67: Digital Brand Survival: Protecting Your Search & AI Presence During Corporate Rebrands

Published by: Marketing, Demystified The Podcast. Host: Jennifer Mancusi Guest: Jason Barnard, Founder and CEO of Kalicube. June 06, 2025.

Listen here: 67: Digital Brand Survival: Protecting Your Search & AI Presence During Corporate Rebrands

Corporate rebrands can devastate your digital presence if not handled properly. Join us with Jason Barnard, the world authority on Digital Brand Intelligence, as he reveals how search engines and AI systems respond to company name changes, domain switches, and identity updates.

Learn the essential strategies to protect your hard-earned search visibility and AI representation during transitions. Whether you’re planning a rebrand or helping clients through one, this episode provides actionable insights to ensure your digital brand survives and thrives through major changes.

How Corporate Rebranding Can Devastate Your Digital Presence in Search and AI

[00:00:00] Narrator: Welcome to Marketing Demystified. The podcast that connects the dots for business leaders to drive revenue through effective marketing strategy. We chat with marketing experts on different topics that will help you ramp up your revenue. We stream live on LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube, and you can listen to us on your favorite podcast platforms. Marketing Demystified The Podcast is presented to you by Growgetter, your partner in your growth marketing and here’s today.

[00:01:15] Jennifer Mancusi: Hello everyone. Are you ready to be inspired, informed, and empowered with actionable tips to transform your marketing game? You’re in the right place. Welcome to Marketing Demystified. I’m your host, Jenn Mancusi, CEO, and co-founder of Growgetter, your growth marketing partner. Today we are exploring how corporate rebranding can devastate your digital presence across Search Engines and AI systems.

All of the above. We’re joined by Jason Barnard, the World Authority on Digital Brand Intelligence™, and CEO of Kalicube®, who’s worked with industry giants like Disney, Microsoft, Semrush. The list goes on. Jason helps business leaders and their businesses maintain control over how they’re perceived online, particularly during major transitions. Through Kalicube Pro™, he’s developed strategies to protect digital brand equity when companies undergo those significant changes. As a regular contributor to Forbes and author of The Fundamentals of Brand SERPs for Business, Jason brings invaluable insights on navigating rebranding without sacrificing your hard earned digital presence.

Very excited to have this conversation today. Welcome to the show, Jason. 

[00:02:24] Jason Barnard: Thank you so much, Jenn. That was a delightful introduction. 

Why Most Rebrands Fail Online and How Meta Got It Right

[00:02:27] Jennifer Mancusi: Well, you have a lot of experience in this area and expertise and I don’t even know if I scratched the surface, so I’m excited to have this chat today with you.

[00:02:40] Jason Barnard: Yep. Thank you. We’ve done so many things at Kalicube®. I’ve done so much in my career over 27 years in SEO, digital marketing online. Rebranding is part of it and a small part of it, and yet it’s super important and so many companies get it wrong. 

[00:02:57] Jennifer Mancusi: Yeah, it’s so true. We’ve seen it go wrong time and time again. Maybe that’s a good place to start. In your experience, what are some of the most common ways that you’ve seen a rebrand really damage a company’s Search and AI presence? 

[00:03:14] Jason Barnard: The biggest issue is that companies will find somebody to give them help and support in changing the brand name, but they really think about offline.

So they’ll change the posters, the advertising, the flyers, the cards, the name on the door, and they fail to think about digital until the very last moment. And the very last moment is too late. So the biggest issue is not giving themselves the preparation time to change their digital footprint from the first name, the original name to the new name.

And an example of a company that did it incredibly well is Facebook. When they switched to Meta, you could see. I mean, I was watching it on the day they switched. How much they had prepared, how much was ready, and how much it was just a question of flipping a switch to get the new name out there. Google results switched in a few hours, which was astonishing.

Really, really well done. 

How Much Time You Need to Prepare for a Seamless Rebrand Online

[00:04:16] Jennifer Mancusi: Yeah. That’s so interesting. I can totally see that as being an afterthought, right? You see a lot of like, hey, we’re going to launch a new website that goes live on Monday. Can you check some like SEO for us? Or whatever, right? Like that’s the conversation. And so you’re saying that’s the biggest issue, people aren’t giving enough time to prepare for that. How much time do you need and what do you need to be doing in that time to be like meta and make sure that’s a seamless transition from one brand name to another? 

