Is SEO Dead in the Age of AI? Jason Barnard on the Future of Digital Visibility
Published by: Rise25 | Better Than the Best B2B Podcast Agency. Host: John Corcoran. Guest: Jason Barnard, Founder and CEO of Kalicube®. September 8, 2025
Listen here: Is SEO Dead in the Age of AI? Jason Barnard on the Future of Digital Visibility
Jason Barnard is the CEO and Founder of Kalicube®, a digital brand consultancy operating in France and the US. Kalicube helps business leaders, entrepreneurs, and decision-makers understand how search engines and AI platforms interpret and display online information. With over 20 years of experience in digital marketing, Jason is a serial entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and best-selling author.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [0:00] Intro
- [3:22] Why Jason Barnard’s past as a Blue Dog cartoon character hurt his SEO credibility
- [6:51] Steps Jason took to reframe his online reputation and regain trust
- [10:18] How AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity are reshaping online search behavior
- [14:29] Why traditional keyword-targeted SEO is becoming obsolete
- [20:22] The concept of the “perfect click”
- [23:00] Why mentions and citations matter more than backlinks in today’s SEO
- [29:10] Understanding technical SEO: how to reduce friction for search engine bots
- [33:36] Why anchor text and context are critical in guiding bots through your site
- [43:13] How to use AI as a co-creator without sacrificing originality and authenticity In this episode… AI-generated summaries and chatbot answers are quickly changing how people search, sparking debate over whether SEO is becoming obsolete. Some business leaders fear the rise of AI will wipe out traditional strategies, while others believe the fundamentals of digital visibility remain unchanged for now. What does this massive shift mean for businesses trying to get found online?
Jason Barnard, a digital brand management expert, believes you can - but only if you adapt. He shares why keyword-first SEO strategies are no longer effective and how to instead focus on expanding human knowledge through content.
Smart Business Revolution Podcast – Is SEO Dead in the Age of AI? Jason Barnard on the Future of Digital Visibility
Episode Introduction and Guest Background
[00:00:00] John Corcoran: Alright, today we’re talking about is SEO Dead in the age of AI. My guest is Jason Barnard.. He is a longtime expert in SEO and now Generative AI Search Engine Optimization. I’ll tell you more him in a second. So stay tuned.
[00:00:17] Narrator: Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today.
[00:00:28] Narrator: Now let’s get started with the show.
[00:00:33] John Corcoran: Alright. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of the show and you know, if you’ve listened before that every week. We have smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies. We’ve had Kinkos and YPO, EO Activation, Blizzard, Gusto, GrubHub, Netflix, you name it. Check out the archives.
[00:00:49] John Corcoran: Lots of great episodes for you to check out. And this episode of course, is brought to you by RISE 25. At Rise 25 we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do [00:01:00] that? We do that by helping you to run your podcast and content marketing, or the easy button for any company to launch and run a podcast.
[00:01:07] John Corcoran: We do three things, strategy, accountability, and full execution. And we even invented what some we’re calling the Wix of B2B podcasting. It’s our platform podcast Copilot. So if you wanna learn more about what we do, you can go to our website, rise 20 five.com, or email us at support at Rise 25 dot com.
[00:01:24] John Corcoran: Alright, my guest here today is Jason Barnard.. He’s a serial entrepreneur, bestselling author. He’s a keynote speaker. He’s an innovator. He’s the CEO and founder of Kalicube, which is a digital branding consultancy. It operates out of France and the US, and helps business leaders and entrepreneurs and decision make.
[00:01:42] John Corcoran: To figure out how search engines and AI platforms work together. And he’s got two decades experience in digital marketing. He’s got a great story about how he got into it, which we’re gonna get into in a moment. But mostly what I was most interested in talking about here today, he. Is AI and the [00:02:00] LLMs LI limited language models are becoming more and more popular, what does that mean for Google?
[00:02:05] John Corcoran: What does that mean for traditional Search Engine Optimization and for the way that people get found on the web? There’s lots of people that are saying the sky is falling. There’s other people who are saying that the sky isn’t falling, or rather. It’s not falling yet. It might follow, it might fall at some point in the future.
[00:02:20] John Corcoran: And so we’re trying to get to the bottom of that question. So Jason, really excited to have you here today. And I was reading this story that you wrote a couple of weeks ago about this Blue Dog cartoon character that you developed. And it was a story about how this was kind of your presence, your identity online.
[00:02:37] John Corcoran: You sold, you developed this company, you got a billion views online, that’s on level with like Disney and PBS and all this kinda stuff. Just got a ton of presence and rightly so. I would’ve thought, this is amazing what I created. And you would think that people would appreciate that.
[00:02:52] John Corcoran: But when you sold the company and you went out and did, started to do digital marketing and started to do SEO, what you found is that [00:03:00] that was kind of the old you, which was weighing you down. So I’d love to hear the story. Of first of all what the company was, the blue dog Boowa. And then we’ll get into how it weighed you down when you’re trying to redefine how the world saw you online.
The Blue Dog Problem: Misrepresentation and Its Cost
[00:03:16] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Thank you, John. In fact, there was a double whammy and there is a thing that says get caught out once fair, get caught out twice. Yeah. Okay. Get caught out three times. You’re a fool. I got caught out twice. The first time is the blue dog. And that was as you say the interesting story is I had a company called Up to 10, it was an ed tech platform.
[00:03:42] Jason Barnard: We had a billion page views in 2007. We were competing with the BBC, with PBS, with Disney. And although I owned the company and I was the CEO and I was signing deals with ITV International Playhouse Disney. I was also the [00:04:00] voice of the blue dog in the cartoon, and that’s what I was known for and I loved it.
[00:04:06] Jason Barnard: I thought that was cool, but then when I pivoted, of course Google just kept saying, Jason Barnard has a cartoon blue dog. So potential clients would see that and say, well, actually, he isn’t authoritative. I can’t trust him with my business.
