How I got Google Home to know who I am

A few days ago, I was looking at my blog's SEO statistics, and noticing that I rank well for several queries thanks to my articles, I asked myself the following question: If I ask my Google Home "OK Google, who is Nicolas Brondin-Bernard", will it manage to pull up info from the web?

So I tested it, and here's the answer in video form:

I was very surprised to see that it worked, and I was even more surprised to see which sentence Google had chosen to describe me even though it's never highlighted on my site.

How does it work?

After doing some research, here are the conclusions I was able to draw if you want to try the experiment so that the Google Assistant can also know your name.

A well-ranked site under your name

Presumably, the first step for Google to know who you are is that one of your sites comes up in first position when you search for your exact name in the search engine.

For me it's very easy since I have a compound name that only three of us carry, but if you have a fairly common last name it can be more complicated.

Having tested this with other people, if it's a LinkedIn profile or something similar that comes up first, even if the criteria below are met, the Google Assistant won't take these results into account.

A dedicated page

Ideally you should be the main subject of the page, which is my case since my site https://nicolas.brondin-bernard.com is the showcase for my professional activity.

A magic sentence

By doing Google searches on other names, I understood why Google picked up this specific sentence, which is neither a description written by me, nor text highlighted on the site.

This sentence is simply the first one on the page containing the phrase "Nicolas is a...", which thus makes the connection between the Google search and information about me, even though the description is actually the review left by one of my former clients about my work.

Microdata?

My site doesn't have much microdata, but it's true that I do have the following tag in my page's header:

I don't know to what extent this metadata can influence these results, but I think it can be a real advantage if present and properly formatted.