What do Google, ChatGPT, and other AI models say when someone asks about you or your business? Are you in control of that narrative? Jason Barnard, “The Brand SERP Guy®” and founder of Kalicube, joins Harmonious at Lunch to discuss how to “educate” these powerful AI systems to present you accurately and authoritatively. This isn’t traditional SEO; it’s a new approach to online reputation management for the age of AI.

Discover Jason’s powerful “Claim, Frame, and Prove” method for building a clear and consistent digital footprint that AI understands and trusts. He shares his personal story of transforming his own online identity from a “cartoon blue dog” voice actor into a recognized digital marketing expert, a journey that led to a multi-million dollar business. This is a crucial conversation for any business owner who wants to manage their online brand proactively and ensure they are visible to the right audience at the right time.

Chapters:

• [00:00] - Welcome: “Educating” Google & AI About Your Brand
• [01:10] - Jason Barnard on the New Era of Online Reputation Management
• [02:00] - The Key Difference: Traditional SEO vs. Brand SERP Strategy
• [03:30] - The “Claim, Frame, & Prove” Method Explained
• [05:45] - Building Credibility for Machines and Humans
• [07:00] - How AI Search Works & Why Your Digital Footprint is Crucial
• [09:00] - Jason’s “Cartoon Blue Dog” Story: Solving His Own Brand Problem
• [11:15] - The Kalicube Process™: Understandability, Credibility & Deliverability
• [13:45] - Your Website as the “Hub” for Your Brand’s Facts
• [15:00] - The Surprising Importance of Reciprocal Links for Brand Confirmation
• [16:45] - Which SEO Rules DON’T Apply to Modern Brand Management
• [18:30] - Your First Action Step: Search Your Own Name in AI
• [20:00] - Where to Learn More & Access Kalicube’s Free Guides

Listen here: The Brand Control Crisis: How Google & AI Are Changing Marketing Forever

Published by: Harmonious at Lunch. June 17, 2025. Host: Brandon Gano Guest: Jason Barnard, Founder and CEO of Kalicube.

Shape Your Online Reputation with AI and Search Engines

[00:00:00] Narrator: Time to fuel your business success. Welcome to Harmonious at Lunch. We’re bringing you bite-sized advice and expert conversations to drive clarity and growth five days a week. Make sure you join our Facebook [email protected] slash lunch where listeners like you and our guests hang out so we can find harmony in business together.

[00:00:21] Narrator: If you’re building a business, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in.

[00:00:28] Brandon Gano: Welcome back to some more bite-sized business advice. Today’s episode is going to be a big one. I’m excited. The topic today, we’re talking about how to manipulate, I don’t know if that’s the right word, but we’re going to roll with it, manipulate, train, incentivize, I don’t know, ChatGPT, AI and Google to speak very nicely about you.

[00:00:46] Brandon Gano: This is intriguing to me. I’ve never talked about this on this show, haven’t really heard anybody talking about it, but our guest is Jason Barnard. Welcome to the show and thank you for being here. 

[00:00:56] Jason Barnard: Thank you, Brandon. Yeah. I was the one who said manipulate, but actually it’s educate. If you treat them like children that you’re educating, everything works out fine.

[00:01:05] Brandon Gano: That’s true. I do manipulate my kids. If you don’t eat your dinner, you can’t get your dessert. So it’s on the table. We’ll say that. 

[00:01:14] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Yeah. And the idea that you can do that is often new to people. The idea that I can heavily influence what Google, ChatGPT, Bing say about me is news for most people.

[00:01:28] Jason Barnard: But if you look me up now on Google ChatGPT, Perplexity, DeepSeek, take your pick. I don’t mind any of them. Who is Jason Barnard. What are his expertise? It will say such nice things about me. It will be my best advertisement possible. Please go ahead. 

How to Educate Google Instead of Relying on Traditional SEO

[00:01:46] Brandon Gano: And it’s not because those things are false.

[00:01:49] Brandon Gano: You just put the effort into educate the software or the model, which is, I think it’s fascinating and I want to dive in, but what I want to be clear of at the beginning here is we’ve talked about SEO on this show. It doesn’t sound like it’s that type of a conversation. Can you just explain quickly the difference between traditional SEO and educating Google that way versus this topic?