[00:04:23] John Corcoran: Yeah, it’s just crazy because you built this thing that got a billion eyeballs.
[00:04:28] John Corcoran: I mean, that is like top 0.1% of all the people out. You have so much more credibility, I would’ve thought. You know, you have so much more credibility than anyone else out there who hasn’t built something that got a billion eyeballs.
[00:04:44] Jason Barnard: But that was exactly the problem. It didn’t say a billion eyeballs. It said He’s a blue dog.
[00:04:49] John Corcoran: He’s a blue dog. Yeah.
[00:04:51] Jason Barnard: And so what I needed to do was reframe it to say he’s a blue dog, and that blue dog got a billion eyeballs and he [00:05:00] was the guy who made it happen. And that’s quite a long leap for people to make from, I’m seeing somebody who is trying to help my company with their digital marketing.
[00:05:11] Jason Barnard: And the problem that I had was that the conclusion he can get a billion eyeballs wasn’t being presented by Google. Google was saying he’s just a voiceover artist.
[00:05:23] John Corcoran: Yeah. So you came to this realization after you’d had, you were making proposals, you were talking to companies about working with them and then they just wouldn’t hire you.
[00:05:32] John Corcoran: Right.
[00:05:33] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I mean, I think I probably lost about a million dollars in deals. Wow. Over several years before. Number one, I understood exactly what was going on. And number two, the time it took me to sort it out and what was going on is I would go into meetings with real people in real life. I would convince them.
[00:05:53] Jason Barnard: I would say, I can build this up. I can make this happen for you. I can help your business. I can beat. [00:06:00] Google, I can win the Google game for you. I would walk out and they’d be going, yeah, brilliant. We’re on board. And then they would Google my name and it would said, Jason Barnard.. is a voiceover artist.
[00:06:11] Jason Barnard: He’s a cartoon blue dog. And that’s suddenly saying, well, why would I trust this guy who’s obviously this kind of, I dunno. Flaky. Voiceover artist with my business strategy. And the answer is no, I wouldn’t.
[00:06:23] John Corcoran: As opposed to CEO of a ed tech startup that was phenomenally successful, that you’d exited. So you basically figured out you needed to redefine how you were viewed online. So what did, tell me what you went through what you did.
[00:06:39] Jason Barnard: Well, well, and that’s the thing, it’s reframing a story. So I’m not creating anything new. I’m just reframing What happened is that I didn’t focus on the Blue dog.
[00:06:50] Jason Barnard: I focused on the successful entrepreneur, the billion page views that deals with Disney, that deals with ITV studios and the [00:07:00] competition with PBS. And that’s what we do at Kalicube is we say, well, okay, what have you done in your life that makes you valuable to your. Ideal audience today. And how can we frame what you’ve done in your life to bring you advantage in that relationship? And once we frame that, how do we then prove it both to your audience and to the machines? And that’s what I did, is I just reframe my story.
[00:07:28] John Corcoran: How often do you find, when you work with clients or you look at someone’s online presence, do you find that their online presence is not what it should be or another way of putting that it, they haven’t talked about or they haven’t boasted about?
[00:07:43] John Corcoran: They haven’t shared, they haven’t communicated the. The value the credibility, the credibility markers that that should be elevating them and explaining to the world the credibility that they truly have.
[00:07:57] Jason Barnard: Literally every [00:08:00] time. There, there are no exceptions. Whoever you are, the AI, Google, and indeed your audience.
[00:08:07] Jason Barnard: Don’t understand quite how incredibly impressive you are.
[00:08:12] Jason Barnard: You might think that it, you’ve communicated it incredibly well. It isn’t clear online. It isn’t consistent online, and it isn’t consistent over time, and that is where the key lies. Is that number one. I probably don’t frame it right. Number two, I probably don’t communicate it consistently.
[00:08:34] Jason Barnard: Number three is, I don’t really prove it. I say it. I mean, I’ve had clients and they say we are the best flower selling business in France. I say to them, prove it. All our clients say it, but give me a page on the online that shows me that that’s true.
[00:08:59] Jason Barnard: And they [00:09:00] simply couldn’t do it.
[00:09:00] Jason Barnard: Then over three or four years, we built up a strategy. We claim framed improved, and we can talk about that later. And all of a sudden they’re outranking into Flora, small French company, outranking into Flora, bingo. And that is, we are the best. We are the solution to getting flowers to your family member or your friend, or your loved one.
[00:09:27] Jason Barnard: The day we say with the most beautiful bouquet where they’re gonna think you are the best person in the entire universe for sending those flowers, and we can prove it.
SEO In The Age of AI
[00:09:36] John Corcoran: So let’s talk about this in terms of, we’re recording this and you know, we’re going to the second half of 2025. And so we have ChatGPT, we have Perplexity, we have Gemini, we have all these different AI tools that are, some say, changing the game.
[00:09:50] John Corcoran: How much has the game changed?
[00:09:54] Jason Barnard: The game’s kind of been added to. I was talking to Fabrice Canel a couple years [00:10:00] ago and he was saying that Microsoft Copilot, he’s the principal program manager at Bing, and he was saying actually supply creates its own demand, which is an economist, which was my initial degree back in the day when I was young in Liverpool.
[00:10:16] Jason Barnard: Supply creates its own demand is a fundamental aspect of economics. What does that mean?
[00:10:22] John Corcoran: English major here. So you have to dumb it down further.
[00:10:25] Jason Barnard: It means that if you give somebody something new to use, they will use it in addition to what they were already doing.
[00:10:33] John Corcoran: Okay?
[00:10:34] Jason Barnard: So if you say to somebody, here’s a machine, you can have a conversation with it and it will guide you to the solution to your problem.
[00:10:42] Jason Barnard: It will help you write, it will help you code. It will help you. Dunno what else it does. It will help you write your emails. It will summarize your emails. It will make your day-to-day life easier. That’s an additional service that we didn’t have before.
