Google Image Roulette

When was the last time you Googled yourself and clicked the Images tab?

Give it a go, this article will still be here (and I expect you to come back to it!)

A colleague of mine did this the other day, and let me tell you, he wasn't too jazzed about what he discovered.

There were photos he forgot existed. Shots from events he barely remembered attending. One headshot that had to be ten years old. "Where the hell did they find all these dead and buried photos?" he asked me.

I told him that if you don't keep track of the visuals you post online, the algorithm will remind you, whether you like it or not.

He had no idea.

Do you?

Here's what most experts believe about their visual presence: they believe they're choosing it. They picked the headshot on their website. They picked the photo on their LinkedIn. They think the image that represents them is the image they selected.

And, in most cases, yes, that's how it works. But that presumes people actually visit your specific online touch points for a look-see.

For many podcasters, conference organizers, event planners, and bookers, they search your name, they click Images, and grab whatever comes up first.

They're busy and simply need a photo for the episode graphic or the event page or the speaker lineup. Should they all ask you for a pre-approved photo? Of course, and some do.

But many of them opt for the path of least resistance, which is whatever Google and AI search spit out at the moment. Why risk wasting time waiting on a photo when they can have the graphic done in minutes, right?

That decision means the stalest, weirdest, most random image, the tagged conference photo where you look hungover, the one you hated but forgot to delete, can become the one that ends up everywhere.

You're not choosing the photo that represents you. The algorithm is. And the algorithm is choosing from whatever ranks high based on the content it's connected to.

That sucks. Here's what sucks even more.

Say a conference organizer grabs that stale photo and runs it on the event page. The audience sees it before they ever see you. They form a picture in their head of who's about to walk out.

Then you walk out.

And for the first ninety seconds, they're not listening to a word you say because they're confused.

The person on the screen doesn't match the person on the stage. Their attention is hijacked by the mismatch instead of locked onto your message.

You're up there delivering your best material that you've spent years mastering, and a chunk of the room is mentally asking who the hell is this guy because the photo set the wrong expectation.

And that mismatch leads to a loss of trust from the people in the room, because it gets people thinking "Well, if he's lying about this, what else is he making up?"

Fair? Nope. Reality? Yup.

You got sabotaged before you opened your mouth, and it was something you didn't even do.

Now, this isn't just a speaker problem.

The buyer checking you out before a call. The prospect who got your name from a friend. The committee comparing you to two other people. They all do the same thing.

They search, they glance at Images, and they are met with whatever the internet decides to show them.

The image that surfaces is doing a job right now, today, whether you chose it or not. It's either reinforcing that you're current, credible, and worth your fee, or it's quietly setting the wrong tone before you get a chance to say anything.

If you ran that search at the top and you're sitting there not feeling so great about it, good. That means you looked. What you just felt is the easiest part of this whole thing to fix.

Because here's the good news.

The reason stale images surface is that there's nothing fresher and stronger in circulation to outrank them.

The internet is grabbing the photo you hate because that photo is what's there to be sourced.

When you have current, intentional, on-purpose images actively circulating, on your site, your LinkedIn, your guest appearances, your event pages, those become what surfaces. You stop leaving the decision to the algorithm and start making it yourself.

And there's an even simpler move, one you can make the next time someone books you for anything.

Send them the link to your media kit even if they didn't ask for it.

A simple array of current, pre-approved, on-purpose images that you actually want representing you. Don't make them go hunting. Hand them the exact photos you'd choose, before they default to whatever Google coughs up.

Most organizers are thrilled to get it, because it makes their job easier too.

That's the whole shift. You go from the internet picked my photo to I decided what the room sees before I walk in.

You control the tone now. Not the algorithm, not the roulette wheel. You.

You decide whether the person who searches your name meets a current, credible version of you, or one that was 13 years and 27 pounds ago.

If you want a structured way to see how your visual presence is reading across the places people actually check, start with the 10-Second Visual Authority Scan. The search-yourself dare you just ran is basically a one-image version of it. The full scan shows you the rest.

Take the scan here: johndemato.com/newsletter-signup