[00:02:13] Jason Barnard: Right. Which is a great question because traditional SEO never worked with Personal Brand or Brand Management in Google, but people thought it did. So I’ve been doing this for 13 years and I’m the only person in the digital marketing SEO space who sees that brand is treated differently by Google, Microsoft, ChatGPT, now, Perplexity, and that the approach has always been different.

[00:02:37] Jason Barnard: SEO is about keywords and links. I count my keywords and I try and get as many links as I can, and I get to the top of a search result for some phrase like buy red shoes. This is about making sure that Google and ChatGPT represent me, myself, and my company the way I want, and to the right audience at the right time at the critical moment they’re about to make the decisions. And we are now in a world where these machines understand the world in a semi human manner. So you won’t trick them with keywords, you won’t trick them with links. Links are about popularity. They’re not about authority. So you need to what we call claim, frame, and prove. Claim, who I am, why I am important, what I do, what my expert is, who I know, who I’ve worked with.

[00:03:26] Jason Barnard: Frame it in a way that makes sense to my brand narrative today, and then prove it to the machines so that they understand. You educate them like children, they need the proof. They won’t believe you on your own good word. They need multiple resources, multiple reassuring corroboration, supporting evidence.

[00:03:47] Jason Barnard: So if you as a parent tell your child something the teacher says something different, there’s a problem. Best if they both say the same thing. 

How Do You Establish Expertise by Providing Clear Proof in Your Digital Reputation?

[00:03:55] Brandon Gano: Yeah, I like this. Okay, so claim, frame, prove. I will say I like the prove piece because if you go back to two decades ago, Wikipedia, still today, anybody can go in and update it.

[00:04:09] Brandon Gano: I don’t know if they’ve updated their policy as to how you need to prove that but technically, you could change pieces of history without ever having to prove it. I like this. It seems more secure. And then it also reassures the person looking at it that the information is aKalicuberate. So when it says you are an expert in some topic, that person can actually believe that is true. So that to me is comforting. 

[00:04:33] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And it is important that the machines aren’t stupid. You can trick them sometimes but you can’t trick them long term. And what we do at Kalicube is build understanding into their brains. We build the credibility into their brains, and we make sure that we give them the content so that they can deliver you to the subset of their audience.

[00:04:57] Jason Barnard: The subset of their users, who your audience at the critical moment of decision and I’ll give you an example of the claim frame and prove. All of the AI recognizes me as the world expert in Knowledge Panels, Google Knowledge Panels, the thing you see on the right hand side when you search for somebody famous.

[00:05:16] Jason Barnard: I can build one of those for anybody. They also recognize me as the inventor of the concept of the Brand SERP. The search engine results page for a brand, a person, or a corporation. Those two together, I’d already nailed it. Then I thought, okay, when you take those two together, it’s actually Online Reputation Management.

[00:05:39] Jason Barnard: So I wrote an article framing those two expertises for which I’m already recognized as the equivalent of modern Online Reputation Management. Proactive Online Reputation Management argued my case linked to multiple sources that talk about me, talking about that as on Online Reputation Management on third party sources.

[00:06:02] Jason Barnard: This could be one in the future. And the machine said, okay, what he’s arguing, what he’s saying makes sense. He’s framed it in a way that I can understand and that is believable and he can link to proof. Therefore, I believe him and in two months I’ve gone from nowhere in the Online Reputation Management space to being top of the pile in AI.

Why Your Digital Footprint and Brand SERP Visibility Are More Critical Than Ever

[00:06:23] Brandon Gano: Wow, that’s impressive. And it’s no secret that AI is taking over Search now too. I use Google, I use Chrome, so I can’t speak to, does anybody use Bing? I don’t know. But anyway, if you do, sorry, I’ve insulted you. But Google, they have Google AI now, and it’s a whole new browser page.

[00:06:43] Brandon Gano: So if you search for something, it pops up and says, do you want to use AI search? And it’s basically like custom building search results for that individual search. Not even for the user, like for that search. So this is huge because we’re going to get away from SEO, we’re going to get away from standard Google listings and a very short period of time.

[00:07:05] Brandon Gano: And this is going to be the new way that people find you. And if you’re not found by the AI or whatever model’s being used, you’re invisible. And that’s not a good thing in business. 