[00:10:58] Jason Barnard: Search doesn’t disappear [00:11:00] because this new service has appeared. What does happen is that people still use search, but they use ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity in addition to.
[00:11:10] John Corcoran: Interesting. Interesting. I don’t know what the days are from this year, but I know that I saw that Google’s traffic in 2024 last year went up by 20% over the previous year.
[00:11:21] John Corcoran: Hmm.
[00:11:23] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And Semrush did, just did a huge study. Where they’re showing that search has gone up alongside use of AI Assistive Engines, as I call them.
[00:11:34] Jason Barnard: I think what is true today is people are new people are being brought into the arena and the people who are already in the arena are suddenly think, well, I can do this and this, oh, and this and this, and this, and this, and this.
[00:11:49] Jason Barnard: And they’re expanding their usage. What will happen is people will gradually get used to the idea that search is pretty clunky. I have to [00:12:00] actively ask a question. Go through the links, figure out which one I wanna look at.
[00:12:04] John Corcoran: Mm-hmm.
[00:12:04] Jason Barnard: And little by little people will start to realize, you can just ask ChatGPT or Google AI mode to summarize. So that
[00:12:13] John Corcoran: Point and that point is one that has been fiercely debated. You know, there’s a story recently CloudFlare came out and said that we need to change the economics of the web because publishers are not gonna get traffic. And for the longest time, Google’s promise has been that we’ll send traffic to these websites.
[00:12:32] John Corcoran: And then websites and publishers and service providers are, you know, fearful that they’re not gonna get people that are coming to their website because they’re inquiring about, about a particular service. What are your thoughts on all of that? How’s that gonna affect publishers and how’s it gonna affect the economics for co people that have websites that have been putting out content for a long time?
[00:12:54] Jason Barnard: What if you’re a pure publisher who is publishing content like USA [00:13:00] today, have famously now just blocked? That’s your business model. You are in trouble. However you look at it, however you manage it, you’re in trouble. If you’re trying to sell something, it doesn’t matter.
[00:13:14] Jason Barnard: Because the point isn’t do I get people coming to my website?
[00:13:17] Jason Barnard: The point is, do I make a sale at the end of the day? So you’ve got kind of two schools of thought now, or school? Two different approach. Yeah. Two very different approaches, I guess. Yeah. But, and I think the publishers are getting a lot of. Press coverage. Because they are the publishers. Sure.
[00:13:34] Jason Barnard: And they write about these topics. Yeah. So yes, there’s a huge problem for them, but no, there isn’t a huge problem for anyone trying to sell something.
[00:13:42] John Corcoran: So if you are a company trying to sell something through your website, then do you continue to create content online in the way that you have before, or do you change your approach?
[00:13:52] Jason Barnard: You change your approach, but the approach that you need to take isn’t so very different to what you had before. [00:14:00] The old SEO strategy was, I look at what’s ranking today for the keywords that I’m interested in, and I will create a piece of content that is better than the one that’s ranking, and I will therefore rank above it.
[00:14:13] Jason Barnard: Yeah, made sense. Yeah. But. Once AI has the information, it doesn’t need it anymore. So there’s no point in doing that. Because you don’t beat anybody because it’s got the information. It isn’t gonna come to your website to look for that information, and it isn’t gonna prioritize you over anybody else because nobody gets attribution for that information.
[00:14:36] Jason Barnard: So that particular strategy is now dead.
[00:14:40] John Corcoran: So the strategy of trying to target a keyword and create content that’s better than what’s out there is dead. So what do people do instead?
[00:14:51] Jason Barnard: You need to expand human knowledge.
[00:14:54] John Corcoran: What does that mean?
[00:14:56] Jason Barnard: It means that if the machines don’t know something, or you [00:15:00] can create clarification or detail about something that they need, they will always come to you.
[00:15:06] Jason Barnard: But if you produce something that is the same thing as everybody else, but slightly better in the way it’s presented, they don’t care.
The Perfect Click: A New Marketing Funnel
[00:15:14] John Corcoran: So like simple things. So like if someone’s searching for, whether it’s in Google or ChatGPT or whatever, if they’re searching for, how do I screw in this light bulb?
[00:15:25] John Corcoran: Yeah, they’re not gonna, they’re no longer gonna go to some niche blog to find that information or to a handyman company’s website, which is written a helpful tutorial on how to screw in a light bulb, because that information is gonna be found very easily, either in an AI summary in Google, or it’s gonna be found in ChatGPT.
[00:15:44] John Corcoran: But if you can write about something new and innovative that isn’t there. Then that’s where you should spend your time.
[00:15:51] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And always remembering that when you create content that’s top or middle of funnel, you’re probably not gonna get the click anyway. So you’re only creating it to educate the [00:16:00] machines.
[00:16:00] Jason Barnard: And I’ll give you an example is I’m a base player, double base player, and I have a huge base amp that’s really cool. And, it makes the best bass sound in the world. I wanted to play guitar and I thought, well, I don’t really want to play. I don’t, sorry. I don’t wanna buy a new guitar amp. So I asked ChatGPT, if I play my guitar through the Bass amp, will I break it?
[00:16:23] Jason Barnard: ChatGPT said, absolutely not, but it will sound really bad.
[00:16:28] Jason Barnard: Okay. Can I solve that as a problem? Yes. If you get some effects pedals, you can solve that problem. Which effects pedals do I need? You need a compressor, an equalizer, and a reverb. Brilliant. Which ones gives me a list? How much will that cost me?
[00:16:45] Jason Barnard: $250. Can you get that for cheaper? Yes. There are lower grade or lower quality pedals that if you’re not a professional musician will be just as good and the total cost is $150. Brilliant. Where do I buy them? If you’re in [00:17:00] the us, buy them at Sweetwater. If you’re in Europe, buy them from Toman.
