The Model Knows Your Project, Not You: Measuring Recognition in LLMs with NameRank

Abstract

What a frontier model recalls about a person or tool from its own weights -- before any retrieval step -- often shapes the first description a human sees, making that parametric corpus presence a measurement problem. Citations explain about a third of whether a model recognizes a researcher; we target the residual and build NameRank, a [0,1] recognition score: each of 4,685 entities in 54 cohorts is probed with one open-ended question across 36 models, and an independent judge returns a binary verdict against a curated gold -- did the model state a specific, non-guessable fact about this exact entity? -- so hallucination, context echo, and guesses earn nothing. Synthetic-null entities hold the floor near zero, and verdicts track the entity, not the model. One thesis organizes the findings: recognition is paid to named, indexable artifacts, not to credentials or titles. Every Olympic-style credential sits below a working-researcher baseline, because no named artifact ships with the medal, yet the ranking inverts at the marquee tier, where Nobel, Turing, and Fields laureates saturate the panel. For independent creators the tool out-ranks its maker, and the credential that does propagate is a named method or awarded paper. Being one of many named contributors to a celebrated artifact, by contrast, earns almost nothing -- the authors listed on a flagship model report or system card sit near the recognition floor -- because recognition attaches to the artifact's own distinctive name, not to the roster behind it. No bibliometric predicts recognition well; top-density institutions out-recognize peers at matched citations; and on 258 news events recognition loads on peak salience, not persistence. A self-report probe shows introspection reads a corpus prior, not its own knowledge.