[00:07:15] Jason Barnard: No! A hundred percent. And you need to be out there. You need to be visible. And a couple of things there. Number one is AI mode, which is the new mode that Google Introduced. If you click on the tab, which is soon going to be the default, it researches 80 web pages and then gives the answer. Anything. In fact, I’ve seen anything from 20 to 200 web pages, traditional SEO cannot handle that. The only way to handle is to make sure your digital footprint is incredibly clean and consistent and up to date, and that you’re claiming, framing and proving in a way that makes sense to the machine.

[00:07:50] Jason Barnard: That’s what we do at Kalicube. That’s what we do for our clients who are high net worth individual entrepreneurs or ambitious entrepreneurs, generally speaking. And I use myself as the gold standards, so I’m working on my own Personal Brand all the time, Kalicube too and it works incredibly well.

[00:08:06] Jason Barnard: I’ll tell you how I came here because it’s quite a nice story. I created a company in 2000, called Uptoten, and it was the leading independent edutainment company in the world in terms of the website size, a billion page views, 60 million visits in 2007. We made a lot of money. I had deals with Disney, I had deals with ITV International.

[00:08:33] Jason Barnard: I had a deal with Radio Canada. When I exited that company, instead of saying Jason Barnard was the CEO and founder of Uptoten had deals with Disney and ITV International, it said Jason Barnard is the voiceover artist of a cartoon blue dog. Because that was something I did during my work at the company.

[00:08:55] Jason Barnard: I realized that I was losing all of the deals I was trying to make because people didn’t trust me as an entrepreneur and a CEO. They saw me as this cartoon blue dog. So I set about figuring out how I could change Google’s search result for my name. I invented the term Brand SERP, the search engine results page for a brand, created myself Knowledge Panel, I looked like a superstar, and business rolled in. Realized that this is a huge gap in the market, created Kalicube in 2015, started collecting the data, we’ve got 3 billion data points, built an algorithm to solve the problem, and now we serve other people with basically what was the solution to my own problem that cost me millions of dollars.

Build a Brand That Machines Understand, Trust, and Recommend Exactly When It Matters

[00:09:34] Brandon Gano: That’s really cool and I’m sure that’s happening to people all over the place. Even today. If you’ve done something in your past and that’s just more public, we’ll say on the internet, that’s what you show up for. So how do we do this? Whether it’s for our Personal Brand, for our business brand, give me the high level walkthrough of how we start because I think now is the time, but if you sleep on this, you’re just going to get lost in the dust. 

[00:10:00] Jason Barnard: A hundred percent. I agree, but I’m already converted to this as an idea and I have been for such a long time.

[00:10:06] Brandon Gano: I don’t convince you. 

[00:10:07] Jason Barnard: No. We have what we call The Kalicube Process, and it’s built on three pillars, Understandability, Credibility, Deliverability.

[00:10:15] Jason Barnard: The Understandability gives you control. Credibility gives you influence. Deliverability gives you the visibility you look for as a person or a company. Works the same for a company or a person. Understandability, do the machines understand who you are, what you do, and who you serve? What we do is organize your digital footprint so that it makes total sense and everything in that digital footprint corroborates and supports your brand narrative of who you are, what you do, and who you serve.

[00:10:44] Jason Barnard: Next phase, Credibility. Why are you important? Why should the machines trust you? Why should people trust you? So we build the credibility that you already have and then add more credibility on top of that so the machines can digest not only who you are, but why you are important and why you’re trustworthy.

[00:11:02] Jason Barnard: Once we’ve done that, we then create the content or help you to create the content so that they can deliver you to the subset of their users who your audience at the right moment. And one good example of that would be if you are researching Knowledge Panels on Perplexity or ChatGPT or Bing or Google, my name will come up all the time.

[00:11:24] Jason Barnard: That’s top of funnel. Then people move down to consideration and say, out of the experts you’ve mentioned, who should I be trusting? My name will come out on top. And then we get the perfect click. At the moment, the person says, okay, who should I go with? You need to be that one single answer, what we call the perfect click.

[00:11:45] Jason Barnard: So I’m introduced at the awareness stage, prioritized in the consideration stage and chosen by the machine at the decision phase. 