[00:17:04] Jason Barnard: I’m in Europe. Give me the link to Toman Link. Went through, bought $150 sale to Toman in literally 20 minutes from the moment I said, can I play my guitar through my bass amp without breaking it?
[00:17:17] John Corcoran: So then, so coming back to the idea of writing about new ideas, new concepts, stuff that hasn’t been written out before so how does that relate to that story you just told then?
[00:17:28] Jason Barnard: So the huge problem is that in the old world of traditional SEO, I would’ve researched. All of those topics. Can I play the bass through and amp and you would’ve probably landed on all these different web pages. Yeah.
[00:17:42] Jason Barnard: Right. And somebody would’ve had a YouTube video about it.
[00:17:45] Jason Barnard: I would’ve watched the ad. I would’ve, right. Given the money through the ad. The fact that I watched it, that simply doesn’t happen anymore.
[00:17:52] John Corcoran: So then, is that something where a company should try and write an article about that, or, because you, [00:18:00] the way you described it, all of that came through the LLM that there’s no need for.
[00:18:04] John Corcoran: Yeah. Okay.
[00:18:05] Jason Barnard: So if your career is creating, in this particular case, videos of you playing the guitar through a bass amp, your career is pretty much over. And I’m really sorry.
[00:18:17] John Corcoran: If you’re explaining to someone like kind of stuff that can be explained in an LLM.
[00:18:22] Jason Barnard: Yeah. If you are creating publishing content, I mean anything that’s just news or helpful Yeah or DIY or, and you have nothing to sell at the end of the day. There is a huge, huge problem, and I empathize that’s the way the world is and we’re not gonna change it.
[00:18:42] John Corcoran: But if you have some kind of service that’s gonna help with help, help the customer to get an end result faster, then you may be okay.
[00:18:52] Jason Barnard: Yeah. So taking the example of Sweetwater or Toman, if I create content as a marketer at [00:19:00] Toman or at Sweetwater, that answers that question. Then what happens is as the user has the conversation with the machine, my company is top of algorithmic mind through the funnel.
[00:19:13] John Corcoran: Okay.
[00:19:14] Jason Barnard: Okay. And then when it comes to the perfect click, which is the moment when I clicked on the to and link and went through and bought which Fabrice Canel from Microsoft Bing calls the perfect click.
[00:19:25] Jason Barnard: That’s what they’re doing is bringing the person down to the perfect click. I click, I buy.
[00:19:30] John Corcoran: The perfect click in the idea, in the sense that they’re preconditioned to buy at this point. Yes. Like your website no longer needs to serve as kind of a conversion funnel because the LLM has been a conversion funnel.
[00:19:41] John Corcoran: Like you, you’ve gotten to the point where like, boom, I’m ready to buy. And you click right through and buy it right away. Yeah.
[00:19:47] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And was telling me a couple of years ago, that’s what Copilot does. We’ve built Microsoft Copilot to recreate your funnel in our engine.
[00:19:57] John Corcoran: Maybe even more efficiently than your website [00:20:00] was percent more efficiently.
[00:20:02] John Corcoran: I mean, it took 20 minutes. That would be a really interesting solution because. You know, right now the smaller providers or sellers have to compete with like the really big ones. So if like Amazon has a really well converting funnel to sell a widget and you don’t have a great well converting funnel to sell a widget, you’re gonna lose to Amazon.
[00:20:22] John Corcoran: That’s what’s been happening over recent years, so that it’s almost like it could hopefully level the playing field for smaller sellers, smaller providers, smaller businesses.
[00:20:32] Jason Barnard: A hundred percent. Well, the whole thing is you need to recreate your funnel in their brain. And if you can do that and your niche and you have an advantage over Amazon, you need to describe that advantage and convince the machine that advantage is worth it recommending you instead of Amazon.
[00:20:49] John Corcoran: So you do, so you need to create content that is around your expertise, around your focus area. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
[00:20:56] Jason Barnard: And, and the, the problem that you’re always gonna have is [00:21:00] that. Your boss is gonna say, well, nobody’s visit visiting the website. Nobody’s visiting this page. You’re saying, well, the role of the page isn’t to get people to visit, it’s to educate the algorithms.
[00:21:09] Jason Barnard: When I say educate the algorithms I’ve been talking about that for 10 years. Educate them like children, and they will bring your audience to you, but they will only bring the audience today for that perfect click. That’s what you’re aiming for.
The New SEO: Mentions, Credibility, and an “Entity Home”
[00:21:24] John Corcoran: Let’s talk also about, gaining credibility through.
[00:21:29] John Corcoran: External sources, let’s call it awards, associations, accomplishments, stuff like that, and how you communicate that online. So for companies that are out there that want that credibility or want to communicate it for the pieces that they already have, what advice you’re giving right now? I know you are a prolific content creator.
[00:21:47] John Corcoran: You write for a bunch of different sources. Yeah. I was reading your article in Rolling Stone recently. Talk a little bit about what your philosophy is on that right now?
[00:21:57] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Well, I mean, link building was always the [00:22:00] big thing in SEO, and I wouldn’t ever say that links aren’t useful. They are valuable, but mentions and citations are the new currency.
[00:22:11] Jason Barnard: So somebody says to you I’ll talk about you in an article, but I’m not gonna give you a link.
[00:22:17] John Corcoran: Still so valuable now.
[00:22:20] Jason Barnard: No. Well, I don’t. I don’t care because if Google and the AI can recognize who I am, yeah. When they say Jason Barnard.. and I’m not the Jason Barnard.. who’s a nice hockey player, or a footballer. Or a circus clown, right. Yeah. Then I’m happy.
[00:22:34] John Corcoran: So the aI now is better able to recognize that sort of thing and put it together and connect it and, you know, the recognize that you Yeah. You have this. Okay. Okay. Yeah.
[00:22:42] Jason Barnard: So a mention in a context that allows the LLMs and the Knowledge Graph and the search index to understand who you are that they are indeed talking about you is absolutely valuable.
