Google keeps a confidence score on you. It measures how well the search engine understands who you are and what you do, and anything above 400 puts you in celebrity range. Most athletes, including professionals with hundreds of thousands of followers, do not register at all.
That score was the subject of a classroom session at a dunk training camp in Salt Lake City. Former search engine engineer Dennis Yu and I taught it to 76 athletes sitting in folding chairs. The video above is the full session. This is the athlete-facing version, written for anyone chasing a college offer, a sponsorship, or a name that belongs to them.
I started exactly where most of that room started. I had a podcast, a couple hundred videos, and real relationships with real people in my sport, and none of it added up to anything a machine could read. Here is how I described that on stage.
“if you Google my name, it was just randomness. If you asked ChatGPT who I was, again, it was just confusion.”
Dylan Haugen
We Audited All 76 Athletes Before We Said a Word
Before the session, we ran every camper through an audit of their public presence and ranked the results. The whole thing is still up at the Dunk Camp 2026 athlete audit leaderboard, with a downloadable PDF for each athlete. Dunker Nathaniel “Hoopin Nate” Kenney finished first. Brooke Lance finished second.
“you can just treat this as a starting point. It’s not, obviously not perfect.”
Dylan Haugen
The ranking was never the interesting part. What mattered was how consistent the failure was. Athletes with contest wins, sponsor relationships, and audiences in the hundreds of thousands were nearly invisible to the systems that decide what a stranger learns about them. The material existed. The structure did not.
What the Confidence Score Actually Measures
Dennis built the analytics at Yahoo in the late 1990s, so his read on this is not theoretical. He put the number on screen and explained why being verified on Google works nothing like being verified on a social platform.
“A lot of people think that being verified on Google… is like a vanity thing… but it’s actually deeper.”
Dennis Yu
“It’s saying how well does Google understand who you are and what you do.”
Dennis Yu
Then he showed the spread. Jordan Kilganon, a dunker known worldwide, sits around 1,700. My own score is north of 3,000. Shaquille O’Neal, with decades of television behind him, lands somewhere around 40,000, which sounds unreachable until you notice how much of his career was never structured properly in the first place.
“Anything above 400 is like a celebrity.”
Dennis Yu
An athlete two years out of high school can outscore a Hall of Famer on this particular measure, because the measure rewards organization rather than fame. That should be encouraging if you are 17 and nobody has heard of you yet. The scoreboard you are actually competing on is one almost nobody in your sport is playing.
The Same Structure Feeds ChatGPT and Claude
Most athletes have not caught up to this next part yet. The structured data that earns a Knowledge Panel is the same data an AI assistant reads when somebody asks about you.
“that’s also the key to showing up in ChatGPT or Claude, because that same structure is the same thing that all these LLMs look at.”
Dennis Yu
Picture a recruiting coordinator with 40 names to sort, or a brand manager deciding who gets the gear deal. More of them every month type a name into an assistant before they ever open Instagram. The assistant answers from what is written down and connected, and your best clip does not enter into it.
“You’re understood by your relationships, by the content that you have.”
Dennis Yu
Relationships count as structure. A 5,000 meter runner who has raced named athletes at named meets, a climber who has competed in named events, a sophomore who trains under a coach people recognize: every one of those connections is a signal, and every one of them counts for nothing until it exists as text on a page with your name on it.
Cam Hazzard’s Site Took About Twenty Minutes
The clearest demonstration we had was a real one. We filmed a twenty minute interview with professional dunker Cam Hazzard in Dallas the day before he spoke at a conference. Over lunch the next day, we built his entire personal brand site out of that single conversation. It took about twenty minutes.
Before that, a search on his name returned scattered social profiles and other people entirely. He now owns nearly every result across the first three pages of Google for his own name. He then went further on his own and built an agent that hunts down credible public mentions of him and files them, and he demoed it live at an AI summit in Detroit in front of a room of university professors.
“you just talk to the thing like it’s a team member or a coworker and just direct it.”
Dylan Haugen
Cam is a dunker, not an engineer. He learned the tool the same week he used it. That is the actual bar now, and it is lower than almost every athlete assumes.
You Are Not Short on Content
Nearly everyone in that room assumed the barrier was production. It almost never is. My own inventory runs to more than 200 long form videos plus about 80 podcast episodes, and most of it sat unusable for years because it lived on platforms I do not own.
“our goal is to repurpose and take things that already exist, your real stories, and turn them into articles that live publicly.”
Dylan Haugen
Your version of that inventory already exists. Race footage, meet results, the interview a local reporter did, the conversation with a teammate about the season that went sideways. None of it is findable while it lives on a camera roll and a link-in-bio page that belongs to somebody else. Point people at an address you own and the same material starts working for you.
Nothing Here Is Specific to Dunking
The room happened to be dunkers, and the room happened to be at The Dunk Camp in Utah. Swap the sport and none of the mechanics move. A distance runner needs personal records, race results, and coaches named on a page under her own name. A speed climber needs a competition history in text, not just on a federation database. A 2028 basketball recruit needs a permanent address that outlives every recruiting profile he will ever fill out.
The pattern holds in all three cases: one owned domain, real facts written plainly, structured data underneath, and every relationship named and linked. That is the whole method. The sport only changes the vocabulary.
What Athlete Spotlight Does
Athlete Spotlight is that method turned into a product for thirty dollars a month. You get your own site on your own domain, your existing content repurposed into searchable articles, entity schema so Google and AI assistants can read who you are, a weekly report on what AI is saying about you, and hosting. If you want the mechanics in full, they are documented in the system we taught 76 athletes.
Cam is on it. So is D1 runner Trenton Sandler, 2028 basketball recruit Oliver Gilliam, Olympic speed climber Julian David, and my own site as a dunker. Four sports, four different goals, one structure. To watch the process run end to end on a single athlete, one interview turned into five articles walks through every output it produced.
“We’re here to see you guys win.”
Dennis Yu
Do this before you do anything else. Search your own name in a private browser window, then ask an AI assistant who you are. Whatever comes back is what a coach or a sponsor sees. If it is randomness and confusion, that is a solvable problem, and solving it starts with one conversation you record on purpose.