Owning your Brand on Google

Will (00:00)
Welcome to Ahead of the Game, a podcast brought to you by the Digital Marketing Institute. I'm your host, Will Francis. And today I'm talking to Jason Barnard about your brand in search and about how the future of SEO is gonna be affected by AI.

Jason's an entrepreneur, author, keynote speaker and CEO of Kalicube. He's carved a unique path into the entrepreneurial world. His journey from musician to digital marketing expert and now a recognized entrepreneur tells a compelling story of adaptability and strategic repositioning. And we're talk to him all about that and more over the next hour. Jason, welcome to the podcast. How you

Jason Barnard (00:37)
I'm doing fine, thank you very much for having me Will

Will (00:39)
It's a real pleasure. I can't say I've spoken to someone about this specific thing that you have thought about incredibly deeply. And that is, I believe, owning your brand in search. Why is that so important? Why have you thought about that so much?

Jason Barnard (01:00)
Well, the story for getting into it is kind of interesting in that I started in the internet in 1998. My ex-wife and I created cartoon characters called Boo-wah and Koala. And I was a blue dog called Boo-wah. I did the voice acting for this blue dog. And when you searched my name in 2011, Google said right at the top, Jason Barnard voices a cartoon blue dog called Boo-wah.

And I realized that as a marketing expert, which is how I was repositioning myself, that didn't make sense. So I set about changing Google's perception of me and Google's representation of me so that when people Googled my name just before signing on the dotted line the contract for me to help them with their SEO or the digital marketing, they saw Jason Barnard is a huge, wonderful, delightful digital marketing expert. So I started looking at it for my own needs.

And then I realized as I dug down that this is an incredibly deep rabbit hole that never stops. And it's incredibly powerful, not only for your personal brand, your corporate brand, bottom of funnel, very, very powerful, but also for your digital marketing and indeed your SEO and your representation and your presentation in Google and in AI.

Will (02:22)
Right, okay, that's interesting. And what do you think the challenge is then today for most brands? mean, if someone makes a brand search, they are looking for a company. So they're already quite far down the funnel. Won't they just find that anyway, even if it's mixed up with other stuff?

Jason Barnard (02:38)
Yep.

Well, it's not a question of findability. especially with corporations, generally speaking, you'll find the company you look for when you search for the name. Because, for example, in the UK, you're not going to have two companies called Greggs because there's a trademark issue. So you will generally dominate for a corporation. For a person, it's very different. And you have the problem. are multiple Will Francis's in the world, some famous ones too. So they won't necessarily find you. They would need to add

"Will Francis marketing", which I did earlier on and I can find you that way. But I'll come back a step. For a corporation or a person who's reasonably famous, they will find you. But what do they find when they Google you? Is your brand narrative represented by Google the brand narrative that you want, that you have worked so hard to build? And especially with corporations, they spend a lot of money building a brand narrative,

getting everybody in the corporation to follow that brand narrative and to use the brand voice only to let Google say whatever it wants.

For me that's foolish.

Will (03:56)
True, true. so yeah, you're saying that that SERP essentially is your brand narrative. It's what people see and you can't really deny that. I think a lot of people deny that. They don't like to look at it too much. They just go, we're on there somewhere. But actually that is people's, it's part of the customer experience if you like, right?

Jason Barnard (04:17)
Yes. Yeah, and it's very bottom of funnel, as you say. People Google your name, your personal name, your brand name before doing business with you. So it's your digital business card. So what Google says about you is hugely important. And I think corporations and indeed people don't like to look at it because they don't want to face the truth. There isn't a direct return on investment that they can identify to their boss that they think they can ignore it.

And some people think we can't actually affect or change that. And truth be told, you can control it. You can teach Google, like a child, exactly what you want it to say about you. And you can make that brand search engine results page for your brand name or your personal name positive, accurate, and convincing. And the kicker is that it's Google recommending you. People use Google because they trust Google.

If Google says you're a wonderful digital marketer like it does for me, you've won the game, bottom of funnel.

Will (05:24)
Interesting, and to be blunt, is this something you can just throw money at and just use Google Ads to win on? I suspect not.