[00:22:54] Jason Barnard: Yeah. A link is a bonus and you need to look at links as bonuses, because a bonus link is simply [00:23:00] that it becomes more explicit. But LLMs don’t see the links. They don’t care about the links. So it doesn’t matter to ChatGPT and its language model because it has no idea where to got the information from.
[00:23:11] Jason Barnard: Yeah. So it only matters in the web index.
[00:23:13] John Corcoran: So kind of traditional PR matters now? Yes. More in a sense because the LLMs the AIs can read. If you’re just quoted in an article and there’s no hyperlink or anything like that the LLMs that are out there crawling the web will see that. And you’ll get additional credibility from it.
[00:23:32] Jason Barnard: Yeah, so you want to keep going for the PR, but you don’t care about the links. So anybody who’s link building or paying for links don’t pay for links. Pay for mentions.
[00:23:43] Jason Barnard: Be aware that a mention is only valuable if the mention is clearly you and you can carry on with the digital PR. You don’t need to worry about the links.
[00:23:57] Jason Barnard: And what you simply need to do is make sure that your [00:24:00] own website, which we call the Entity Home website, clearly indicates all of the places where you already appear. So, for example, you mentioned Rolling Stone. I’ve been in USA today, Forbes Entrepreneur, Search Engine Land, Semrush. I link out to all of these resources and I say that is indeed me.
[00:24:19] John Corcoran: So on your website, you’re linking, you’re linking out to those places so that they know so that Yeah, the, okay.
[00:24:24] Jason Barnard: Okay. And traditional SEO would tell you don’t link to them because you’re giving away your link juice. Link juice, doesn’t matter. What does matter is that it’s very clear that is indeed me.
[00:24:33] Jason Barnard: So the LLM, the search engine will have looked at Rolling Stone. That will have said, that’s probably Jason the Jason that we’re looking at now, as opposed to another Jason or. If I then link from my website out to Rolling Stone out to USA today, out to Forbes, out to Search Engine Land, I confirm that it’s me and that I am standing by that content as a representation of me.[00:25:00]
[00:25:00] John Corcoran: And do you do this like on an about page on your website, or do you build a separate page on your website? How do you do it functionally?
[00:25:07] Jason Barnard: You would want to build. The about page is all about same as, so it would be your profile pages, social media, Wikipedia, IMDB, Crunchbase. Then you would want an articles about page, where you link out to articles where people write about you, articles by me.
[00:25:23] Jason Barnard: Link out to the places where you’ve written articles yourself pages that mention me, webinars I’ve been in, podcasts I’ve been in, so on and so forth. So you build out your website with dedicated pages. Each of which deals with a specific type of online presence.
[00:25:41] John Corcoran: So not just one generic one, but specific, like each of those webinars, podcasts, stuff like that.
[00:25:47] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Okay. We used to, five years ago, put it all on one page. Because the machines weren’t able to understand the context of an entire website. Now they are. And also you’ll find that when you start pushing [00:26:00] out the PR, you end up with 500 links on a page. And that’s too many.
[00:26:04] John Corcoran: I wanna ask you about, I’m bouncing around a little bit here, so I apologize about that, but I want to ask you about technical SEO.
[00:26:10] John Corcoran: Yes. And try and keep it high level because I know this is your expertise. You’ve been working on this for 20 plus years. You know it extremely well. I’m new to it. And, I didn’t understand that there was kind of this black magic behind the scenes. There was this technical SEO that we were absolutely failing at, horrible at it.
[00:26:29] John Corcoran: We got so many things wrong and we’ve improved it dramatically. For our website, we went from a three. A HFS Health score out of a hundred, which is awful to a 96 in not that long a period of time just by improving it, and it’s still early. So we’ll see what a, what kind of impact that has, but I’m happy about it.
[00:26:49] John Corcoran: So talk a little bit about technical SEO today and you know, what people are getting wrong and what they could do in order to fix their technical SEO or first to check and see how they’re doing in [00:27:00] terms of technical SEO.
[00:27:02] Jason Barnard: One of the things that strikes me is what we’ve just talked about is very difficult to measure.
[00:27:08] Jason Barnard: Technical SEO is really easy to measure, which is why a lot of SEOs focus on it so much. Yeah. You could show specific, you could show results very easily. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you’ve said we went from three to 96. I’m super happy and I, as of yet, have no results. Yeah. Yeah. And yet you’re super happy.
[00:27:27] Jason Barnard: Yeah. ’cause I can give you a score. I can say your site is faster, I can say it’s easier to crawl. Yeah. So be very wary of that kind of approach where that’s the only focus.
[00:27:40] Jason Barnard: It needs to be done, but it isn’t the be all and end all. It isn’t enough.
[00:27:44] John Corcoran: Yeah.
[00:27:46] Jason Barnard: But, if we come back to that, as a, a leader, a business leader, you need to think about it.
[00:27:52] Jason Barnard: Rather than site speed and the score of the crawlability and the internal [00:28:00] linking index score, whatever the tool calls it, you need to fundamentally reduce friction for the bot to an absolute minimum.
[00:28:09] John Corcoran: And just to take a step backwards on this, ’cause this is a concept that I didn’t understand until recently, but there are these bots that Google and the LLMs have that are like, they’re bots that go out and crawl the web and they look at your website, they look at everyone else’s websites and they need to understand it.
[00:28:29] John Corcoran: And a lot of times they don’t understand it because you’ve organized the information in a bad way. Maybe you could explain that idea a little bit.
[00:28:38] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I suppose, I mean, kind of when we say bots, I just think, oh, it’s really obvious, but it’s actually just like a machine visiting your website as though it were a human.
[00:28:46] Jason Barnard: So you take a bot, it will visit your website, it will take the content, it will try to understand what is in the content.
