Being one business, not three

A model deciding whether to name you is really asking: do I know who this is? If your business appears as "Fernway", "Fernway Pty Ltd" and "Fernway Software" across your website, LinkedIn and Google Business Profile, you look like three weakly-evidenced businesses instead of one well-evidenced one.

This is called entity disambiguation, and it is boring, unglamorous work that quietly outperforms almost everything else.

The three rules

1. One canonical name. Pick the exact string, including punctuation and legal suffix, and use it everywhere. Your footer, your schema name, your directory listings, your invoices.

2. One canonical address and phone. Byte-identical. "Suite 4, 12 Summer St" and "12 Summer Street, Suite 4" are two different strings to a machine.

3. Claim your Google Business Profile. Formerly Google My Business. It is the independent record an assistant can check your claims against, and the name and address there must match your website byte for byte.

4. Explicit connections. Use the sameAs array in your Organization schema to point at every profile you control. This is you telling the machine directly that these accounts are the same entity.

"sameAs": [
  "https://www.linkedin.com/company/fernway",
  "https://www.facebook.com/fernway",
  "https://au.linkedin.com/in/samwhitely",
  "https://github.com/fernway"
]

The about page nobody writes

Most about pages are a founder photo and a paragraph about passion. That page cannot be used to verify anything.

An about page that works for AI visibility states, in plain text on the page:

• The full legal and trading name
• What the business does, in one sentence, with a constraint ("for crews under ten people")
• When it started
• Where it operates, by named place
• Who runs it, with real names
• How to reach a human
• Registration details where applicable — ABN, ACN, licence numbers

None of that is glamorous. All of it is verifiable, and verifiable is the entire point.

Where inconsistency creeps in

• A rebrand where old directory listings were never updated
• A trading name that differs from the registered name with no page explaining the relationship
• Multiple locations with slightly different phone formats
• A LocalBusiness block from your theme fighting an Organization block you added

Fix the last one first — two conflicting schema blocks on the same page is an active contradiction, which is worse than silence.