How the Self research was conducted

Sample

The sample contains 500 real, publicly accessible career websites published with Self and observed on September 22, 2026. Each observation represents one distinct professional profile. Demo and test pages were not included, and repeat versions of the same profile were counted once.

The sample describes people who chose to publish with Self. It is not intended to represent every profession, country, job seeker, or website builder.

Website anatomy

A section, contact method, or external link counted only when it contained published content. Empty fields did not count. Section prevalence, page language, contact choices, and template selection were calculated across the 500 websites. Summary-length statistics use only websites with a professional introduction.

Measurable achievements

The achievement analysis covered 2,425 work-history roles. A role counted as quantified when a number was tied to meaningful evidence of change, scale, money, time, ratio, or rank. Dates, software versions, and isolated numbers without professional context were excluded.

The rules were intentionally conservative. They may miss unusually written evidence, and a detected number does not by itself prove importance or individual ownership of a team result.

Professional language

Of the study's 500 career websites, 270 had English professional introductions and formed the language-analysis sample. We checked normalized full text for exact duplicates, compared the first five meaningful words of each opening, counted meaningful four-word sequences shared between profiles, and checked for a predefined list of 22 familiar CV phrases.

The test measures whether published text on an AI-assisted CV-to-website product converged. It cannot determine which individual sentence was first written by a person, copied from a source CV, or revised with AI.

Privacy and reporting

The analysis used content already published on public websites. Names and direct contact details were not reported. Achievement examples were anonymized and lightly edited for clarity while preserving their figures and meaning.

How to interpret the findings

The results are descriptive, not causal. They do not show that a section, template, contact choice, or writing style produces more interviews or offers. External links also cannot be used to infer a person's profession with certainty. Because published pages can change, future snapshots may produce different results.