Jason Barnard (05:36)
Yeah, I I would suggest that in the short term, you can dominate the top using Google Ads. But you also want to think about the deeper question, because people do scroll down the page. They do look on the right-hand side where there's a knowledge panel. If you have a Google Business profile and you're a corporation, you look like a bricks and mortar local business. That's not impressive. You need a knowledge panel, not a Google Business profile, if you're a serious corporation. And if you're a person,

The knowledge panel represents authority and credibility and you want that authority and credibility as represented by Google. So just for the representation of you, you do need to work on it, but it goes deeper than that. If Google isn't showing your videos on your brand set, but you're investing in video, it means you're investing badly. You're not doing a good job with your video strategy. So think it over again.

Will (06:28)
interesting.

Interesting and specifically you're primarily talking about videos on YouTube.

Jason Barnard (06:39)
can be anywhere. mean, YouTube does dominate 80%, which is lower than you would expect. And that's actually dropping as Google adds more and more rich elements, search features, and generative AI. They're pulling in a lot more video from Facebook, from Twitter/X, from TikTok. All of these platforms are feeding video to Google. And Google loves video. We were talking about it just before the show started. Multimodal, which basically just means multimedia, is the future.

written content is struggling today and struggling increasingly to find its place on the SERP and in generative AI even more so.

Will (07:18)
I'd love to break down how we approach that problem with you before I do and get into the real nitty gritty, because you've really piqued my interest there for sure. Let's just set the scene a little bit more. You're talking about AI quite a lot and in the UK, for instance, we've seen the AI summaries starting to appear at the top of SERPs. Do you know what effect that's having on people's kind of behavior, the user behavior on SERPs and also traffic?

what is the impact for marketers of these AI overviews

Yes, yeah, absolutely. People, I think, want more help with search, clearly. And the idea of a research assistant that does the searching for you and finds the information is quite alluring. But do you think it's having the most impact with those highly informational searches and less so with more transactional searches, like when I search for running shoes?

Jason Barnard (08:19)
Yes, definitely the search intent is really important there. But if you're researching something and you're sitting in a conversational engine like ChatGPT or Bing Copilot and you get to the bottom of the funnel, are you really going to go back to search or are you just going to continue in the funnel on that engine? And if we can recreate the funnel, we bring you down the funnel from informational

to consideration to decision and give you what they call the perfect click. And the perfect click is when you click on the link, you go to the site and you convert. So the long term will be how do we create or recreate our funnel in their brain?

Will (09:03)
are you saying that old world, the funnel is a series of searches of people dipping in and out of websites, starting to home in on maybe a purchase. And you're saying in with AI in search in that one, just one visit, one conversation, you can go from very top level research all the way through to actually choosing a product in one go.

Jason Barnard (09:26)
Yes.

Will (09:27)
Basically. Yeah. you're very interesting, right? Okay. Sorry to interrupt, but yeah, I just wanted to clarify. That's cool. Yeah.

Jason Barnard (09:32)
No, no, no, it's a really good clarification. I think I tend to forget that I've been looking at this so much it all just makes sense to me. if you talk to anybody at Google or anybody at Bing, they will always say, we're thinking of the user first, and we want the best experience, or we want to get the user to the solution to their problem as efficiently as possible.

So there are multiple things that need to happen. Number one is the answer has to be correct.

and helpful and it needs to solve, truly solve the problem with the best possible solution. And the other is we all want to be fast. We want to get from A to B to Z as quickly as we possibly can. And I think marketers often forget that as users they're really happy with the on-site features that save them time. And as marketers they're really upset that they're not getting the visit. And we forget that we've got two hats. As a user we want this.

efficient experience, this helpful experience. And as a marketer, we want the visits. And I would argue, put yourself in your user's shoes or your user hat on and think about how do I feed these machines so that they will present me as much as possible in those results, whether the person visits my website or not. And that means brand.

Will (10:52)
Interesting. mean, it's an interesting point you make there about what's good for users and what's good for marketers are often in conflict, aren't they? If you look at social media, exactly the same things happen there. People complain about the algorithm. They blame it in marketing. They blame the algorithm because their content's not doing well. Well, yeah, that's because the algorithm is making these places more entertaining, more engaging for users. And that almost always means less crappy marketing content.

Jason Barnard (11:01)
Yes.

Yeah.

Will (11:21)
So, and the same kind of thing is happening with search, isn't it? These, you're right, if Bing and Google are gonna retain a loyal audience, they need to be maximally useful. I'm afraid that doesn't quite mean working for you and your marketing goals, primarily is for the user.

