I wanted a Google Knowledge Panel for the wrong reason

There was a period where I wanted a Google Knowledge Panel mostly because I thought it would be funny.

If you are a young founder building apps on the internet, the flex value seems obvious. You type your own name into Google, and instead of a generic list of blue links, the search engine gives you a dedicated card with your picture, your bio, and your companies.

It feels like a neat conversational party trick:

"Look, apparently Google knows who I am."

Eventually, a Knowledge Panel for my name did show up.

The funny thing is that I still cannot point to a single button I clicked or a specific trick that triggered it. Google does not hand out application forms where you ask an algorithm to recognize you as a person.

Looking back, though, I have a pretty clear theory about what happened.

The panel was not the result of an SEO growth hack. It was an accidental side effect of shipping a real product, leaving clean digital evidence behind, and letting search engines connect the dots.

I think Shopmatey created the initial signal

The period where Google started paying attention to my name coincided directly with building and launching Shopmatey.

On January 31, 2023, I launched Shopmatey on Product Hunt.

The launch went surprisingly well. Shopmatey finished as the #2 Product of the Day and #4 Product of the Week, picking up upvotes, maker comments, and social shares.

That launch did something more important than driving short-term traffic: it created multiple independently verifiable relationships across the open web.

On Product Hunt, there was a public page for Shopmatey. That page listed Kenneth Mak as the maker. My maker profile linked to my personal website, my Twitter account, and my LinkedIn. The Shopmatey homepage listed me as the founder.

Shortly after the launch, third-party curation websites began picking up the project.

Design galleries like MakeLanding started featuring Shopmatey's landing page as an example in their ecommerce, mobile app, and social media design showcases. Blog posts and directory sites linked back to both the product and the company.

I cannot prove which specific backlink or crawler run tipped Google over the threshold. Search algorithms are complex and opaque.

What I can see, though, is the correlation: before Shopmatey, my name was just an isolated string on a few social profiles. After Shopmatey, there was suddenly a network of independent websites corroborating that Kenneth Mak was a real person who founded a real software company.

How Google connects the dots

To understand why this happens, you have to look at how search engines have evolved over the last decade.

Google does not just index keywords on pages anymore. Through the Google Knowledge Graph, it attempts to understand real-world entities and the relationships between them.

An entity is simply a thing: a person, a place, a business, a book, or an organization.

In Google's official documentation, Knowledge Panels are described as automatically generated summaries that appear when an entity is recognized in the Knowledge Graph. Google crawls information from across the open web, reconciles factual claims from data partners and authoritative sources, and assembles an informational snapshot.

In my case, the web was supplying a very straightforward graph:

• Kenneth Mak is a person.
• Shopmatey is an organization.
• Kenneth Mak founded Shopmatey.
• kennethmak.com is the personal site of Kenneth Mak.
• LinkedIn, X, and Facebook profiles belong to the same Kenneth Mak.

When multiple third-party domains repeat and corroborate those exact relationships without contradiction, the search engine's algorithmic confidence crosses a threshold.

At that point, Google stops seeing "Kenneth Mak" as an arbitrary string of characters and starts treating it as an identified entity in its database.

The first version of the panel was messy

When the Knowledge Panel first appeared, it was far from polished.

It did not have a dedicated high-resolution avatar. The bio was sparse, pieced together from whatever meta descriptions Google scraped from my profiles.

In fact, if you look at the screenshot of my search results, Google even pulled in a broadcast news image of Professor Kenneth Mak, Singapore's Director of Medical Services during the pandemic, alongside my own photos.

Because we shared the exact same name in the same geographic region, Google's entity disambiguation algorithm initially lumped some of our imagery together into the same visual cluster before it learned to separate the startup founder from the medical director.

That messiness taught me an important lesson:

Having a Knowledge Panel is not a seal of approval or human editorial verification. It is just an algorithm's best guess based on the data it has crawled so far.