[00:04:48] Jason Barnard: Well, for a company like Meta, I would imagine with the resources they’ve got, they might have been able to do it in six months, but I would say a year to be safe.

For a smaller company, you can probably do it in three months. And what we do at Kalicube® is to track the original name three months before, work through the three months preparing all the work of all the things we need to go and change on the company’s website, on their social media channels, on all of the references to them online from third party references, articles about them, videos, everything that needs to be changed so that the day we need to change it, we can change it.

We can give them a task list to change the parts that we can’t change within a couple of days. And we did a rebrand of my podcast and within two days, we’d switched everything to the new name. And all the Google results were reflecting that new name. And that’s very hard to do. Meta did it in the afternoon.

Kalicube® managed to do it in about a day and a half when everything changed. If you prepare and you’ve got a big digital footprint, you can expect it to take a week, possibly two. If you don’t prepare and you try to do it last minute or as an afterthought, it’s going to take you months and it’s going to kill your brand equity.

[00:06:06] Jennifer Mancusi: Yeah. I mean that really checks out with a lot of what I’ve seen, maybe on the flip side of where it’s gone wrong that it takes at least three months to recover. And that’s if you really work fast to fix all the issues that have maybe been created and sometimes it’s not even a change in the brand name, although that definitely is the biggest issue. But even just a domain name change, even if the company stays the same, but moving your website or launching a new website even on the same domain without the right considerations about the setup of that site can create a lot of problems.

And I’ve seen web traffic tanks and take three to six months to recover. 

[00:06:56] Jason Barnard: Well, there’s also the question of repositioning the brand. If you reframe how you are describing the brand, that’s a rebrand of sorts, and it needs the same work as if you were changing the name. Changing a logo, not as important that it changes everywhere all at once.

But I would suggest that if you’re going to do it, do it properly. All of these require multiple weeks or three months to prepare so that you can do it and you can turn on a six months, as we say in the U.K. because the damage you’re going to do if you don’t do it all at once in terms of Search and AI, at least, is to confuse the algorithms of Google, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Perplexity, and they won’t be able to represent you.

And what they then do is lose confidence in the information they have about you. And they will drop you from a lot of Search Results, from a lot of conversations the AI is having, like ChatGPT, they’re having a conversation with users because they have a doubt they will drop you because they want to be right. Their sole aim is to help the user find the best solution and if they have any kind of doubt, they drop you. 

So it’s incredibly important, whether it’s a logo change, a brand name change, a pivot in terms of how you’re presenting yourself to do it all in one go as fast as you possibly can and as fast as you possibly can within a day.

And that takes preparation. 

How AI Assistive Engines Are Shaping Buyer Journeys and the Perfect Click

[00:08:19] Jennifer Mancusi: It’s not really the topic of this show today, this episode, but I do want to like maybe take a little trip down a side rabbit hole to talk a little bit about Search and AI and sort of these new Search Engines, these ChatGPT, Perplexity, and DeepSeek that we’re talking about, like they’re having such a rapid impact on how we think about SEO and Search as a whole. What are some of the biggest opportunities and maybe threats that you’re seeing in the market that if people aren’t paying attention to are going to miss out on a lot of search traffic and behavior and activity.

[00:09:02] Jason Barnard: Right. Which is a great question. Number one, I would start talking about research. When I talk about these machines, we’re researching on these machines. So Google Search is all about me having an idea of what I want, searching, clicking on a link, going to a webpage, reading, going to another webpage, reading, and then I move myself down the funnel.

Whereas with ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and DeepSeek, I can have a conversation with the machine and I trust the machine to help me make a decision. So it’s a recommendation engine. It’s a research engine, and I like to talk about influencers. You can talk about the biggest influencer you can think of on TikTok, on YouTube, let’s say 200 million followers.

These machines are having trillions of niche conversations with billions of people who trust them every single day. So you want to be recommended by these, the biggest influencers in the world by far. 

And I got a good story from yesterday which is about the funnel. Fabrice Canel, who’s the principal program manager at Bing who builds Bingbot explained to me that Copilot is designed to bring people down the funnel to what they call the perfect click.