[00:28:54] Jason Barnard: And every time there is any kind of barrier or friction, it’s gonna. [00:29:00] Disadvantage you. And so for the same thing for a user, if you’ve got a user coming to your service page, first thing you do is say, well, this is too slow.
[00:29:08] Jason Barnard: The button’s the wrong color. They’re not gonna click on it. The text is wrong if they get through to the next page. I don’t give them the trust elements. Humans, yeah, bots have exactly the same problem. The problem is. Obviously framed very differently because bots have different needs to human beings, but that idea of friction within your website is exactly the same.
[00:29:33] Jason Barnard: So, as a business leader, you’re gonna think, well, for my human audience, I absolutely have to reduce friction to a minimum. And I will see an uptick in conversion rates from 3% to 4% to 5%, whatever it might be. With a bot, you need to do exactly the same thing. But the conversion rate, KPI isn’t gonna be direct
[00:29:51] John Corcoran: And the challenge, frankly, is that a lot of the things you need to do to fix your site for the bots to reduce friction is kind of [00:30:00] invisible to us as business leaders.
[00:30:02] John Corcoran: Yes. Unless we have these tools, unless we use an expert like yourself to look at these different pieces and tell us where there is friction and what to do about it.
[00:30:13] Jason Barnard: Yeah, well there are five points of friction discover, so if there’s a link to your webpage, it will be discovered. The machine will say, okay, there is a webpage over there.
[00:30:25] Jason Barnard: And just to give you an idea of scale, every day Microsoft Bingbo finds 70 billion pages that has never seen before. That’s crazy. Wow. Yeah. So that’s the idea of scale. So when people say, oh, your crawl budget, or Ooh, you know, the bot might never find us. Yeah. Like as long as you’re on the normal web and not the dark web, it’s very likely Microsoft, Bing and Google will find you ChatGPT, Perplexity are a different story because they’ve, they’re so small by comparison. So will they [00:31:00] discover you as long as there is a link into that webpage? Yes. Will they select you is the next question. So they see the page, they see the link, do they follow it?
[00:31:15] Jason Barnard: No. By default they need to be encouraged. So if you have, click here or get free Viagra for the rest of your life. The bot looks at that and it thinks well click here. I’ve got no idea what’s on the other side. It’s not worth the effort. Free Viagra for the rest of my life is obviously spam. I’m not gonna bother following it because it’s a waste of my time. It’s a waste of resources and it’s a waste of money for my boss, which is Microsoft.
[00:31:44] Jason Barnard: So that’s the select stage. So you need to make sure that when it sees a link, it thinks that’s gonna be interesting in the context of what I’m currently looking at.
[00:31:54] John Corcoran: And so how do you do that? How do you explain it to make it interesting?
[00:31:58] Jason Barnard: The [00:32:00] content around the link is very important. The anchor text, which is the text that makes the link blue is very, very important. So click here is bad. Okay. This way to more information about Knowledge Panels is a really great way to get the bot thing.
[00:32:14] Jason Barnard: Oh, I’m gonna learn more about Knowledge Panels. Great for people too. And the, you need to facilitate the idea to the bot that whatever page it’s gonna be visiting next is going to be valuable in the context of what it just has seen. So it needs to be relevant.
[00:32:33] John Corcoran: Which is the way you describe it, like that’s what you do with humans.
[00:32:38] John Corcoran: Yep. Like when we’re talking to someone at a cocktail party about topic A and we wanna shift them to talk topic B, we don’t say, click here to talk about topic B. We say, actually, you know, we were just talking about how lovely it is to visit Paris in the summertime. Have you ever visited [00:33:00] Morocco in the summertime?
[00:33:02] John Corcoran: It’s a natural transition to another topic, and then the person you’re talking to can express whether they wanna click that link, whether they wanna go to that next topic or not. So it’s almost like the computer Equivalent of that.
[00:33:15] Jason Barnard: Which is a brilliant explanation. Absolutely. Perfect.
[00:33:18] John Corcoran: Yeah.
[00:33:19] Jason Barnard: So the next step is crawling.
[00:33:22] Jason Barnard: Can it actually get through the page? Can it get the HTML? So if your page is incredibly slow, that’s obviously gonna create a problem. If there’s an error on the server, that’s a problem. And if it’s pure JavaScript, which is a technical thing, then it’s a problem.
[00:33:38] Jason Barnard: If it struggles to crawl your web the webpage that it’s trying to visit, it will start to be, let’s say, less enthusiastic.
[00:33:46] Jason Barnard: So we’re going through these stages of how enthusiastic can you keep the bot? Yeah. Then it needs to do what we call render, which is basically see the page as a human being. If that’s difficult, it loses [00:34:00] more enthusiasm.
[00:34:01] Jason Barnard: Then it needs to break the content into chunks and index it. And that’s the critical stage.
[00:34:08] Jason Barnard: You’ve got it through all these stages. You’ve kept it super interested, it’s super excited, super enthusiastic. It gets the content and it says, okay, I’ve got to the point where I’m interested enough in this content to waste. I was gonna say, or spend the resources.
[00:34:24] John Corcoran: And resource, because it costs Google, it costs Microsoft, it costs the LLMs money and resources.
[00:34:30] John Corcoran: You call it crawl budget for every website for your website. For everyone watching this, if you have a website, it costs these companies money and resources and so they’re selective about if they come across a website that’s disorganized, that’s fragmented, that has, it might be invisible to you but has like multiple different tags that doesn’t make sense to the bot, then they won’t do it.
[00:34:56] John Corcoran: Or they’ll allocate less crawl budget to that website because it is [00:35:00] too confusing and resource intensive for them. Correct.
[00:35:03] Jason Barnard: Yes, absolutely. Brilliantly said. So you have this kind of child that’s losing interest with each stage.
[00:35:11] Jason Barnard: Yeah.
[00:35:11] Jason Barnard: And you have an employee who’s saying, well, my boss keeps telling me to stop spending money, so I’m not gonna waste money and resources on this page if I’m not a hundred percent sure.