Jason Barnard (11:38)
Yeah, and I think kind of a year and a half ago we were thinking everything is going to shift over to ChatGPT and Co-pilot and Gemini. Truth is that didn't happen and it's not likely to happen in the medium term.

Will (11:54)
let's break down. So actually you've got a guide. You've got a guide that you've written to owning your brand in search. And we're going to link to that in the show notes. But I want to just break down the steps that I might go through to better own. I mean, of course, it's going to be very high level in the time we've got, but just some of the main things we can do just to own our brand on that search.

So you used me as an example, right? I've got a not massively unique name of Will Francis. There are many other Will Francis's in the world and a couple of them are notable for various reasons. And how might someone like me...

not dominate, but certainly be more prominent and be more clear to Google that I'm this will and that guy's that will. you know, so there's two things. I'm trying to not confuse Google so Google's got clarity on who's who, but also I do kind of want to win. So what kind of things might I do?

Jason Barnard (12:57)
Right, which is great question. We break it down at Kalicube into what we call the Kalicube process, which is a process I invented based on three phases, understandability, credibility, deliverability. Understandability means the machine understands who you are, what you do, and who you serve as a person or a corporation. Credibility means it understands that you're an authoritative, credible solution to whatever problem its users might have. And deliverability...

means that you have the content that allows it to present you to its users. So if we start there, understandability, how do I get this machine Google search, Bing search, ChatGPT, the large language models, Perplexity, Alexa, Siri, Bixby, all of these machines, how do I get them all to understand who I am, what I do, who I serve? And the answer to that is very simple.

you create one web page that you own on your own website where you describe very clearly who you are, what you do, who you serve.

Then what you do is link out to all the corroborative sources online, your own social media, articles about you, videos you've appeared in, Crunchbase, Forbes if you write for Forbes. And those sources should repeat the same information consistently and clearly. And they should link back to what we call the entity home, that web page that you own that you describe who you are, what you do, and who you serve.

And John Mueller from Google has confirmed that.

Will (14:33)
Does that necessarily have to be your home page? Couldn't it an about page?

Jason Barnard (14:37)
Better to be an about page because you need to be factual and clear and you don't necessarily want to be factual and clear on your homepage you want to sell and you want to show off. So yes, you're right. You would create an about page for you on your personal website. You need a clear about page where you would set out the facts about you according to you. And at Google they call that reconciliation. They're looking for a point of reconciliation. John Mueller has confirmed that

And I call this the hub, spoke and wheel model. The hub is your about page, the spokes are the links and the wheel is all the corroborative sources around the web. And that's what we do at Kalicube for our clients is that we organize and optimize their digital footprint, which is what that in essence is, to make sure that everything is clear and consistent and everything is joined together correctly in a way the machine will understand. And in that way, you can educate the machine so it understands you.

and you have control of how it understands you and therefore how it represents you.

Will (15:44)
Yes, I also heard you probably correct me on this, but I also heard it's good to have the same profile picture in all the different places because that's another way that Google can see that you're that person, that will and not the other will. Is that or is that just a myth or?

Jason Barnard (16:02)
No, no, no, it is very good at the start. Then what happens is you get a knowledge panel on Google. And if you search my name, Jason Barnard, J-A-S-O-N-B-A-R-N-A-R-D, you will probably see what we call knowledge panel cards, which is generative AI, with multiple pictures. You can't have that if you use the same picture everywhere. So you're right. For the foundational knowledge, you need to repeat the picture. Repetition is how...

Will (16:26)
Hmm.

Jason Barnard (16:31)
the machine will understand. Repetition in what you say, repetition in how you present yourself, repetition in your photo. But over time, as it understands, and it is confident in that understanding, I think that's something people underestimate. Understanding is one thing, confidence in understanding is another. And for example, your child, if it understands something, it will be unlikely to share it publicly in the playground unless it's very confident.

The child Google is the same. It needs to understand to be confident at which point it will start shouting by presenting your knowledge panel to people when they search your name. And that confidence is how you can dominate. Personally, I dominate my name. Jason Barnard is a famous podcaster, footballer, circus clown, academic with my name. None of them get a look in because Google is so confident what it's understood about.