So you start with awareness, move down to consideration, then move down to decision. And the decision is where they tell you where you should click to go through and buy. So they’re sending less traffic to websites, but the traffic they’re sending is hugely more valuable. And as an example, ChatGPT conversion rates for one of our clients went from 0.03% on Google to 3% on ChatGPT, because they were getting the perfect click or almost perfect click, or relatively more perfect.

And my example from yesterday was I’m a double bass player and I have a huge bass amplifier in my living room. I was wondering if I could play a guitar through it. I asked ChatGPT, will I break my bass amplifier if I play a guitar through it? And it said, no, absolutely not. So that reassured me and it took me 20 seconds.

Which is much faster than me visiting a website, watching lots of YouTube videos or reading an article saying a bass amplifier is an amplifier that you play the bass through, blah, blah, blah. These pillar articles people have been writing, which are very, very annoying. It gave me the answer straight away.

Then I said, well, okay and it said the sound will be too bassy for a guitar. And I said, what’s the solution to that problem? And it said, get some pedals, some effects pedals. I said, what affects pedals? It said, compressor, gain, reverb and equalizer. And I thought, that’s too much money.

Give me the two pedals I need to correct the sound of a guitar through a bass amp. It told me that I needed an equalizer and a reverb. Then I said, which ones do you recommend? It recommended me reverb and an equalizer, total cost of $200. I said, oh, that’s too much. Give me cheaper options that are just as good or almost as good.

It gave me two cheaper options. I then clicked on the link. I said, oh, no, no. I said, who can sell them to me? Where should I buy them? Said, if you’re in Europe, buy from Toman. If you’re in America, buy from Sweetwater. I went to Toman. Bought the products. They’re arriving tomorrow. Job done. It took me 15 minutes.

[00:12:19] Jennifer Mancusi: That’s incredible. What you’re describing is the difference between a search engine and a research engine, and how each one guides you through a process or down a funnel. Many people are saying that they don’t see a lot of traffic from certain sources.

But the way you’re describing, that’s like so intentional. You don’t need a lot. You just need the right traffic. And you think about Google Search being this wide net and you don’t know if it’s your ideal customer. People can stumble upon you for a lot of reasons that are not necessarily the right ones. So it really is kind of narrowing your audience into exactly the right person who is in the market to buy what you have to sell at that moment. 

[00:13:13] Jason Barnard: And what Fabrice Canel calls the perfect click. I’ve actually written an article about that on Search Engine Land. So go and read that and it explains the concept and how it works much in the way I’ve just done.

But what’s interesting there is that Toman will never know that I came from ChatGPT because it didn’t give me the link. 

It gave me toman as the supplier, and I already have toman in my bookmark, so I came from the bookmark. 

The purchase decision was made on ChatGPT but it will not be attributed to ChatGPT, which is a pity.

[00:13:43] Jennifer Mancusi: Yeah, that’s so interesting. So it’s like this still sort of amorphous thing that is difficult to influence. It’s difficult to measure. What are we doing to make sure that we’re showing up in that way that I’m getting that recommendation that I’m getting that last perfect click.

It’s maybe a mystery to a lot of marketers out there and content folks. 

[00:14:12] Jason Barnard: A hundred percent. And I think that’s part of the secret. We’ve got a thing called The Kalicube Process™, and it’s all about Understandability, Credibility, and Deliverability. Do the machines understand who you are, what you do, who you serve?

Do they believe you to be a credible solution for their users? And do they have the content from you that allows them to deliver you to the subset of their users who are your audience. So in the case of Toman here, they understood who Toman was. They understood that Toman can serve me. They understood that Toman is a good supplier, a credible supplier that they can rely on to deliver the products to my door in a great manner and cheaply.

So they trusted Toman with my custom, so they influenced, recommended. They influenced me recommending Toman. The point there is how does that happen? And it’s because Toman are walking the walk across their entire digital footprint. So Toman, generally speaking, is standing where I’m looking with the right offer at the right time, in the right place across the entire internet.

