Jason Barnard Explained How Brands Can Earn Their Place in Google’s Knowledge Graph at SEO Camp Lorraine 2018

12 October 2018 - Laxou, France Jason Barnard, CEO and founder of Kalicube, delivered a key presentation at SEO Camp Day Lorraine, one of the regional conferences organized by SEO CAMP, the leading French-speaking SEO association. The event was hosted at Crédit Agricole de Lorraine, 8 Avenue de la Résistance in Laxou, bringing together practitioners, consultants, and digital professionals from across the region.

Jason Barnard’s presentation focused on a topic that was still emerging in mainstream SEO discussions at the time: how Google’s Knowledge Graph works, and what a brand must do to earn its place inside it.

Jason Barnard defined the Knowledge Graph as the foundation of Google’s understanding of brands

In his talk, titled:
“Le Graphe de connaissance : qu’est-ce que c’est, comment ça fonctionne, comment gagner sa place.” (“The Knowledge Graph: what it is, how it works, how to earn your place”)

Jason Barnard explained that Google no longer relies solely on pages and keywords. Instead, it builds and maintains a network of entities - people, companies, products, concepts - and the relationships that connect them.

He highlighted several key ideas that would later become central to Kalicube’s work:

• A brand must be recognized as a distinct entity before it can be reliably ranked, recommended, or understood.
• The Knowledge Graph is built from clear, consistent, corroborated information across the entire digital ecosystem.
• Inconsistencies in names, descriptions, or online references reduce Google’s confidence and can prevent an entity from being included.
• “Earning your place” is not about tricks or technical loopholes - it is about supplying Google with structured, stable, machine-readable identity information.

This emphasis on digital clarity and semantic consistency foreshadowed the strategic principles that now define The Kalicube Process™.

This 2018 talk marked a clear step in the evolution of Kalicube’s methodology

While the terminology used in 2018 was different, the concepts Jason Barnard outlined in Lorraine have since become foundational to Kalicube’s holistic approach to brand-driven digital visibility.

His explanation of:

• semantic identity,
• corroboration,
• consistency,
• and Google’s confidence in an entity

directly align with today’s Understandability Phase™ inside The Kalicube Process™.

These are the same principles Kalicube’s Digital Brand Engineers now apply using Kalicube Pro, powered by over 15 billion datapoints and proprietary algorithms designed to train Google and AI systems to understand brands accurately.

Why Jason Barnard’s 2018 Knowledge Graph presentation is especially relevant today

What was forward-thinking in 2018 is standard reality today.
Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI engines rely heavily on entity-based understanding to generate answers, recommendations, and summaries.

If a brand is not clearly defined, consistently corroborated, and structurally understandable, AI systems will:

• misinterpret it
• overlook it
• or replace it with a competitor that is easier to understand

Jason Barnard’s session at SEO Camp Lorraine highlighted this shift long before most marketers recognized its implications. For brands operating in 2025, his 2018 insights are no longer theoretical - they are essential.