Will (17:31)
Yeah, that confidence is very interesting. I have come across that idea before, but you explained that really clearly. That's really good because you're right. If like Google, you're kind of the librarian of the internet, the sorter of the internet's information, you are obviously cautious about presenting information that will be muddled up or where you've got the wrong, you've kind of got confused in some way. So it was obviously going to...

veer away from risking doing that. And it will only present Jason Barnard, the Jason Barnard that does this and that, if it's got this supreme confidence that you are that one and you're the one that does these things and that's, you're the one that looks like that and that was born in that year and based in that place. And so I like that you just, and I think again, it's something that so many brands, companies and people don't take the time to go and do it's just like.

It's kind of tidy up. It's a very big housekeeping task, isn't it? Just organizing the stuff about you on the web, taking control of it. You know, I've got to admit, I haven't done that as fully as I could have done.

Jason Barnard (18:30)
Yes.

No, and as you say, corporations and people often don't do it. And they think either it's too much of a big job, it's boring, I can't find all this information. I actually built a machine, a platform called Kalicube Pro, and we can get every single mention about you in 20 minutes. And then my team goes through the entire list and corrects everything we can and sends to you the task list of things you need to correct. And that's a three-month

Will (19:05)
interested.

Jason Barnard (19:10)
month project where we can make sure your message is clear and consistent across your entire digital footprint and that you're standing in the right places where your audience is looking.

we're not looking for gaps, we're looking for commonalities. So Google will tell us, for example, LinkedIn dominates in this particular industry or Twitter/X dominates in this particular industry. Forbes is important for you, Crunchbase might be important. And that tells you where you should be focusing to be standing where your audience is looking. And this is the foundation of business. You need to be standing where your audience is looking and offering them the solution to their problem.

And it's not just on Google, it's every single platform. If your audience are hanging out looking for a solution on LinkedIn, you need to be on LinkedIn and focusing on LinkedIn. And so the Kalicube process is that understandability. Where should I be standing and how should I be communicating or I should be communicating clearly. And I hook it all back to my personal website or my corporate website.

Will (20:13)
What kind of videos, and this is very broad question, but what kind of videos might a personal brand like myself or a small to medium-sized business put out there and where?

Where would you start with that?

Jason Barnard (20:26)
Right. Well, the first thing I would do would be the technique we use at Kalicube is look at my own brand set, look at my own videos, see what's there, see what I... I advise people, think what you expect to see, then look at what you get, and then decide what you want to see and create the content that you want to see and make sure you're promoting that kind of content. So you need to change what Google is presenting by changing also what you produce.

And that's actually part of the next phase, is credibility. After understandability, you need to build your credibility. And your credibility is going to be who you know, who you work with, your qualifications, your history as a company, what your clients are saying about you, what your peers are saying about you. All of this building up the credibility, and once again, for humans and packaging it for machines.

So if I'm standing on LinkedIn, you're looking at me, I want you to understand as a human being that I'm a credible solution. So I want to make sure my awards are clearly demonstrated, my connections are clearly demonstrated to you as a person. And then I just need to make sure that Google and the other machines see this. They will then understand my credibility. And once again, we come back to the entity home, the page on your website. In fact, it would be your whole website. Build your credibility, state your credibility, state what you know.

state your qualifications, state who you know, what you know, and why anybody and everybody in your audience should trust you, and make sure Google understands you, understands, sorry, the content, so that it will then trust you. And for example, being on this podcast, I'm associating myself with yourself and your podcast, which brings credibility to me because you are implicitly vouching for me.

but also brings credibility to you because I'm implicitly vouching for you.

Will (22:29)
Yeah, it's interesting that, again, another thing to focus on there is you're talking about trust and the way that a lot of people put information together on websites isn't really primarily focused on trust. It's often primarily focused on just lots of information about products and services, isn't it? And they miss out the primacy really of trust.

That's ultimately what you're trying to convey first and foremost, because if people don't have that, they're not really interested in your products or services. And Google certainly doesn't, again, have that kind of confidence.

Jason Barnard (23:04)
Yeah, and one huge miss that people haven't, people and companies put trust elements on their pages, classic of service pages, landing pages, put a trust element on testimonials, reviews, that's super helpful, super, super useful. But also think about the language you're using. And for example, in our content at Kalicube, we will include 10 years of existence. Kalicube has existed since 2015, we're almost

coming up to our 10th anniversary of profitable business. That makes me look credible. I've been in the internet since 1998. Stating these facts, making sure that people see that I'm a credible solution, that I've been in the internet since 1998, that my company's existed since 2015 and has been profitable since 2015, hugely important. You just need to state the facts.