So I see them on YouTube. I see them on social media. I see articles about them. I see reviews about them and buy them. So what, as a consumer, somebody who wants to buy musical instruments, I see them often and I already know who they are. I already have an element of trust, and when ChatGPT says to me, here’s the product, here’s the price, Toman is a recommended supplier. The brand name Toman, the fact that I’ve been engaging with them passively over a long period of time. And the fact that ChatGPT has just reinforced my own thoughts about Toman and recommended them explicitly to me meant that I went to Toman.

So that’s the solution. It’s to build a digital marketing strategy where you’re standing, where your audience, human audience is looking with the right offer at the right time, in the right place. Demonstrate your credibility, demonstrate that you are a great solution and provide them with the right content that educates the audience.

Make sure all of that is packaged for the machines so the machines can digest and understand it. At which point the machines will simply replicate what they’re seeing in the real world. The Kalicube® process is as simple as that. 

[00:16:31] Jennifer Mancusi: Yeah. That, I love that. That’s, you know, simple, not easy, right? 

[00:16:38] Jason Barnard: A hundred percent.

Well, we’ve got a database of 3 billion data points collected from Google and AI over 10 years. And that allows us to go in and not guess at where you need to be standing. Not guess at what you need to be saying to be credible. Not guess at which content you need to create where we can tell you exactly where you need to be doing it, because

Google and AI, the data we’ve collected tell us what they expect to see. 

And so we use them as a way to understand what the world should look like for you in terms of serving your human audience. So it’s using the machines to understand what your human audience expects, do what your human audience expects, and then the machines will replicate it.

It’s super simple. Once again, not easy. And we do it every day at Kalicube®. 

[00:17:27] Jennifer Mancusi: Amazing. Amazing. 

The Hidden Risks of Brand Name and Domain Switches in Search and AI

[00:17:29] Jason Barnard: We’re talking about rebranding. 

[00:17:31] Jennifer Mancusi: I know. Well, let’s get back to rebrand. That was a very, I think, useful rabbit hole. So thanks for coming with me down that road. 

[00:17:39] Jason Barnard: It’s a pleasure. I love that particular rabbit hole. 

[00:17:43] Jennifer Mancusi: In thinking then about sort of Search Engines and AI systems together, how are they typically responding to a corporate name change? A domain switch? Maybe if you’re not thinking about it intentionally, what are they doing? And how is that impacting if you’re not sort of prepared?

[00:18:05] Jason Barnard: Well, a domain switch is super dangerous. You can lose everything if you do it badly. And I think one thing that a lot of people focus on that isn’t the right thing is their own website primarily, and not look at what pages are being crawled. So my first piece of advice is you look in your logs to see which pages are being crawled, look in Google Search Console to see which pages are in the index and focus on those because those are the ones that are going to kill your business if you get it wrong. If you get the other ones wrong, it’s not going to kill your business. If you get those wrongs wrong, especially if you’re relying on Google and AI, it can potentially kill your business.

If we’re talking about a name change. Then the mistake that people make is to not consider that the machines have to understand that the old name and the new name need to be synonymous in their mind. So if your client or your prospect, or your bottom of funnel partner searches for the old name or the new name, they get the same result.

And for a machine that takes a little bit of time for them to digest it. You need to be ready to switch across as fast as possible so that within a day everything has changed, as I said before, and within a week, the machines will all understand. And if you get that right, the switch will be almost seamless and both brand names will bring up the same result.

And both clients who have understood the name change and those who don’t yet know about it will still see the same resulting will be comfortable and you won’t lose the business that you would otherwise lose. If you get it wrong and you change half of the name or change the name in half of the places and don’t change it in the other half, or you change it in the places that aren’t important to the machines, the machines aren’t really paying attention to for understanding, for knowledge, and you fail to change in the important places, then what will happen is the machine will get confused.

Once again, lose confidence. If it loses confidence, it will drop you from all of the Search Results or a lot of the Search Results. And the problem at the bottom of funnel is that people searching your brand will get inconsistent results that don’t make sense to them. They will probably lose confidence too.

So it’s critical to your business to prepare this and to do it right before you actually launch that new name. And in the case of a new website, if you’re doing both, that’s a double risk. And that double risk is something you should really, really, really pay attention to. 

[00:20:40] Jennifer Mancusi: Yeah, no, that’s amazing. Keep going. 

[00:20:43] Jason Barnard: Yeah. I wanted you to come back because I know you’re going to ask me about an example where it all went horribly wrong. 

