Jason Barnard at SEMrush Live Prague 2019: Conversations That Redefined SEO as AEO
PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC - May 15-18, 2019 - In the historic and highly connected city of Prague, SEMrush Live 2019 brought together some of the most influential voices in the global search and digital marketing community. Over four intensive days, the event became both a conference and a think tank - and at its center was Jason Barnard, hosting a series of conversations that quietly challenged everything the industry thought it knew about SEO.
Branded with the hashtag #SEOisAEO, these interviews weren’t designed as traditional presentations. They were unscripted, thought-provoking dialogues with industry leaders that explored how search was evolving from keyword ranking to answer engine optimization - a shift that would later become central to Digital Brand Intelligence™ and Jason’s strategic framework at Kalicube.
Rather than focusing on “how to rank a page,” the discussions explored a deeper question:
How do you make a brand understandable, trusted, and chosen - by both humans and machines?
Chris Simmance - Crawl Budget and Speed
In his conversation with Chris Simmance, the focus turned to crawl budget and site speed, two elements often misunderstood or overly simplified in SEO discussions.
The interview opened with a touch of humor (and a lighthearted moment about beards), before diving into one of the most technical yet essential realities in modern SEO: a slow, inefficient site is not just bad for users - it is bad for machines.
Speed is not cosmetic.
It is strategic.
Chris explained how crawl efficiency affects what search engines even see, let alone rank. The discussion highlighted the intersection of technical SEO and brand performance - revealing that a machine can’t trust or recommend what it cannot efficiently access.
This conversation foreshadowed the Deliverability Phase™ of Jason’s later framework: if the content cannot be delivered properly, it cannot be recommended.
Anton Shulke - Using Webinars for Influencer Marketing
With Anton Shulke, the conversation shifted to webinars and influencer marketing as powerful, scalable brand-building tools.
More than lead-generation tactics, webinars were framed as authority engines - digital stages where expertise becomes visible, shareable, and replayable.
Anton and Jason examined how influencers perform a unique function in the algorithmic ecosystem: they are not just promoters, but signal amplifiers. Their participation lends meaning, structure, and perceived trust to a brand.
This dialogue planted seeds for what would later evolve into Credibility in The Kalicube Process™: a brand is not validated by volume - it is validated by who stands behind it.
Ross Tavendale - Brand is the Only Ranking Factor
Perhaps the most philosophically bold conversation was with Ross Tavendale, who declared, with both confidence and clarity:
“Brand is the only ranking factor.”
What began as a playful exchange involving Scottish accents evolved into a powerful statement about the future of search.
Ross and Jason explored the idea that keywords, links, and technical optimization are tactics - but brand is the strategy. A recognized, trusted, and coherent brand cuts through complexity in ways that no isolated ranking factor can.
This conversation directly aligned with what Jason would later articulate: that search engines are not ranking pages - they are selecting entities they understand and trust.
Brand is not just part of SEO.
Brand is the foundation of AEO.
Stewart Rogers - Image Search vs Voice Search
The discussion with Stewart Rogers examined emerging interfaces - image search and voice search - and what they reveal about how humans and machines interpret the world differently.
As Stewart jokingly “stole” Jason’s job as host, the conversation turned to something serious: search is no longer text-based alone. It is becoming multimodal - simultaneously visual, verbal, and contextual.
Images and voice are not alternatives to search.
They are new languages of discovery.
This episode demonstrated how brands must now present themselves consistently across multiple sensory channels in order to be understood by AI systems and digital assistants.
Eugene Levin - Amazon as a Marketing Channel
Closing the Prague series, Eugene Levin explored the growing power of Amazon as a marketing and discovery platform.
Rather than positioning Amazon as competition to search engines, Eugene reframed it as a complementary ecosystem: a place where transactional intent and algorithmic recommendations converge.
The key takeaway?
Visibility is no longer confined to Google.
To build a modern brand, you must exist where the decision happens - whether on a search engine, a marketplace, or an AI-powered platform.
This concept tied directly into Jason’s later emphasis on Deliverability at the decision point - when and where the machine finally presents a brand as “the best answer.”
The Missing Pillar of Algorithmic Trust.
The SEMrush Live Prague event was a crucial turning point for Jason Barnard’s methodology. The original framework he had developed centered on Understandability (ensuring algorithms comprehend a brand’s factual identity) and Credibility (proving its expertise and trustworthiness). However, the collective insights from Prague, particularly the discussions around a holistic Whole Page Algorithm and how Google manages its display of products and content, demonstrated a missing third pillar: Deliverability.
The conversations proved that even a brand with high Credibility could fail if its message wasn’t properly packaged and delivered for the new search environment. This realization led to the vital third phase of The Kalicube Process:
- Deliverability, ensuring the right content appears in the right format, at the right time.
This experience led Jason to conclude that true Business Success in the AI era is the result of mastering this three-part system: Understandability, Credibility, and Deliverability. This holistic framework moves beyond chasing search tactics, turning the brand into a singular, powerful asset that algorithms trust and, critically, choose to recommend.