Will (24:01)
So testimonials. How much of an upgrade is it to go from having text testimonials to video testimonials? What's your thoughts on that?

Jason Barnard (24:12)
From an audience perspective, it's huge. Videos make all the difference in the world. from my audience, I'm actually in the process of building up the testimonials. We have what we call the wall of love, which is testimonials about Jason Barnard. And what was interesting is I went around the internet and found all the things people have said about me in the past, from LinkedIn, Trustpilot at one point, Facebook, where else was there?

There was a huge number of—oh, on Google Business Profile for Kalicube, people talk about me as well. And pulled all of those into one page. And turns out a lot of people think a lot of good things about me. And it's not me saying it, it's other people saying it. But a lot of it is text. So now I'm going out and getting video testimonials because those are more powerful for humans.

in multimodal search, Google and Bing and ChatGPT and Perplexity in the future are bringing video more and more into play. So more video is better, generally speaking.

Will (25:15)
Which means that if they're bringing more video into play, that means that they're obviously putting as much resource as possible into understanding those videos. Because again, they're not gonna take the risk of surfacing irrelevant videos and proving their products are rubbish. they are looking into, they're obviously using LLMs to digest the transcripts of videos and understand them fairly deeply. So this is where I get a bit stuck. So I...

create content, I create video content on TikTok, a little bit on LinkedIn, but it's always informational because I'm always hung up on this idea that no one's really interested in a video about me and who I am, but if I can do a video of a quick how-to, then that will make people think, well, this is useful now, but also this guy is cool and interesting and I might follow him or I might just think he's an authority and job done, but is there some way to...

have some of that video that does what you say that communicates a bit more about who you are, what you do, beyond the informational content.

Jason Barnard (26:23)
Yeah, well look, KaliCube, a few years ago, we actually created a series of six videos that you can actually put together that describes everything that KaliCube does. they actually, number one, informed our audience, and we used them on our website on various landing pages. Number two, helped Google understand. But also, if you think about that in the same perspective that I was talking about earlier on, if I say it,

Google understands what I want it to understand. If other people say it, then it will be confident that what I've said is true. So I can say all I want that KaliCube is the leading company in the world for cleaning up digital footprints, getting knowledge panels, and controlling your brand narrative on Google and AI. But if you say it as well, then I've won the game.

So the testimonials of people saying Jason Barnard and Kalicube have helped me control my personal brand on Google and in AI, then I'm a huge step further forward.

Will (27:27)
Yeah, well this podcast goes out on YouTube, so you've just said that and that's now going to be in the transcripts of this podcast on YouTube. So I like that. I'm going to remember that when I go on other people's vids. good. Yeah, because I spoke...

Jason Barnard (27:34)
Yeah.

You've spotted that I'm actually very intentional about saying things like that and not being shy about it and it's important. And I would encourage you as well to say the same thing back to me because that increases the confidence and the credibility of what I've just said. You don't have to, I'm not saying you have to say it, but my aim as well is to get other people saying it and I'll reiterate something which is please go in and hand human correct the transcript.

Will (27:49)
I have. I have.

Jason Barnard (28:12)
because it creates a second version of the transcript in YouTube and Google sees and understands that it's been human corrected and it won't be full of all the mistakes that the automatic transcripts do and they make a lot of mistakes. And if you think about that as well, that there is a huge problem, sorry, go ahead.

There is a huge problem that people haven't understood yet and I don't think even the engineers at Google and Bing and ChatGPT and Perplexity and Alexa and Siri have really got to grips with is that once the machines start to get it wrong, they're going to get it more and more wrong. It's going to snowball because they're going to convince themselves these little machines are sitting there in their corner repeating the same things to themselves if they're repeating a fallacy.

they're going to convince themselves that that fallacy is wrong. And I'll give you a really good example. Danny Goodwin, who's the editor of Search Engine Land.

shares a name with a famous baseball player. And Google is absolutely convinced that this baseball player retired and then became an expert in SEO and became the editor of Search Engine Land. So when you ask Google about our Danny Goodwin's articles, it says, this baseball player wrote this brilliant article about SEO. So Danny's actually asked me to help him sort that out so that we disambiguate the two. And the problem.

is that Google has believed this for the last 10 years. So I'm trying to change a piece of information in this child's brain that is absolutely 100 % convinced is true for 10 years and has been repeating to itself that it's true for 10 years. So these machines are, how would you put it, self-confirmation, they're creating a truth in their own brains.