[00:35:24] Jason Barnard: It’s gonna be interesting. So it’s a question of maintaining the interest, maintaining its enthusiasm for your website and your web pages, and making sure that it costs as little as possible to Microsoft, to Google, to Open AI to Perplexity to actually get that content and use it. Yeah. Let’s.
The Importance of High-Quality, Focused Data
[00:35:45] John Corcoran: I know we’re, so, it’s business.
[00:35:46] Jason Barnard: Which is delightful.
[00:35:48] John Corcoran: Yeah. Yeah. So I know we’ve been going for a while here, and I wanna shift to asking you about something because you have got you have put a lot of your resources as a [00:36:00] company into analyzing the web. And you have this, you’ve actually 9 billion data points that you have developed.
[00:36:09] John Corcoran: You potentially built focused on businesses and entrepreneurs and understanding SEO. That’s a tremendous amount. Talk a little bit about some of the work that you’ve done in understanding, SEO, understanding the web and how the modern web works.
[00:36:27] Jason Barnard: Yeah, it’s a lovely question. 9 billion data points sounds like a lot.
[00:36:31] Jason Barnard: And the Semrush article I mentioned earlier on, analyzed 260 billion lines of data. So we are tiny compared to Semrush. We’re tiny compared to Ahrefs. The difference is that we have very focused clean data. It isn’t because we can collect it, that we do collect it. And generally speaking, platforms like Google, Bing, Ahrefs, Semrush will collect everything they can find in the hope that it might be useful.
[00:36:58] Jason Barnard: We have been very, [00:37:00] very meticulous in collecting only data that is useful to business. And I was talking to you earlier on about the average webpage has about 300 interesting facts in it for the machine on the Kalicube dataset that’s 1,500 interesting facts. And on Wikipedia, you would be looking at 2000.
[00:37:22] Jason Barnard: So we’re not far off Wikipedia standard for the webpages we collect and the web data we collect from Google, from Open AI, from the web to be sure that the data is valuable, clean and the key is if we were talking about Microsoft and Google and ChatGPT crawling the web, if you have to choose between a webpage that has 300 interesting points and 1,500 interesting points, you will always choose the one with 1,500 interesting points.
[00:37:53] John Corcoran: And what did, what are some insights that you got from analyzing that amount of data points? [00:38:00]
[00:38:00] Jason Barnard: That if you can provide webpages on your website that consistently provide 1,500 useful data points that are topically relevant within your business, you will have all eyes of all these engines on you all the time.
[00:38:16] Jason Barnard: So more they stay interested and they keep coming back.
[00:38:19] John Corcoran: So more information with less friction. Is across the board better for your website? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And the problem that I see is that, and I’m guilty of this, is that for a long time we just, you know, we built our website a long time ago and then didn’t stop, we stopped improving it.
[00:38:39] John Corcoran: Right. We just kind of like made, left it as is and didn’t add more content to it. And meanwhile. I’m sure lots of companies have experienced this. Your competitors are out there building pages, building little, you know, landing pages, describing each of their different services that they have, making sure that there’s little friction, making sure that it’s really [00:39:00] robust and you kind of need to be doing that.
[00:39:02] John Corcoran: In today’s day and age.
[00:39:03] Jason Barnard: You absolutely have to do it. And there are a couple of things. There is, number one, it isn’t because. The webpage is small or the content appears to be thin that the data isn’t there. So for example, we can take a webpage that has 300, 500 useful data points, and we can take that and turn it into 1,500 useful data points simply by reorganizing and reiterating the information already in place.
[00:39:34] Jason Barnard: So a lot of the time you don’t need to create new content. You simply need to refresh, how could repurpose the content? Refresh it? Thank you. Yeah.
[00:39:41] John Corcoran: Yeah. Like, for example, a lot of great, you know, like having an FAQs section at the bottom of the page might be taking some of the same information but explaining it in a different way or answering questions in a different way, for example.
[00:39:52] John Corcoran: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:39:53] Jason Barnard: Yeah. A hundred percent. And so for Kalicube, for example, on Kalicube dot com, I created a module that we’ve added to the website, and [00:40:00] that’s how we went from 1,200 to 1,500. Not because we added more information, but because you, because we organized the information better. And it’s, the information was there, but the machines couldn’t extract it.
[00:40:13] Jason Barnard: Once we organized the information, the machines could extract it. And so that’s a huge point is if you can predigests the information for the machine, if you can prepare it for, its the machine’s consumption. You are always gonna win. So the data is almost certainly already there on your website, on every single webpage.
[00:40:33] Jason Barnard: It’s just not machine friendly.
The Role of AI in Content Creation
[00:40:35] John Corcoran: What are your thoughts on using AI to create this content? As I’ve heard people say different things about, oh, it absolutely must be human written. You can’t use AI at all. Other people saying it’s fine if you use AI. I’ve even, someone told me recently that the LLMs are watermarking content, that they’re outputting and that the bots will be able to see these watermarks.
[00:40:59] John Corcoran: What are your thoughts on [00:41:00] all that?
[00:41:01] Jason Barnard: Pure AI is always gonna be weak number one, because AI recognizes AI. Number two, because AI output is the most obvious. They’re not intelligent machines. They’re predicting the most probable next word. So if you are creating an article with AI, it isn’t writing anything original.
[00:41:23] Jason Barnard: It’s saying what’s the most next probable sorry, the most probable next word. So you are not adding to human knowledge, which is what I said earlier on. And number three is, if ever you manage to get people to that webpage, they’re gonna switch off and leave. So the point of getting them there is completely lost because you’re not gonna convert or convince they’re gonna see you as, a bad resource because they can see it’s AI.
[00:41:52] Jason Barnard: So our approach to Kalicube is to use AI to [00:42:00] create the content and move us forwards away from the blank sheet of paper. That’s such a struggle for most people in terms of creativity. Give us something and then look at it and say, well, that’s rubbish. And then rewrite it as a human being. And I’ve been using it a lot to.
