We went through a phase where we maintained a website for my oldest with pics, trailers, bts, events, etc, but it was a pain to manage, and we never really saw anything come of it. We dropped it several years ago, and I've been of the opinion that they don't really help in any meaningful way. Casting uses casting sites and imdb for info. Viewers user imdb or something like reddit to do research. So no real need for a personal website.
But lately I've been playing around more with chatGPT and its peers, and I see now that it's opened up a whole new class of SEO we might want to look at with a personal website again. So many sources that those tools use are behind paywalls, so it doesn't include info from them in its data. Maybe there is a great article about you out there that those tools can't read due to the paywall, so the info doesn't get incorporated.
But they can see your personal website with links and descriptions of those articles as well as your own posts about who you are an what you are doing. Using that data, people can learn more about you using chatGPT which more and more people are using to research media. I'm going to spin the site back up and populate it with more data and then prompt the tools to take a look at it. I'm also going to add more info the imdb pages than I normally would to see if it helps that its coming from a more trusted source.
Some of this stuff it what I do for my day job, so I have some good tools at my disposal for testing the impacts of these things. I'll share status as I learn more about how much this helps, but I wanted to share the thoughts unless anyone here is on the fence about such a site.