[00:20:49] Jennifer Mancusi: I exactly want to know an example of how it went horribly wrong. That’s my next question. 

[00:20:55] Jason Barnard: Well, I worked for a company called Mailjet, who were a competitor of MailChimp.

And they’re from France. And their competitor Sendinblue, who I never worked for. I don’t know these people at all, so this is absolutely nothing to do with me. It’s just something I observed when I was working for their competitor. Sendinblue, changed their name to Brevo, B-R-E-V-O, and they switched domain and switched the name. And at Semrush, you look at the traffic from Google, it dropped by a third from one day to the next, it went off a cliff.

That was their main source of new clientele and Mailjet obviously got a huge amount of extra traffic because where Sendinblue or Brevo weren’t anymore in Google because Google lost confidence and dropped ’em like a hot rock. Mailjet could then rank in their place. So they got it very wrong. They lost a third of their traffic.

I looked online and it was very confused. And if I didn’t know that they had changed name to Brevo, I was really confused. I didn’t understand as a user that Brevo was Sendinblue. So all of the equity, the brand equity and the trust that Sendinblue had built was suddenly gone out the window. I was confused about it and I don’t know how long it took them to build back up.

They’re still going, so it obviously didn’t kill the business. But certainly they will have lost millions and millions of dollars from that mistake of changing the name, not thinking it through, not preparing in advance. And the domain switch was actually pretty well done, but just the brand name I would imagine almost killed their business.

[00:22:34] Jennifer Mancusi: Wow. Yeah. It’s so interesting. Maybe from a technical perspective, like the domain switch, right? You’re making sure you don’t have 404 errors and you’re redirecting and you know, this sort of like the checkbox of how to make sure your website is operating properly and you’ve got good scores and all of that, that’s easier to prepare for.

But the actual preparation of making sure the robots understand the connection between the two brands is really what you’re saying is what gets missed. 

[00:23:16] Jason Barnard: And as you say, very rightly. There are scores and there’s a checklist. And I think a lot of SEOs get stuck in if we can measure page speed, let’s focus on that because we can measure it. And I improve results. And 404 errors. Let’s focus on that because I improve it because there are no 404 errors. Does it make a difference to SEO? Very, very little, if any. I mean, Gary Elias from Google said, you know, page speed is a tie breaker, and in the algorithms, tiebreakers almost never happen.

So it’s going to change you one place if ever there’s a tie breaker. But in reality that tie breaker isn’t something that’s going to happen on a regular basis and something like brand name changing across an entire digital footprint. At Kalicube®, we have the Kalicube Pro™ platform that will bring up every single one of the 5,000 references to the brand. And we can say, we’ve gone around and we’ve changed them all. And that took us two months. It’s measurable from the perspective of somebody say, well, you have changed them all. It’s not measurable from the perspective of does it bring any value?

It won’t bring any value until the day somebody that they actually switch. And then the problem is how do you prove to them that if they hadn’t done that, it all would’ve gone horribly wrong. 

[00:24:31] Jennifer Mancusi: Right. Right. 

[00:24:32] Jason Barnard: So there’s a leap of faith going on there that you have to have. But if you value your brand, and you should, it’s your biggest business asset.

If you value your brand, you have to look after it. And if you change your brand name, you’re going to lose all of the brand equity or a lot of the brand equity if you don’t do it properly.

But I think it’s weird or strange in the digital marketing and SEO space, brand is vastly underestimated and in the branding space, SEO and marketing are underestimated and the two need to talk to each other more, I think.

Why Brand Is Now the Cornerstone of SEO and AI Success

[00:25:04] Jennifer Mancusi: Yeah, that’s a really interesting concept. Can we talk more about that? What is it about SEO and AI that is not putting a lot of value on brand and what is it about brand, like vice versa that doesn’t value SEO as much? 

[00:25:23] Jason Barnard: Well, SEO traditionally just talks about keywords and links.

And when you look at it, it’s so simplistic and so idiotic and simply doesn’t make sense. We’re counting the number of words in a page that happen to correspond to what somebody’s search for. And then we’re counting the number of links, which is actually a measure of popularity and not brand equity or importance or authority or notability.