Organizing Your Digital Footprint: The Hub-and-Spoke Model for AI Understanding

[00:11:54] Brandon Gano: I like this. So when you’re talking about organizing your digital footprint is this obviously website. What else goes into that to make sure that the AI has access to you and actually can learn about you? Because I assume website’s not enough and there’s more that’s involved. What is involved? 

[00:12:13] Jason Barnard: But you’re right to say the website’s important. It’s the hub. In what we call the hub spoken wheel model. So you have a hub which is your website, where you state all the facts, who you are, what you do, who you serve, why you’re credible, and you have the content that you want them to deliver.

[00:12:30] Jason Barnard: But you also have LinkedIn, YouTube, forbes.com, entrepreneur.com, associations within your industry, all of which talk about you. You need to make sure that they confirm what it is you’re saying on the hub. So that’s your wheel. It’s the wheel of all the content around your digital footprint, and then you connect it with the spokes, which are just links.

[00:12:52] Jason Barnard: So essentially, the solution to this incredibly complex problem is organize your digital footprint so it’s clear, navigatable, digestible, understandable by the machines, and convince them by claim, frame, and prove that your version of the facts on your hub are true. 

The Importance of Reciprocal Links for AI to Accurately Identify Entities

[00:13:15] Brandon Gano: Okay. So let’s talk about this because I get it conceptually, but then I could also see where it could potentially fall apart and I don’t know if it could but I the thought that popped in my mind is, let’s use Forbes, right?

[00:13:29] Brandon Gano: Or even this podcast. If Forbes writes an article about you or your company and links to your website, does your website also have to link to that so that the AI can confirm that these two things are the same because a lot of times, I mean let’s use even guests of this show. I will link to their website.

[00:13:50] Brandon Gano: They will not link back or post to this podcast so the AI could get confused. Am I understanding that correctly? 

[00:13:57] Jason Barnard: You are. Exactly. Now, if we take people’s names, this is the big one. Incredibly ambiguous. There are 10,000 Jason Barnards in the world. We need to make sure that it understands which Jason Barnard was on this podcast. So when you link to my website, you are telling it, this is the Jason Barnard I was talking to. It’s not the ice hockey player. It’s not the professor at San Francisco, Golden Gate. It’s not the footballer. It’s not the circus clown. And if I point back to you, I confirm that is indeed me, and I agree that it’s me and you are not pretending that you talk to me.

[00:14:33] Jason Barnard: So we need reciprocal links, which in SEO world are naughty. But in this world, they’re fundamentally important. So an SEO will tell you, don’t get that reciprocal link because it looks naughty. I say, get the reciprocal link because it confirms and it gets the machine backwards and forwards between the sites in what we call the infinite loop of self corroboration.

Why Traditional Techniques Fail and Brand Focus is the Real Key

[00:14:56] Brandon Gano: That’s really interesting. So SEO, what they just think you’re trying to trick the machine? 

[00:15:02] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Oh, so I had a discussion with somebody about seven or eight years ago where I said, where they were just saying, you are just doing cheap SEO. And I’m saying, actually, no, I use some SEO techniques, but I built a whole host of new techniques that none of you are ever using. And the ones that you use are actually not relevant a lot of the time, or the ones that you think are important are simply not important.

[00:15:26] Jason Barnard: So inbound links, not important. Site speed, not important. Duplicate content, don’t care. All of these things that are traditionally a huge problem in SEO, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter for brand, what matters for brand is understandability, credibility and deliverability that gives you control, influence, and visibility.

[00:15:47] Jason Barnard: So the whole approach of an SEO is going to be wrong, and we get a lot of clients coming to us saying, this guy, for example. I was working with an SEO, it all fell apart. They worked, he worked with us, Scott Duffy, he worked with Richard Branson. He sold the company to Richard Branson. That was invisible. We made it visible.

[00:16:06] Jason Barnard: Because the SEOs were focusing on the wrong things. 

How Reframing Your Digital Presence Can Control Reputation and Unlock Business Growth

[00:16:11] Brandon Gano: Wow. This is really interesting. And I’m also thinking in a Reputation Management perspective, if people just go spam the internet with bad things about you, you can basically now control that by just not recognizing it. 

