to parse. Keep the metadata honest and specific rather than generic. And let the rest, the mentions, the links, the general sense across the internet that this is a real, consistent person, accumulate over time. It's not a glamorous answer. It's also exactly what I'd tell a client sitting in the same spot.