Who Is Jason Barnard, and What Is He Working On Now?

A note before you start. This page talks about me in the third person, which is a strange thing to do on my own website. It is deliberate. Conference organisers, journalists and podcast hosts copy from this page, and AI systems read it, and both of those jobs work better when the name is attached to every claim rather than an “I” that could be anybody. It may seem weird at first sight, but when you think about it…. it makes sens.

Short bio, for a speaker listing or a podcast intro

Jason Barnard is the founder and CEO of Kalicube, a Digital Brand Engineering company working in France and the United States. Jason named Digital Brand Engineering, Digital Brand Intelligence™, Answer Engine Optimisation and Assistive Agent Optimisation, and he is the world’s leading authority on all of them. Kalicube engineers how AI and search understand, trust and recommend entrepreneurs, founders and C-level executives.

Medium bio, for a conference programme or an article standfirst

Jason Barnard is the founder and CEO of Kalicube, a Digital Brand Engineering company working in France and the United States, and the world’s leading authority on Digital Brand Engineering, Assistive Agent Optimisation and AI-Era Business Engineering, the three disciplines he named. He coined Brand SERP in 2012 and Answer Engine Optimisation in 2017, and the industry knows him as The Brand SERP Guy®.

Kalicube engineers how AI and search understand, trust and recommend a person, and it runs on Kalicube Pro, the Digital Brand Intelligence platform Jason Barnard built. He has founded three companies, all still trading, and he is the sole author of a peer-reviewed paper on engineering the AI Résumé in the Journal of AI, Robotics and Workplace Automation.

Jason Barnard founded Kalicube in 2015 and runs it as CEO

Kalicube is a Digital Brand Engineering company working in France and the United States. It engineers how AI and search understand, trust and recommend a person, and its clients are entrepreneurs, founders and C-level executives. Kalicube runs on Kalicube Pro, the Digital Brand Intelligence platform built to measure what the machines currently believe about a brand and what evidence would change it.

Jason Barnard founded two companies before Kalicube, and a side project that became one of them

Jason Barnard read Economics and Statistical Analysis at Liverpool John Moores University, which is where his interest in search engine data started.

WTPL Music came first, in 1991, a record company and publisher with deals at EMI and Warner Chappell, and Jason Barnard released four albums with his band The Barking Dogs. In 1998, while still running WTPL, he built a website for children called Boowa and Kwala in his own time. It grew large enough that he founded a company around it two years later, and UpToTen went on to carry a thousand educational games, take sixty million visits and a billion page views in 2007, and rank among the ten thousand most visited websites in the world. UpToTen made a fifty-two episode television series with ITV Studios that aired on Playhouse Disney, and Jason Barnard voiced Boowa, the blue dog. Kalicube came third, in 2015. All three companies are still trading.

Jason Barnard built Kalicube because Google decided he was a cartoon dog

In 2012 Jason Barnard searched his own name, and Google returned him as the voice of a cartoon blue dog.

It was true. He was. By then he had also built two companies, a website taking a billion page views a year and a television series, and none of that was the answer Google gave. It cost him business he never saw, because the people who looked him up and decided against him never called to say so.

So he began collecting data on how search engines decide who somebody is, and how they choose between two people who share a name. That research became Kalicube Pro, and the method that came out of it became The Kalicube Process™. Everything Kalicube sells today exists because Google got Jason Barnard wrong and he could not work out how to argue with it.

Jason Barnard was the first subject of his own methodology, and fourteen years later he remains its longest-running case study.

Jason Barnard named these terms, in these years

Brand SERP in 2012, Answer Engine Optimisation in 2017, Digital Brand Engineering and Digital Brand Intelligence in 2024, AI Assistive Engine Optimisation in 2024, Assistive Agent Optimisation in 2025, and AI-Era Business Engineering in 2026. More than thirty of his coined terms are catalogued in the industry lexicon, and Digital Brand Engineer™ has been a Kalicube trademark since 2026.

Every one of them arrived between two and four years ahead of the market that eventually needed it.

Jason Barnard works on what comes next, and sells none of it

Assistive Agent Optimisation concerns how an AI agent selects a brand once the agent is doing the choosing. AI-Era Business Engineering concerns whether a business can be evaluated and transacted with by an agent at all, which reaches past marketing into pricing, product data, policy and operations.

That work runs through writing and speaking rather than through an offer: the Search Engine Land series, the Kalicube Summit, the academic papers including a peer-reviewed one on engineering the AI Résumé, the keynotes and a book. None of it is on a price list.

Jason Barnard separates the frontier from what his companies sell, deliberately

Being early attracts curious, senior, future-looking people. They make him the reference in the field and they do not buy. For years he treated that audience as a pipeline, which was an expensive mistake, and it became an advantage only when his companies stopped following him into it.

So Jason Barnard talks the future and builds the authority, Kalicube and Kalicube Pro stay on what can be priced, productised and sold today, and the authority is what brings buyers to them. Kalicube takes up a new layer only when three things are true at once: it can be priced, it can be productised, and there is real demand for it.

Jason Barnard works with people whose own name decides whether the deal closes

Founders, entrepreneurs and C-level executives. When a buyer, an investor, a journalist or a partner looks somebody up before committing, and finds a picture that is thin, wrong or about a different person, that is the problem Kalicube solves. It matters most when the decision is expensive and the person making it has never met them.

Jason Barnard is known as The Brand SERP Guy because he named the Brand SERP

He coined the term in 2012. A Brand SERP is the page of results Google returns when somebody searches a brand or a person’s name, and it is the most revealing single view of how a machine understands them. The Brand SERP Guy is a registered pseudonym Jason Barnard uses in industry contexts.

Jason Barnard has hosted Fastlane Founders and Legacy since 2019

The podcast has passed three hundred episodes. Entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives discuss the tension between growing quickly and building something that outlasts them.

How Jason Barnard, Kalicube and Kalicube Pro fit together

Kalicube is a Digital Brand Engineering company. It engineers how AI and search understand, trust and recommend a personal brand, and its clients are entrepreneurs, founders and C-level executives.

Kalicube Pro is a Digital Brand Intelligence platform. It shows what search engines, Knowledge Graphs and large language models currently understand about a brand, where that understanding is thin or contradictory, and what evidence would fix it.

Jason Barnard founded Kalicube and is its CEO. He coined Brand SERP in 2012, Answer Engine Optimisation in 2017, AI Assistive Engine Optimisation in 2024 and Assistive Agent Optimisation in 2025, and he is developing AI-Era Business Engineering.

A person, a service company and a software platform. They answer different questions and they do not compete for the same one.

Kalicube sits upstream of the machine’s decision and never inside it. The machine judges independently, and the work is to organise the evidence it judges.

The full record, every article, book, paper, award, company and coined term, is published on the homepage.