Will (30:10)
Yeah, yeah.

Jason Barnard (30:11)
feeding their own information to themselves and that's a huge danger. And technically speaking, they're doing it. From an LLM perspective, it's called synthetic data. They will say to the machine, create some more data from the data you already have, it will create more data, nobody checks it properly, and they inject it back into the machine as fact. Then you've got a snowballing false information.

Will (30:17)
Interesting.

Yeah.

Jason Barnard (30:37)
that's very, very, very, very hard to correct. So I would suggest this is something you need to do today because once it starts to get it wrong, it's gonna get worse and worse and worse and worse. Don't let the machines decide today because they're gonna get it wrong. If they get it wrong today, tomorrow, you're in big trouble.

Will (30:56)
Yeah, that's interesting that I mean I suppose something would be a good thing for us all to do is like actually ask ChatGPT and other LLMs Who is Will Francis or if it's if you've got a company, know who who are that company and just see what it spits out because Yeah, you it's really important. I'm not sure I've actually ever done that So, you know and I play with these things a lot. So it's really important that that is correct For sure. Yeah

Jason Barnard (31:23)
Well, at Kalicube for our clients, we ask them every day. So we collect the data day in, day out to see, number one, the variations that they give and how much they change. And I'll give you another scary idea. Is a little bit of information out there about you is worse than no information at all. And of course, everybody has a bit of information out there. So no information at all is absolutely not an option. If you think it is, think again, because it's not.

A little bit of information for these, especially the LLMs, is very dangerous. And I'll give you the example. My ex-wife, Veronica, I got her a knowledge panel because she was the voiceover artist for Yellow Koala in the cartoon series I mentioned earlier on. And she was a singer and an actress. And I just left it at that. said, OK, she's singer and actress. That's good. Got the knowledge panel. She looks great. And then I asked ChatGPT, I think it was, who is Veronique Barnard?

And because it understood so confidently that she's a singer and an actress, there must be a ceiling whereby the engineers say, once you've got this level of confidence, can just, you know, go, run to the, run with it, off you go. And it invented an entire career for her that simply doesn't exist. There was a list of 10 films, 10 albums, dates, names, characters she played in films.

Will (32:37)
with it.

Jason Barnard (32:52)
She became Swiss French rather than French French. And the entire thing was invented. So if it understands, these machines understand the foundation of you, but don't understand the details, they will make the details up.

And they'll just run with it and they'll make up your entire life story, which has nothing to do with the truth.

Will (33:17)
to be honest, my made up life is probably a lot more interesting than my real one, but with all my albums and the movies that I've been in, perhaps, but I will be definitely checking on that.

Jason Barnard (33:19)
haha

Will (33:27)
So how does voice search play into all this? You did mention voice assistants like Alexa. What sort of considerations do we need to have around those?

Jason Barnard (33:37)
Well, this is actually a one strategy fits all. If you have the machine understanding you, if it believes you're credible, and if you give it the content, you feed it the content so that it can represent you and can introduce you to the conversation, and in case of voice search, it is a conversation, then you've won the game. So it's understandability, credibility, deliverability, which is control, influence, visibility, or in this case, audibility.

And if you ask Alexa, who is Jason Barnard, it will answer just as well as ChatGPT would, just spoken. You can also use ChatGPT voice activated and it will simply speak back the answer. it used to be you would get a feature snippet and Alexa would simply repeat that or a voice assistant, voice assistant. It's more complex than that now, but it's still using Gemini ChatGPT meta AI.

I have a friend who got the Ray-Ban glasses with MetaAI installed and he asked his glasses who is Jason Barnard and his glasses replied to him exactly who I am with the facts correct. So even MetaAI gets it. So it's important to remember all of these machines function the same way. They use the same data source which is the web plus internal data from themselves and their own users. But from our perspective in terms of educating

Will (34:38)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Barnard (35:02)
From the outside, if I want to educate Meta, Apple, Bing, Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity about me, I need to do it using the web because that's the public information they're using. But the same methodology works for all of them. Hub, Spoke, Wheel, your entity home, your own website that you own, explain everything you want to explain, link out to all the corroborative sources, link back from those corroborative sources to that entity home.