[00:16:26] Jason Barnard: Yeah, exactly. And for cartoon blue dog, which isn’t a reputation problem as such because I’m very proud of cartoon blue dog. But what I did was reframe the story and refocus the algorithms on Jason Barnard as the world authority in Digital Brand Intelligence™ and a CEO, founder, entrepreneur rather than voiceover artist for a cartoon blue dog.

[00:16:49] Jason Barnard: But naturally, the cartoon blue dog was dominating because there was a Wikipedia page, there was an IMDB page, the TV series was very successful. So all of these aspects were outweighing my existing digital footprint, and I needed to reframe and claim my CEO entrepreneur status and prove it. And at that point, I could change, manipulate, educate the algorithms to what’s important to me today. And that stop me losing millions of dollars in deals and in fact, created Kalicube, which is now sixfold in revenue in just four years. 

Future-Proof Your Brand with Free Guides Backed by 3 Billion Data Points

[00:17:32] Brandon Gano: That’s amazing. This is super cool. I’m going to go ahead and toss your website here on the screen. it’s down below in the show notes below. it’s Kalicube dot com slash guides. What’s at that link that you want people to go check out? 

[00:17:46] Jason Barnard: Free guides. So everything I’ve just explained, we give away for free. So you can go and do it yourself absolutely. Knock yourselves out. For me, this is existential. It’s fundamentally important to people and businesses, and we have found a universal timeless solution, future proof, because all of these machines use the same data source, the web. Which is your digital footprint within the web is what they’re going to be using about you. They’re all based on Large Language Model Chat bots, Search Results, and Knowledge Graphs, and all of them use the same source, the web. So anybody can do it themselves.

[00:18:27] Jason Barnard: Then the question is, do you want to upskill? Do you want to take the risk of doing it wrong? You’re going to be guessing. We have 3 billion data points. The algorithms and the tech layer hold it all together because what’s important for the machines is that it’s clear, it’s consistent across the entire digital footprint over time and manually, that’s almost impossible to do, and I’ve never seen anybody do it. 

From Awareness to Action: How to Address Your Online Brand Gaps

[00:18:53] Brandon Gano: Yeah, that’s important. So wrapping this episode up then, the action item that at least I could think of and please correct me if there’s something better to do. But I would say, I’m going to go to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, wherever, Perplexity, search myself and my company and see what comes up.

[00:19:10] Brandon Gano: And then maybe get a little disappointed, a little scared, and then go download these guides. Is that the appropriate action to take? 

[00:19:17] Jason Barnard: Yeah, that’s exactly it. That’s the first action to take. It isn’t if what it’s saying is not true or not complete or not positive enough, you have a problem, solve it.

[00:19:30] Jason Barnard: The guides are there for free. Then the next step, which I would get excited about would be to ask, who are the top experts in my field? And if you’re nowhere to be seen, you’re going to become invisible in the next four or five years. But to do that phase, which is the credibility Deliverability Phase™, you have to have the understandability, which is what you started with. Do they understand you today? Do they understand you in depth and are they saying nice things about you? 

How to Get Ahead and Stand Out in Today’s Marketplace

[00:20:00] Brandon Gano: This is fascinating, Jason. This was such a cool conversation. I’m glad we got to have this because it really is the beginning of the future.

[00:20:08] Brandon Gano: I get so excited by this stuff because now is the opportunity. The listeners are here. You took time to listen to this episode. Please go take action. This is how you can get ahead of your competition and actually stand out in the marketplace. I think the tides are turning and it’s fair game for anybody at this point.

[00:20:24] Brandon Gano: So Jason, thank you so much for stopping by. 

[00:20:28] Jason Barnard: Thank you. That was absolutely delightful. Brandon. 

Tune In and Take Action: Links, Resources, and What’s Next on Harmonious At Lunch

[00:20:31] Brandon Gano: Wherever you’re watching, listening, that link is down in the show notes as long as all of Jason’s websites, contact info, social media, so go check that stuff out. We’ll see you back on another episode tomorrow of Harmonious At Lunch.

[00:20:44] Narrator: Another episode of Harmonious At Lunch in the books. I hope this episode made you think and you grab some actionable ideas to propel your business. Don’t forget to like, comment your takeaways and subscribe wherever you’re listening so we can help more entrepreneurs just like you to keep life and business for cutting edge tools that bring clarity to your people and processes. Check out humanop.com to download our app today.