If you give Google contradictory or incomplete information, the panel will reflect that confusion.

Discovering Kalicube and the Entity Home

Seeing that messy initial card made me curious about how entity optimization actually works.

That curiosity eventually led me to the work of Jason Barnard and his agency, Kalicube.

Jason is known in the search industry as "The Brand SERP Guy," specializing in how Google understands brands and personal entities.

The most useful concept I took away from Kalicube's methodology was the idea of an Entity Home.

According to Kalicube, an Entity Home is the single canonical web page that you own and control, where you provide the definitive explanation of who you are, what you have built, and where you exist online.

Think of it like an authoritative point of reference.

If your own website is ambiguous, Google has to guess. But if your personal site clearly states your identity, links out to your verified profiles, and uses structured data, it gives the search engine a primary anchor to compare against third-party sources.

The process is remarkably straightforward:

1. State the facts on your Entity Home: Your personal site clearly lists your name, your biography, your companies, and your official links.
2. Link out with structured data: Use Schema.org markup (such as Person, Organization, and sameAs properties) to explicitly map your social profiles, company pages, and public profiles.
3. Corroborate on third-party sites: Ensure your LinkedIn, Product Hunt, GitHub, and social accounts point back to your Entity Home and use the same factual details.

When search crawlers see that your site points to your LinkedIn profile, and your LinkedIn profile points back to your site with matching details, the loop is closed.

You are not tricking the search engine. You are simply removing ambiguity.

Consistency matters more than SEO tricks

Before I understood entity search, I assumed personal SEO was about keyword density, guest posts, and backlink volume.

For Knowledge Panels, consistency is far more important than clever tricks.

Consider what happens when a creator maintains sloppy profiles across the web:

• their personal website says they are a freelance designer;
• their LinkedIn says they are a founder of an agency;
• an old Twitter bio says they are a student;
• their Product Hunt profile uses a different nickname;
• their GitHub has no link to their portfolio.

To a human who knows them, those differences are easy to explain as different phases of a career. To an automated search crawler trying to resolve entity nodes, those discrepancies create uncertainty. The algorithm cannot tell if those accounts belong to one person or five people with similar names.

When you align your public footprint so that your name, your primary roles, and your core links match across every platform, you make it easy for machines to understand you.

You do not need to buy fake press releases or pay shady reputation agencies to submit Wikipedia drafts. Legitimate, public product activity combined with clear, consistent profiles is what builds durable algorithmic trust.

Why the panel became actually useful

I originally wanted a Knowledge Panel because I thought it looked impressive.

Now that I have one, I appreciate it for a completely different reason: context.

When someone meets me at an event, hears about a project I am building, or looks up my name after seeing a demo, searching for me on Google immediately pulls together the relevant pieces:

• my personal website;
• the apps and startups I have launched;
• my active social profiles;
• the timeline of what I have worked on.

It removes friction for anyone trying to figure out who I am and whether the projects they saw are actually mine.

It does not make me a better engineer, and it does not make my startups more successful. A search result is an index, not an endorsement.

Build the evidence, not the panel

If someone asked me today how to get a Google Knowledge Panel, my advice would be simple: stop trying to get a Knowledge Panel.

Trying to optimize for a search card before you have built anything meaningful is putting the cart before the horse.

The healthy sequence is:

1. Build real things in public. Ship software, launch products, write open-source code, and put your work where people can use it.
2. Create a clean Entity Home. Set up a personal domain that you own, write an accurate description of who you are, and keep your project history up to date.
3. Keep your profiles consistent. Make sure your professional profiles, maker accounts, and social links reflect the same factual reality.
4. Let search engines catch up. When you create real value, third-party mentions, directory features, and organic references happen naturally.

The Knowledge Panel is just a mirror reflecting what exists on the web.

If you spend your time building interesting things and documenting them honestly, the search engines will eventually figure it out on their own.

Don't optimize for the box on Google.

Build the evidence that makes the box inevitable.

Back to work.