# The Findability Profile — Five Dimensions of Digital Presence Category: Findability Published: 2026-07-22 Author: Jean Dorff Publisher: Jean Dorff Consultancy > Reach, Legibility, Identity, Accuracy, and Consistency. What each dimension measures, and what a gap in each one looks like when a prospect goes looking for you. Visibility is usually discussed as a single quantity — you have more of it or less of it. That framing is useless diagnostically, because two businesses with identical amounts of it can be invisible for entirely different reasons and require entirely different work. The Findability Profile breaks the quantity into five dimensions that can each be measured, and more importantly, each be failed independently. ## Reach Reach measures how many independent surfaces mention you at all. Not how much traffic they send — how many distinct, credible places a crawler can encounter your name in context. A business with a beautiful website and no presence anywhere else has a Reach problem: a single source, however good, is one data point, and one data point is not a pattern. A Reach gap looks like this in practice: your own properties rank for your own name, and nothing else does. Ask an AI engine about you and it either declines or paraphrases your homepage back to you, because your homepage is the only thing it has. ## Legibility Legibility measures whether a machine can parse what you actually do. This is where structure lives — schema markup, semantic HTML, heading hierarchy, plain statements of service and location, an llms.txt summary, markdown mirrors for crawlers that prefer them. Legibility is the dimension most damaged by beautiful design, because visual clarity and structural clarity are unrelated, and a site can have all of one and none of the other. A Legibility gap looks like a business that is mentioned everywhere and categorized nowhere. Systems know the name exists. They cannot say what it is for. ## Identity Identity measures whether your name resolves to you. Common names collide. Practitioners who have changed fields drag old categorizations behind them. A person who spent a decade in one industry and now works in another is frequently still filed under the first, and the model has no reason to know a transition occurred. An Identity gap looks like accurate information attached to the wrong entity, or your credentials distributed across two or three partial versions of you that never merge into one. ## Accuracy Accuracy measures whether what exists is currently true. Old titles, closed offices, superseded pricing, a bio describing a role left four years ago, a service you no longer offer sitting at the top of a directory listing you forgot you claimed. Every stale artifact is a live source, and systems have no way to know which of your descriptions is the most recent. An Accuracy gap looks like being confidently misrepresented — the worst failure mode of the five, because it produces a citation you would not have wanted. ## Consistency Consistency measures whether every source tells the same story. Not identical wording everywhere, but the same category, the same location, the same central claim, the same name spelled the same way. Consistency is what turns a scattering of mentions into a stable association, and its absence is the quiet reason many well-marketed businesses remain uncitable. > Five dimensions, five different remedies. Treating visibility as one number guarantees you will work on the wrong one. ## Why the diagnostic comes first The dimensions interact in an order. Fixing Reach before Consistency multiplies a confused message across more surfaces. Fixing Legibility before Accuracy makes an outdated description easier for machines to extract. There is a correct sequence, and it depends on which dimensions are actually weak — which is not something most owners can assess from the inside, because they know what they meant. **5** — Dimensions scored in the Findability Profile The Findability Profile is a fixed-scope diagnostic that scores all five dimensions and returns a prioritized picture of where you stand and what to address first. It is deliberately an entry point rather than a retainer: it produces a document you can act on yourself, with or without further engagement. Knowing which of the five is broken is most of the work. The rest is execution in the right order.