Charles
Zakarin

Today I lead RMG Digital Solutions, a team of eighteen working with executives, companies and families whose Google search results and AI answers give an inaccurate, incomplete or out-of-date account of them. I have written on this subject for the Forbes Business Council.

I came to this work the hard way, after my own name went wrong online in 2009. Painful at the time, it has turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It changed my life and gave me a second career I love, helping people whose reputations have been damaged, just as mine was. It also led to RMG’s scholarship program, which as of September 2026 has made 212 awards to students attending 123 institutions. But the story begins much earlier, with a table tennis team from China and a nine-year-old walking home down the highway.

Today, a good deal of my attention goes to what gets said about you before anything goes wrong: what an AI system answers when someone asks who you are, whether your record across the web agrees with itself, whether the machines can place you without guessing. Repairing a damaged record is urgent, and it is often where we begin. Construction is the longer work: a record accurate and substantial enough that search engines and AI systems have little room to improvise. It compounds, too. Every accurate source published now is one the next system learns from, which is why the people who begin before they need to end up paying the least. More on how I think about this

If any of this sounds like the week you are having, or the one you would like to avoid, write to me. My team and I reply within a business day.