It is popularity. And it’s very difficult to pull the SEO world away from that concept. But now that Google understands a brand as an entity, it doesn’t need the link anymore. So you get invisible links, implicit links. So if somebody mentions Kalicube®, that’s good enough for me. I don’t need a link.

If I get a link, that’s better because it’s more explicit. But the dimension of Kalicube® is already adding value to my brand Kalicube®. As long as Google and AI have understood what Kalicube® is, and it’s up to me to make sure it’s understood. And if you want to know if Google or AI have understood who your brand is, ask AI what is name of company or who is name of person, and see what it answers. A lot of the time it’ll answer, I don’t know, or I don’t have enough information, or it will answer wrong because it’s making it up, it’s hallucinating.

If it doesn’t answer it right, it’s up to you to correct that. If it doesn’t answer at all, it’s up to you to explain, educate the machine, who you are, what you do, and who you serve. And on Google, you simply search the name. And if you have a Knowledge Panel like the one you can see behind me, then it’s understood.

And because all of these machines use the same data source, which is the web, and because they all use basically the same technologies, which is Knowledge Graph, Search Results, and LLM chatbots, they will all learn the same way by crawling your digital footprint and trying to piece all the pieces of the puzzle together, and they look at your website to see what that puzzle should look like.

So it’s up to you to create a very clear and clean representation of your digital footprint on your own website. And then make sure that your entire digital footprint, your ecosystem corroborates what it is you’re saying on your website. That is how you educate these machines. And I’m talking about educating the machines about who you are, what you do, who you serve, why you are a credible solution, and what content of yours can they safely, reliably, and happily deliver to the subset of their users who your audience. So you can look at it like educating a child. The child just wants to understand, the child is there to serve the user, it’s user, and give them the best possible solution to the problem that user is looking to solve.

And if you can educate the child about who you are, what you do, who you serve, why you’re credible, it will recommend you, it will prioritize you, it will be the influencer you want to drive your clients to your door. 

[00:28:18] Jennifer Mancusi: This is so interesting because I feel like there’s maybe in the last like few years there has been a new sort of a new focus, a renewed maybe focus on brand in all other areas of marketing and you know, there was a period of time, I don’t know where 10, 15 years ago where the thing was lead generation, right? It’s all about lead generation and brand was like this soft thing that you could do maybe on the side or whatever. Now it’s like you cannot generate leads without a strong brand. You cannot generate search traffic and authority on the internet without a strong brand and a clear message.

And I just think it’s so interesting how brand is having a moment right now where even with, it used to be this like soft, fluffy thing that you can’t measure. And now it’s the thing that if your things that you can measure are not working, you probably have a brand problem. That is the source of the more quantifiable marketing tactics failing is that there’s something wrong with the brand, the message, the simplicity, the way people understand it. Like how you’re known in the market. Which I just think is so interesting and I love hearing about it from an SEO and an AI perspective because it makes total sense.

[00:29:43] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Brand is everything in SEO and AI. If you search my name, Jason Barnard, J-A-S-O-N-B-A-R-N-A-R-D on Google, you’ll see a wonderful Knowledge Panel that makes me look like a superstar. I’ve amplified my own authority and my own importance to get Google to believe. If you compare me to Richard Branson, I look just as famous as he is, and I’m obviously not.

If you ask any of the AI engines, DeepSeek, Copilot, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Mistral, all of these will all be able to tell you my entire life story 100% accurately because I’ve educated them. Same thing for Kalicube®. And if you ask any of these machines, who is the world’s leading expert in Google Knowledge Panels, and I tried this the other day to write a conference, every single one named me.

[00:30:34] Jennifer Mancusi: Amazing. 

[00:30:35] Jason Barnard: Which is astonishing. 

[00:30:36] Jennifer Mancusi: Yeah. 

[00:30:37] Jason Barnard: And that’s how you can dominate a niche. When somebody goes to any of these machines and says, who is the world expert in Google Knowledge Panels? Who do you recommend I speak to? They all say, I recommend Jason Barnard. And I had a client yesterday. He came on the call.

He said, I know what you do. I know what I want. I need to know the timeline and I need to know the investment I need to put into this. I said, well, how did you find it? And he said, well, everywhere I look, every time I ask you, come up. 