[00:42:19] Jason Barnard: Create ideas for myself, see how I can evolve my own thought process so it becomes a bouncing board. And I had a conversation with Gemini. I created a Gemini gem and during the afternoon we kept going back and forth with this AI and it was to write an article. It took me about three hours. And at one point, Gemini said to me, aha, that’s an aha moment.
[00:42:44] Jason Barnard: This is brilliant. I’ve just learned something. And I was sitting there going, that’s really weird. Why would Gemini say to me, this is an aha moment for an AI? And in fact, it turns out when I thought about it, I was just talking to myself, but I was talking to myself with immense [00:43:00] knowledge and a perfect recall memory that I don’t have.
[00:43:04] Jason Barnard: By the end of that session, I had written an article that without AI I would never have come close to writing with insights that make so much sense. Because I was having aha moment sending it back to Gemini, who was having aha moment sending them back to me. And it was at the end of the day, a conversation with myself that created immense value in content.
[00:43:27] Jason Barnard: And although it’s AI based. It still comes from me and the out out coming , the article that came out of it. In fact, three, the last three or four articles on Search Engine Land absolutely acceptable to the editors at Search Engine Land, Semrush are perfectly happy. You test it through any AI testing tool.
[00:43:48] Jason Barnard: It will turn that up as a hundred percent human because it was a conversation with the machine where I ended up with my own personality in the final result. And then [00:44:00] I tweaked it so that it felt like me. But at the end of the day, if you take the first AI output, it will sound like AI. If you have a trained model, an assistant GPT or a Gemini Jam, you can have a conversation.
[00:44:13] Jason Barnard: It will end up being a conversation with yourself where you end up with something really stunning. Yeah. And I’ve strongly advised that anybody who has a desire to expand human knowledge, which is at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do, or at least I’m trying to do to investigate assistance, assistant GPTs and Gemini Jam. Yeah.
[00:44:32] John Corcoran: Or I found also, I don’t know if you’re doing this, but bouncing between the ais is really helpful too. You create something, so do the process you’re describing, create something, and then copy and paste it over to another LM and say, Hey, I wanna improve this. What would you add?
[00:44:47] John Corcoran: What would you delete? What are your thoughts on this? Critique it, you know, that’s interesting to see what comes up with.
[00:44:52] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I really like that too. My kind of, my problem at the moment is because [00:45:00] AI will output enormous amounts of text very quickly, and it’s easy to keep asking lots of AI, you end up with too many ideas, too many things going on, and it is really difficult to decide what you should be using.
[00:45:12] John Corcoran: Yeah. Abundance of riches now.
[00:45:15] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And so the problem then becomes is what do I want to keep? And maybe that’s the key. To the human element.
[00:45:23] John Corcoran: Yeah. What should I keep, what should I let The idea output.
[00:45:26] Jason Barnard: Yeah.
[00:45:26] John Corcoran: Right. What’s extraneous here?
[00:45:28] Jason Barnard: Yeah, it’s gonna output 10,000 words or a thousand words that are worth keeping.
[00:45:32] John Corcoran: Yeah. Right, right. That’s true. Well, Jason, this has been great. I wanna wrap up with my final question, which is my gratitude question. I’m a big fan of giving our guests a little bit of space at the end here to acknowledge any peers, contemporaries, maybe mentors, business partners, you name it, who’ve been there in the journey for you.
[00:45:50] John Corcoran: And, just thank them, shout them out for helping you. Anyone in particular you wanna thank.
Thanking People Who Helped Jason
[00:45:55] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I mean right now in EO I’m working with Nir Zavaro. He’s brilliant. Such a delightful guy. He is really helped me. I was working with a guy called Itamar Murani who was helping me become a better CEO. And what was interesting about him is that he approaches it from a psychologist’s perspective. What is it in your mindset, Jason, that’s holding your company back?
[00:46:23] Jason Barnard: And what I learned is I’m holding my company back and it, once I let go of that and I can improve my own approach to my own psych psychological approach to my company, it took the brakes off and the company is now flying.
[00:46:39] Jason Barnard: So those are two people who’ve really helped me in the last year
[00:46:41] John Corcoran: And I definitely wanna second Nir Zavaro who’s great. And he’s been really helpful for me in my journey of understanding SEO in this age of Generative AI. So super appreciate him. Jason, where can people go to learn more about you and Kalicube?
[00:46:56] Jason Barnard: Ask ChatGPT. Ask Google Gemini. [00:47:00] Ask Perplexity. And I think that’s challenge. Is the well, and it is. The challenge is ask them, who is Jason Barnard.. and what, why should I trust him? Try that as a question to any AI and it will be incredibly enthusiastic because I have educated it to be that way.
[00:47:18] Jason Barnard: You can make the AI jump when you say jump. So if you try your own name, then you try my name, you see the difference and. It will help you to understand to what extent you can control your own brand narrative when the AI is the mouthpiece for you.
[00:47:38] John Corcoran: And the AI is gonna be mouth and you don’t wanna be known as the voiceover agent for a blue dog. Exactly. Or whatever, or whatever it is that you’re coming up with. So Jason.
[00:47:47] Jason Barnard: I mean the future is AI is gonna be the mouthpiece for us all . you don’t have the choice. It will do it whether you like it or not. Question then is, do you want to control what it’s saying and do you want [00:48:00] it to shout louder about you and be your advocate or not?
[00:48:04] Jason Barnard: I want it to say what I want, which is Jason Barnard.. world leading expert in digital brand management. I want it to shout that from the rooftops. I want it to advocate me to you, to everybody who’s searching around that topic. If I can make that happen, I’ve got a huge competitive advantage for sure.
[00:48:21] Jason Barnard: Jason, thank you so much for your time.
[00:48:23] John Corcoran: Thank you so much, John.
[00:48:27] Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