And make sure the corroborative sources on first, second and third party websites, i.e. websites you own, websites you semi-control, such as LinkedIn profiles, and third parties especially powerful, make sure they all repeat and confirm what it is you're saying clearly and consistently. And you've won the game with all of the machines because they all function the same way.

Will (35:56)
That's interesting. And you know, there's one, there's many ways to test that. But one way that I like is, I don't know if you've heard of LM Arena. It was, to be called LM Sys. LM Arena is where the AI chat bots are all basically competing on this leaderboard of effectiveness. Anyway, that aside, what's cool about it is on that website, you can actually try out all of the known models. So you could put in who is Jason Barnard, and you can have, you can request that of Grok.

Jason Barnard (36:12)
Ha!

Will (36:25)
Claude, Lama, Gemini, ChatGPT and all its different models. And then some of the Chinese models is about, I don't know, 80, 100 models, 75 actually, I'm just looking, 75 different models that you can try a query out with. So you could do that, you know, just to be really sure that they were all clear on who you are, you know.

Jason Barnard (36:45)
Yeah.

Will (36:47)
I'm aware we've taken up lots of your time. One last question for you. And I'm gonna challenge you to keep this quite brief and summarized because I know one's life is...

Jason Barnard (36:57)
Sorry.

Will (37:00)
Well, no, one's life is a big thing. But give me just a quick snippet of how you've got from basically being on the internet in the late 90s and starting with SEO back then through various pivots and projects to where you are now.

Jason Barnard (37:21)
Well, it's actually a really interesting question from the perspective of these machines and how they understand you, because we're all multifaceted. We all have a life with multiple parts and different things that we've done. And I'm a spectacularly good example of somebody who a machine would naturally understand to be seven or eight different people.

because I have a degree in economics. Then I was a musician playing double bass in a band. I was a singer. I was a songwriter. Then I was a cartoon blue dog on a TV series writing songs, doing a voiceover. Then I founded a company. I was the CEO of my music company when I was a musician. I was the CEO and founder of Up to 10, which was the company that...

created or commercialized the Blue Dog and the Yellow Koala. Then I was an SEO consultant, then I created KaliCube, and now I'm specialist in knowledge panels and how generative AI and Google search and Bing search understand you. So my career is hugely complex, and Google could potentially have me as a musician, a singer, a songwriter, a scriptwriter.

CEO of a company in France, CEO of a company in Mauritius, CEO of a company in France with a team in the Philippines, SEL consultant, author. I'm trying to go through them all, but there are so many different possibilities for Google to get confused. And this is true of everybody. There are so many opportunities for Google to get confused. It's very, very, very important that you are very clear with dates and

times and mentions of who you were working with at any given time and so on and so forth. So making sure that you're very clear is the way to make sure that Google will understand and with my particular career, that's a spectacularly difficult job and I'm very, very proud that I've managed to get to the point where Google doesn't get it wrong.

Will (39:13)
interesting.

Well, that's going to be increasingly a challenge for people because, you know, more and more people don't have one job for life. We have portfolio careers, as they get referred to. I'm very much like you, done lots of different creative things in my life. And that could be confusing. But like you say, when you were talking about that, I was thinking, yes, it's important to make sure the machines know who you are, but also who you were and the different hats that you've...

that you wear and have worn. And it's just giving that clarity really as things become more based on the training data that is the internet.

Jason Barnard (40:05)
I'd to put.

Will (40:06)
Well look, Jason, thank you so much for your time. Just remind our listeners where they can find and connect with you online.

Jason Barnard (40:13)
If I were you as a listener, I would search my name, Jason Barnard, J-A-S-O-N-B-A-R-N-A-R-D. The result will present me my entire career, plus where you can engage with me on my company website, my personal website, on LinkedIn, on Twitter/X. It will all present there. You can watch my videos, you can read my articles, or you can just ask ChatGPT who is Jason Barnard and where can I connect.

Will (40:35)
I love it. Brilliant. We'll do that. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jason. It's been a pleasure. I've learned so much. I've got a really long to-do list now. Thanks so much. And hope to chat to you again soon.

Jason Barnard (40:44)
Thank you, absolutely delightful, that was wonderful, thank you so much.