[00:31:05] Jennifer Mancusi: Yeah. 

[00:31:06] Jason Barnard: And he was asking the AI, he was searching on Google and this red shirt comes up all the time.

And he actually said, I was asking the machines, who’s the best? And they all said, you. 

[00:31:16] Jennifer Mancusi: And that is brand. That is your brand and which is so powerful. But there is like a lot of technical work and like you said, you educated the systems, you gave the information it needed to be able to recommend you in that way. So that combination of having a strong brand and then communicating that to the systems that are going to communicate on your behalf is the formula. 

[00:31:44] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And those systems, the Search and AI engines like Google, Bing, ChatGPT, so on so forth, are the interface between me and another human 

And they’re an opportunity for me to be introduced to somebody I would not find any other way. Once again, it’s billions of people having trillions of niche conversations. 

And I want, as you said earlier on, I want them to introduce me to the right people, and that means that I have to be very clear to the machines who I am, what I do, who I serve and that I’m credible. And if I can do that effectively, they send me the people I can truly serve. And I think that’s what we lose sight of, that I don’t lose waste my time on people I can’t help because they don’t come to me through the machines. 

And that’s really important.

I don’t get as many sales calls as some other people I talk to, but I don’t need that many sales calls because we convert so many because the right people are coming to my door. 

Practical Steps to Protect Search Visibility Before, During, and After a Rebrand

[00:32:44] Jennifer Mancusi: Amazing. Yeah. That’s what everybody’s looking for. That’s what everybody’s looking for. 

Amazing. So let’s say somebody out there listening is considering a rebrand or they’re maybe in the middle of one right now.

What are some of the steps that they should be taking to protect their search visibility before, during, after the exercise that they’re going through now? 

[00:33:10] Jason Barnard: If you are rebranding and changing domain, which is very common, then you need to prepare both separately and bring them together at the moment that you actually flip the switch.

So ideally, what you would do would be to prepare the technical aspect of the site migration which means moving all of your pages from one domain to another. Theoretically, if you don’t change the structure of the website, which is I, what I strongly would advise is do not change the structure of the website.

Then you just simply redirect every single page to the equivalent on the new domain. That’s really easy for you, it’s really easy for your developers, and it’s really easy for the machines to follow and understand. While you are preparing for that domain switch, while you are preparing to launch your new brand name, spend three months preparing a list of every single mention you can find starting with these social media profiles, which are the most obvious. Also obviously your website. The social media profiles, but also videos, mentions, articles, contact the journalists, ask them to change the brand name. Start beforehand so that some of it may well already be in place, but you’ll be unsurprised by how slow journalists are and website owners are, because there’s nothing in it for them to actually spend the time to go in and change your name in an article. Ideally they would change it from like with Twitter and X is keep the old name in brackets, previously, name of company.

That’s hugely helpful to the algorithms and that was done very, very well by Twitter. And then when you’re ready to flip the switch, get ready to spend a full day or two days going around every single platform changing at the time it changes on the website. If you can do that, then the machines will follow and within a week everything will be in place and you won’t see that dip in traffic that you would expect to see at the moment of a site migration and a brand name change. As a rule of thumb. You have about a week. If you’re later than that week for the majority of the changes of your brand name across your entire digital ecosystem, then you’re going to hit trouble. 

So plan to do it in a week at the most, which means planning beforehand, two to three months.

That’s what we do at Kalicube® with our clients. 

[00:35:35] Jennifer Mancusi: Sure. And that having that inventory to be able to check it off yes. Done, done, done is so important. And so let’s say like your past, that week, somebody’s listening, they did their rebrand a month ago, and they’re going, uh oh, I didn’t do any of this work.

Is there such thing as too late? Or is it like, Hey, get on it now. Now’s the time. 

[00:35:56] Jason Barnard: Well, I mean, there’s no such thing as too late to recover. 

I was speaking to somebody the other day who was talking about recovery SEO, and basically saying that when clients leave them and realize that when you’re not doing SEO for a long period of time, it will suddenly go down the toilet and then they come back and they have a recovery service.

We can do the same thing at Kalicube® with brand name changes. You would have to expect it to take longer for it to actually have an effect in the engines. For us, it takes the same amount of time. We can actually get the list, get that ready for you, sort that out in the first month, and then keep working to rebuild the brand equity that you’ve lost over the next two months.

