I Lost My Name to a Three-Year-Old

I used to rank first on Google for my own name.

This was not an achievement. My name is Sarwagya Singh. There are not many of us.

Then, in December 2025, a three-year-old from Madhya Pradesh learned chess.

I am now on page one.

To be clear, I am still on page one.

Rank thirteen.

This is the kind of statistic you mention when you have lost but would like the conversation to continue.

For years, if you searched Sarwagya Singh, Google showed me.

This made sense.

I owned the domain. I had the GitHub account. The LinkedIn. The npm packages. The IMDb credit. The research profile. The startup. The engineering blog. The comedy blog. Several subdomains whose existence cannot be justified before a court of law.

I had structured data.

I had sameAs.

I had rel="me".

I had, at one point, spent actual time thinking about whether six websites were correctly pointing to the same Person node in JSON-LD.

Google had been given every possible piece of evidence.

Sarwagya Singh is this man.

Then a child arrived.

His name was Sarwagya Singh Kushwaha.

He was three years old.

And he had a FIDE rating.

Google reviewed the evidence.

My name was reassigned.

The Incident

In December 2025, news organisations around the world reported that Sarwagya Singh Kushwaha had become the youngest FIDE-rated chess player in history.

This was, from an SEO perspective, catastrophic.

I had spent years building software.

He had spent three years being alive.

I had GitHub.

He had FIDE.

I had npm.

He had international news coverage.

I had carefully constructed a machine-readable identity graph across the internet.

He knew the Sicilian Defence.

There was no contest.

Within weeks, the Google search results for my own name had become a shrine to someone who could not legally agree to the cookie policy.

I searched again.

And again.

The child remained.

News article.

Chess profile.

News article.

FIDE profile.

News article.

Another news article.

Me.

More child.

I had not merely lost rank one.

I had been surrounded.

I Began Investigating My Opponent

This is a normal sentence for a twenty-three-year-old man to write about a three-year-old.

My original plan was simple.

Understand the competition.

Fix the SEO.

Move on with my life.

Then I looked at the match history.

This did not help.

Reports later emerged that a formal complaint had questioned the circumstances surrounding the record. Among the allegations was the fact that the rated opponents the child defeated were coaches from the academy where he trained.

His father acknowledged that the opponents were coaches, while rejecting the suggestion that this proved wrongdoing.

This distinction is important.

The record is official.

The circumstances have been disputed.

The family denies wrongdoing.

I am not a chess investigator.

I am a software engineer who would simply like his Google result back.

But there is something spiritually devastating about spending years building authority on the internet, only to be outranked by someone whose backlink strategy may be summarised as:

beat the coaching staff.

The SEO Industry Has Lied to Me

Every SEO guide says the same things.

Build authority.

Create useful content.

Earn trusted backlinks.

Establish expertise.

Maintain a consistent identity.

I did this.

The child became FIDE-rated.

Apparently I had misunderstood the assignment.

I had spent years accumulating what Google calls E-E-A-T.

Experience.

Expertise.

Authoritativeness.

Trustworthiness.

The child had ELO.

This was better.

I began looking at my entity graph with the sadness of a man inspecting the Maginot Line after discovering aircraft.

Six subdomains.

Seventeen canonical profiles.

Article schema.

Person schema.

Author pages.

Cross-domain identity links.

All of it technically correct.

All of it absolutely useless against a preschooler with an international chess record and several hundred newspapers.

The Search Results Are Brutal

The problem is not that Google cannot find me.

Google can find me perfectly well.

It has simply made a decision.

When somebody searches Sarwagya Singh, Google now has two candidates.

Candidate one:

A three-year-old chess prodigy who became an international news story.

Candidate two:

A software engineer in Germany with opinions about IndexedDB.

This is not a difficult ranking problem.

I understand Google's position.

I resent it.

The child has a FIDE profile, global press coverage and a record.

I have a website ending in .wtf.

If I worked at Google, I would probably rank him too.

I would feel bad about it.

But I would do it.

There Are Now Two Sarwagyas

This is where the situation becomes philosophical.

For most of my life, my name was rare enough to function as a username.

I did not need to explain which Sarwagya I was.

There was no disambiguation.

There was only me.

Now there is another one.

And unlike most people who discover a namesake, mine arrived with a world record and immediately took control of the search results.

He did not slowly build an online presence.

He did not post consistently.

He did not optimise his bio.

He did not start a newsletter.

He appeared.

The newspapers arrived.

Google surrendered.

I became the other Sarwagya Singh.

At twenty-three.

To a three-year-old.

Operation: Reclaim Sarwagya Singh

I want to be very clear about the nature of this campaign.

I am not fighting the child.

That would be undignified.

I am fighting Google.

The child may continue playing chess.

I wish him well.

I will continue publishing software, writing articles and constructing increasingly unnecessary websites until the algorithm is forced to acknowledge that two people can exist.

My objectives are modest.

When someone searches Sarwagya Singh chess, he wins.

Fair.

When someone searches Sarwagya Singh software engineer, I win.

Obviously.

When someone searches Sarwagya Singh, I would like Google to at least stop behaving as though I died in December 2025.

I am not asking for rank one.

Yet.

I am asking for disambiguation.

A small box, perhaps.

Sarwagya Singh may refer to:

• a chess player
• a man who has taken this far too personally

That would be acceptable.

The Counter-Campaign Begins

There will be an About page.

There will be structured data.

There will be canonical URLs.

There will be more articles.

Google Search Console will be opened with hostile intent.

I may create another subdomain.

Nobody can stop me.

Somewhere in Madhya Pradesh, a child will continue playing chess, completely unaware that a software engineer in Germany is inspecting search rankings at midnight and muttering about entity consolidation.

This is probably for the best.

He has chess to play.

I have work to do.

I used to rank first on Google for my own name.

Then a three-year-old took it.

The record is official.

The search results are brutal.

And Operation Reclaim Sarwagya Singh has begun.