What Recruiters See When They Look You Up (Including ChatGPT)

You've got an interview coming up. Before you walk in, there's a good chance someone on the other side of the table has already looked you up — and these days, "looked you up" doesn't just mean a Google search anymore. It increasingly means opening an AI assistant and simply asking, "what do you know about [your name]?" That's a faster habit to pick up than a careful search, and it can hand back a different picture than a search engine would — sometimes a less accurate one, delivered with the same confident tone either way. What a thorough look-up actually covers A recruiter or hiring manager doing their homework before an interview typically isn't doing anything exotic. It usually comes down to a handful of predictable steps: Your LinkedIn. Still the first stop for most people in a professional context — your current title, your work history, who you're connected to. A general name search. A plain Google search of your name, sometimes paired with your employer or city to narrow things down. Public social media. Whatever you haven't locked down — a public Twitter/X account, an Instagram that isn't private, old posts that are still indexed. Increasingly, an AI assistant's summary of you. Rather than reading through search results themselves, more recruiters are just asking ChatGPT, Gemini, or a similar tool directly and taking the answer at face value, especially when they're short on time between back-to-back interviews. None of this is new behavior exactly — people have been Googling candidates for years. What's changed is the last item on that list, and it's worth understanding why it's a meaningfully different kind of risk than the others. Think about Maria Lopez, a marketing manager who's about to interview for a new role. If a hiring manager does a traditional search on her, they'll find her current LinkedIn, a conference bio from two years ago, and maybe an old college newspaper mention — a slightly dated but broadly accurate picture that a careful reader can piece together correctly. If that same hiring manager instead just asks an AI assistant "who is Maria Lopez in marketing," they might get a single paragraph that quietly folds in a detail from a different Maria Lopez entirely — a different city, a different industry, even a different professional reputation — stated with exactly the same confidence as everything that's actually true. Why the AI version is a different kind of risk When a recruiter does a careful Google search themselves, they're looking at a page of results and applying their own judgment — they can see there are three different people named David Chen, notice that one article is from eight years ago, and draw reasonable conclusions about which result is actually relevant. When they ask an AI assistant instead, they get a single paragraph, stated confidently, with none of that visible sorting. A few specific things can go wrong in that paragraph: Blended identities. If you share a name with someone else — especially someone with a more prominent or more public online presence — an AI assistant can merge details from both of you into one answer without flagging any uncertainty. Outdated information. A job you left two years ago, a city you moved away from, a title you've since been promoted out of — AI answers aren't always working from the most current version of you, and there's no visible timestamp to tip off whoever's reading it. Confident mistakes. Sometimes an answer is just wrong, in a way a careful human doing their own search might catch by noticing a mismatched detail, but that reads as perfectly plausible when stated in one smooth, assured paragraph. A recruiter who's inclined to double-check won't take the AI's word as final — but plenty won't double-check, especially when the answer sounds specific and confident. That's what makes this worth a few minutes of attention before a high-stakes interview: it's a real, distinct risk sitting alongside the more familiar ones, not a dramatic one, but one most job seekers haven't thought to check at all. A short checklist before your next interview None of this requires an overhaul. A focused twenty or thirty minutes before a high-stakes interview covers most of it. Clean up anything genuinely unprofessional that's public. Not everything — you don't need to scrub your personality out of your online presence — but anything you'd be uncomfortable having come up mid-interview is worth privacing or removing if it's within your control. Make sure your LinkedIn and any public profile reflect your current role accurately. An outdated title or employer is an easy, avoidable mismatch between what you say in the interview and what shows up when they check. Do a plain Google self-search. See what actually comes up when someone searches your name the ordinary way. If you haven't done this in a while, here's a guide on how to Google yourself properly — it covers more than just typing your name into the box. Take a broader look at your full digital footprint, not just the top search results. A thorough recruiter sometimes digs past the first page — old forum posts, a dormant account, a tagged photo from years back. This guide to checking your digital footprint walks through how to see what's actually out there beyond the obvious first search. Specifically check what an AI assistant says about you. This is the step almost nobody takes yet, which is exactly why it's worth taking. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude directly what they know about you, or use a free tool that checks all three at once so you're not repeating the same question three separate times. You can check your name before the interview and see, in one place, what each assistant currently says. What if the AI assistant gets something wrong about you? First, figure out whether it's a mix-up with someone else, an outdated detail, or a plain error — the fix is a little different for each, and it's worth knowing which one you're dealing with before the interview rather than during it. At minimum, knowing in advance means you won't be caught off guard if an interviewer references something that doesn't sound like you — you can calmly correct it instead of looking surprised or defensive. There's no promise that a single check will clean up every stray mention of you online, especially anything baked into how a model was trained — but knowing what's out there ahead of time is still far better than finding out mid-interview that an assistant confidently told your interviewer something untrue. Consider David Chen again, this time applying for a project management role. If he checks ahead of time and finds that an AI assistant is describing a job he left eighteen months ago, he can simply make sure his LinkedIn and any other public profile are current before the interview — a small fix that closes the gap for most future lookups, even if it doesn't retroactively change what a model already learned. If instead the issue is a mix-up with a different David Chen, the fix looks different: adding a middle initial or a location to his professional bios, so there's a clearer, more specific thread for both search engines and AI tools to follow going forward. Is this really worth checking for an entry-level interview, not just an executive search? Arguably more so. The share of recruiters and hiring managers who use AI tools as part of candidate research is widely reported to be rising, and it's not limited to senior searches — a hiring manager screening a stack of applications for an entry-level role is just as likely to ask an AI assistant a quick question about a candidate as someone running an executive search. The checklist above takes the same twenty minutes either way, and the AI-specific step takes less time than the others. You can't control everything a recruiter sees, but you can control this part There's no checklist that guarantees a recruiter forms exactly the impression you want. You can't see every tab they have open, and you can't fully predict what a search engine or an AI assistant will decide to surface on a given day. What you can do is make sure the version of you that's easy to find — on LinkedIn, in a plain search, and now in an AI assistant's answer — is accurate and current. That last part is still a five-minute step most job seekers haven't thought to take, which is exactly what makes it worth doing: it's not crowded advice yet, and a few minutes spent on it before your next interview is a small, cheap way to close a gap most people haven't even noticed is open.