And after three months, you are going to be back in a solid position in terms of a digital ecosystem and the way you communicating with the machines, and that’s key is we change the way you communicate with these machines. But it will take about six months for the machines to react and to come back to you with what you had before.

[00:36:55] Jennifer Mancusi: Yeah. Yeah. I mean that checks out. I feel like that’s exactly what I’ve seen. Again, not just with a rebrand, but with any kind of major digital change that’s happening. That if it’s done with an inventory of things to do after the new site is live or after the new name is announced, then you know, sometimes that’s too late. And that dip that you see, you see it dip again for another month and another month, then maybe it starts to recover. But that’s a lot of time lost. 

[00:37:33] Jason Barnard: You need to be realistic about the time it takes machines to react. So Google, for indexing will take a week or two. 

For knowledge and its Knowledge Graph will take about three months and AI will take anything from three months to six months. It’s getting faster depending on the platform you are using and it’s going to get faster and it’s going to become more like Google.

But you need to think about those time lags between what you’ve done and what you’ve changed and the actual reaction of the Search Results, the Knowledge Panel and the AI results. 

And one thing I did say, just now that I’d like to reiterate is what we do at Kalicube® is change the way you communicate with the bots and the algorithms.

And that’s essential. Because we’re communicating with them. We’re trying to educate them although we don’t realize that’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to communicate who we are, what we do, and who we serve, and that we’re credible and what content we have that’s valuable. And the secret source that Kalicube® has is we communicate with the machines in a way that makes sense to them and makes sense to you.

And it’s not geeky. That’s the beauty of it. 

[00:38:46] Jennifer Mancusi: Yeah. Now, based on the conversation that we’ve had today, I think I might know the answer to this, but I’m going to ask it anyways. Should people be thinking about approaching rebranding differently with AI being the first point of contact? Or are you thinking about the machines and the algorithms, as Search, AI, you’re feeding it your story, you’re feeding it the right, what you said, the understanding, the credibility, like it doesn’t matter.

Search or AI, Google or ChatGPT, you just have to give it the right information. Are we thinking about AI differently or are we just thinking about it more? 

[00:39:31] Jason Barnard: Most people are trying to think about it differently because they think it’s different, and actually fundamentally it isn’t. As I said earlier on, we’re looking at Understandability, Credibility, Deliverability because all of these machines have the same aim, which is to provide the best possible solution to their users when the user comes to them with a problem. How they interact with the user in terms of conversation on ChatGPT or search on Google doesn’t actually matter. They’re still trying to solve that problem. How do I provide the user with the best solution to their problem or the answer to their question?

And they all use the same underlying technologies, which is Search Results, Knowledge Graph, LLM chatbot in differing blends, let’s say, and I’ve got an article coming out on Search Engine Land soon about that. And those three technologies, Search Engine, Knowledge Graph, LLM chatbot, all use the same sort data source, which is the web.

What can you do with the web? You can control your digital footprint, your digital ecosystem. You can make sure that you’re communicating consistently and making sure that these machines understand who you are. And it’s up to you to educate them. It’s up to you to figure out how to communicate with them the way they need to be communicated.

It’s their game. They make the rules. You need to communicate with them the way they want to be communicated with. The more you help them, the more they will reward you. Help them digest your content. Help them understand who you are, what you do, and who you serve, and why you’re credible.

Help them to understand which content of yours is valuable to the subset of their users who are your audience, and they will reward you as the biggest influencers in the world. 

[00:41:15] Jennifer Mancusi: Amazing. That is so helpful. And this conversation has been so enlightening for me. Really interesting stuff. And I think, everybody can really learn something from this and maybe not even limited to rebrand, right?

But just how to talk to these machines. It’s so important. And so anyways, I just really appreciate you coming on and sharing your expertise. Thank you. 

[00:41:40] Jason Barnard: Yes. Thank you, Jenn. They were great questions. I enjoyed it. It went a bit off rebranding but I think all of it’s good and all of it’s useful.

[00:41:49] Jennifer Mancusi: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoy today’s episode, please subscribe to Marketing Demystified wherever you get your podcasts. And join us next time for more conversations that help demystify the…