Jason Barnard has been published every year since 2017 by Semrush, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, Majestic and Henry Stewart

Published 23 August 2026.

I’ve spent this week arguing that a claim without evidence attached gets marked uncertain and quietly discounted, and that proof nothing can read may as well not exist. So here is my own record, dated, linked, and assembled in one place for the first time. Check any line of it.

Semrush published my first article, in French, on 9 March 2017

It was about paid review platforms and which of them actually helped you in search: Plateformes d’avis payantes, quelle est la meilleure solution SEO, 9 March 2017, on the French edition of the Semrush blog.

I’d been researching for Kalicube®.pro since January 2017, two months earlier, and somebody at Semrush decided the results were worth publishing. That is the whole beginning of it.

Semrush kept publishing through 2017 and 2018, in two languages

Semantic HTML5 for Content Writers went up in English on 1 November 2017, three weeks before I stood up in Metz and told a room to forget domain authority.

Then The Key to the Future of SEO and AEO on 5 February 2018, which put Answer Engine Optimisation in a headline on a major platform and set out understanding and credibility as the two things Google was actually weighing. That link goes to an archived capture on purpose: the live page was updated and re-dated years later, so the original date only survives in the archive, which is its own small lesson.

Brand SERPs You Really Should Be Tracking followed on 7 June 2018, and it spells the term out in the body: SEO and AEO, Answer Engine Optimisation.

David Bain put the work in print in 2019, and the chapter never reached the web

Marketing Now was published on 2 December 2019, I was one of the contributors, and my section ran at number thirty-nine.

It took me until this week to notice that the book has a machine-readable footprint and my four hundred words inside it have none, which is a problem I’ve written about separately because it turns out to be the more interesting half of the story.

Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land carried the research from 2019 into 2022

Search Engine Journal ran the Knowledge Graph algorithm update I called Budapest on 12 December 2019, then how to get a brand into the Knowledge Graph without a Wikipedia page on 1 April 2020, off the back of twenty thousand tracked brands.

SEO in a Nutshell: Understanding, Credibility and Deliverability followed on 23 October 2020, which is the earliest dated place I can point you at where all three pillars are named together. Darwinism and Google SERPs as product came on 18 August 2021.

Search Engine Land has had me on the expansion of People Also Ask on 14 December 2020, on Google’s podcast knowledge panel update on 26 October 2021, and on why brands must dominate People Also Ask on 1 March 2022, and both papers keep author archives that carry the rest.

Benjamin Thiers built the commentary into a Dunod handbook in April 2021

La Boîte à Outils du SEO, Référencement naturel, Benjamin Thiers, Dunod, collection BàO, 7 April 2021, ISBN 9782100818204. Fifty-six tools across seven sections, and a proper French reference handbook rather than a trade paperback.

The cover carries Benjamin’s name and Dunod’s own page carries his alone, so let me be exact about mine: his site describes me as the digital marketing consultant and SEO expert whose commentary runs through the work. That’s his account of my role, on his site, and it’s the right level to claim it at.

The record opens in French in March 2017 and it’s still running in French in April 2021, which pleases me more than it probably should.

Two Henry Stewart journals published the research in 2023 and 2026, both with DOIs

Search marketing in the age of AI: Understanding the marketing implications of search, assistive and answer engines, written with Matt Artz, ran in the Journal of Digital and Social Media Marketing, volume 11, issue 3, 2023, pages 244 to 260, DOI 10.69554/ZVMD6442.

Engineering the AI Résumé: A digital brand intelligence™ framework for algorithmic entity representation in the age of AI assistive engines and agents ran in the Journal of AI, Robotics and Workplace Automation, volume 4, issue 4, 2026, pages 338 to 355, DOI 10.69554/SKXJ7235.

Both are research articles with Henry Stewart Publications. Neither journal publishes a statement of its review process, so I’ll describe them as what they demonstrably are: work that went through an editorial gate at a journal, with a DOI you can resolve, rather than something I posted myself.

Majestic has run the work in five consecutive annual books, and the recordings come with them

Majestic runs an annual SEO title as a book, a podcast and a video series together, sold in print and as an ebook, with named contributors throughout. I’ve been in five of them: 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026.

Precision matters here, because precision is the entire point of this page. My contribution to each is a named section inside a chapter rather than a chapter of my own: the 2022 edition launched on 7 December 2021 and ran twelve chapters across sixty-five named contributors, with my line being to educate Google about your brand, and the 2026 edition has me on the Algorithmic Trinity. So the claim isn’t that I wrote a book. It’s that five separate editorial teams decided I belonged in one, printed my name, and sold the result.

A record on somebody else’s platform is third party proof by definition

Here’s why any of this is worth assembling.

First party frames, second party supports, third party proves, and that ordering is the whole architecture of credibility as far as a machine is concerned. Everything above sits on somebody else’s domain, under somebody else’s editorial control, published because an editor decided it was worth publishing. I can’t author a single line of it into existence, and that is precisely what makes it evidence rather than assertion.

Which is also the uncomfortable part. I don’t get to tell you I’ve been at this since 2017, I get to show you a French article dated 9 March 2017 on a platform I don’t own, and you get to decide what that’s worth.

Ten consecutive years sit in one block below, so nothing has to be worked out

Year	Published by	What
2017	Semrush (FR, then EN)	Review platforms and SEO, 9 March. Semantic HTML5, 1 November.
2018	Semrush, Search Engine Watch	AEO in a headline, 5 February. Brand SERPs and AEO, 7 June.
2019	Author Academy Elite, Search Engine Journal	Marketing Now, 2 December. Budapest, 12 December.
2020	Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land	Knowledge Graph without Wikipedia, 1 April. Understanding, Credibility, Deliverability, 23 October. People Also Ask expansion, 14 December.
2021	Dunod, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, Majestic	La Boîte à Outils du SEO, 7 April. Darwinism, 18 August. Podcast knowledge panels, 26 October. SEO in 2022, 7 December.
2022	Search Engine Land, Majestic	People Also Ask, 1 March. SEO in 2022.
2023	Henry Stewart, Majestic	Journal of Digital and Social Media Marketing 11(3). SEO in 2023.
2024	Majestic	SEO in 2024.
2025	Majestic	SEO in 2025.
2026	Henry Stewart, Majestic	Journal of AI, Robotics and Workplace Automation 4(4). SEO in 2026.

Nothing had assembled this record until today, which is the reason it exists

The pieces were all public and none of them were connected.

Scattered across two Semrush domains, an archived capture, two printed books in two languages, two trade publications, two journals behind two different platforms, and five annual titles, the record was real and unreadable at the same time. Every machine that has ever tried to work out whether I was early to any of this had to do that assembly itself, at the gates, on a budget that allows no assembly at all.

So this page is the assembly. One list, one place, every line dated and linked, nothing that needs working out. What I’m working on now is the forward half of the same story.

Claim what you can prove, link the proof next to the claim, and put the whole thing somewhere a machine can read it in one pass.